Well, I don't know how to do 1, 2, or 3, even if I had superpowers. What exactly is it you want?
If you don't like the same company doing search, ads, mail, and docs, well, just use Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Zoho as separate services. If you're really concerned, use some of the privacy options or use desktop software.
Data retention is already limited in the EU by law. The US could do the same thing.
What else do you want? What else do you want to be protected from?
Let's say your ISP offers you search, document storage, E-mail etc. (they do some of that already). Or let's say you go with Mobile.Me. Now, why exactly do you have any more reason to trust them than Google or Yahoo or any of the other services? Do you seriously think Comcast or Apple are any more likely to keep your private data private than other companies?
Nobody cares until somebody has a reason to care. Say your future employer, or your insurance company, or your opponent's lawyers in a future lawsuit, or your spouse in divorce proceedings, or any malicious person who is trying to find any damaging information about you etc etc
And they get Google's data... how? Where is the web page where people can buy Google data on other people?
Google can collect this data, they can use it for marketing, but they can't sell most of it. If there is anything they can sell, we can make that illegal too.
And they can't and don't retain the data forever either unless you ask them to.
Trying to re-assemble information after being passed through a lossy pipe is hard.
It's called a "modem". We have had those things for years. You could treat cell phone audio like a lossy analog channel and run a robust modem over it. But what's the point?
If you want something that sounds speech-like, that's not a lot harder.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
Most Android apps work fine on all major Android versions. The ones that don't work fine usually use some capability that doesn't exist in the old version. They can usually fall back gracefully.
This is no different from what Apple is doing with iPhone, iPad, and iPod hardware, and it is no different with forward incompatibilities between iPhone OS versions.
Maybe you should simply get some programming skills so that your software works well on all Android devices. You know, like 99% of all Android apps and developers already do.
To be clear: if you develop for Android 1.5, it will run on all newer phones. The additions in later versions are functions you generally don't even get on iPhone.
Furthermore, the hardware is standardized. There are four standard buttons and two screen sizes. You know, like the iPhone also has two standard screen sizes and one button.
I was helping a friend set up an Android phone a few days ago. It came with a manufacturer home page theme. The market was full of the standard apps, they installed, and I didn't even notice that it was a 1.6 phone.
For the vast majority of apps, the differences between versions don't seem to matter.
Punishment should come in the form of criminal indictments against the persons responsible.
The fact that they are paying, however, isn't punishment (that would be ineffective), it's simply a reflection of the cost of doing this kind of exploration. If that raises the gas price and causes people to switch to other energy sources, then externalities have been accounted for and economics has done its job.
You state as fact that all of this is due to unexpected, low-probability failures. However, from news reports, it appears that BP deliberately disregarded protocols for cementing and pumping mud, and that they continued despite the fact that the blowout preventer may have been damaged. And that is consistent with their past disregard for safety.
The best guess at this point is that the disaster is due to deliberate negligence on the part of BP. That's not legal proof, but it's a good basis to keep in mind as the response goes forward. I hope they are being closely watched now...
You stop drilling until you have found a way to get a new blowout preventer installed. That may require abandoning this well and drilling a new one.
Maybe that will teach them to take user interface issues more seriously, since the root cause seems to have been that billions of dollars could be lost by just touching a joystick the wrong way, without confirmation.
Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.
I think you overestimate the size and effect of underground nukes. The Gulf is geologically active; there are a lot bigger earthquakes than a small nuke.
The Russians nuked gas wells; different thing. The failure was failure to extinguish. Stopping a big, burning gas leak is different from stopping an oil flow. I suspect stopping the oil flow is easier; it's a tiny hole through 3 miles of rock; it shouldn't take much to block it.
However, experts should make the call. I just hope they do so based on geology and other science and engineering, without being swayed by anti-nuclear hysteria.
(FWIW, am generally against nuclear energy because nuclear waste disposal hasn't been solved).
and nobody saw it as a problem that end-users could not rebuild it without also purchasing the compiler.
Yes, and times have changed, and now people are starting to see it as a problem. It's even more of a problem because much of the proprietary build environment probably consists itself of GPL'ed software and the only thing keeping it from being usable is some glue and loader code.
A strict interpretation would be that one cannot use GPL source code in embedded products using traditional embedded development tools, because those tools have incompatible licensing terms which prevent end-user modification of systems.
Yes. I don't know whether that is a good step to take yet, but it is certainly reasonable to consider at some point; given the prevalence of free software-based toolchains for embedded development, it may be easy to do for most companies. And it would prevent the kind of dangerous bullshit Apple is doing with AppStore and iPhone.
Well, it might be good to have that as an additional option (as well as prohibitions against Apple AppStore-like usage). However, when the GPL was created, that was not an option, because most users were using it on machines where the compilers and other essential software was closed source.
Do you really think intelligence agencies use the shittiest tools and waste their time and resources whenever "bomb" passes over the wire? Or perhaps they have a very efficient system which can process all of this information easily and hone in on real targets.
There is no such tool, no matter how much money you spend. Nobody knows how to write it.
Look at the size of the no-fly list; that alone shows you that text and data mining isn't working.
but lets not underestimate them and congradulate ourselves thinking that an SSL wrapped Google search will be their undoing. It's not like they can't see a log of every other site you open from Google's results, which I'm sure they could use to piece together your search (if they cared at all).
Google SSL isn't a total answer, but it is one small step towards making routine, warrantless recording of Internet communications harder for people who have no business recording such data.
Self-signed certificates still protect pretty well against eavesdropping (i.e., passive attacks). They don't protect against MITM attacks. But whether a certificate is self-signed is really irrelevant; even officially signed certificates are not secure against MITM attacks, since certificate authorities can forge them. The organizations likely to be able to pull off a MITM attack on my SSL connections usually can also generate certificates. In different words, there is no reason for me to trust certificate authorities; they do not have my interests at heart.
SSL needs a web of trust and mechanisms like ssh. And with a web of trust, whether something is self-signed or not doesn't matter.
As for Firefox, a simple dialog box should be sufficient; the current multi-step process is idiotic. It makes using legitimate self-signed certificates unnecessarily hard and gives people an excessive level of trust in certificates signed by a CA.
(given google's questionable record on privacy issues)?
Really? Like what?
moved to other search engines
Like which one? Bing? What reason do I have to trust them any more than Google?
I can't help but question who this feature is for.
Pretty much anybody. Right now, your ISP and your government likely are scanning your unencrypted web communications for keywords and prohibited content. Even if you don't do anything wrong, you may trigger those systems, with potentially unpleasant consequences. An SSL connection makes that harder for them.
And it's a matter of principle: my web searches are nobody's business other than my own and my search engine's.
SSL will only protect against man-in-the-middle attacks;
In other words, you still trade your privacy for the service provided by Google; the difference is the trade being less likely to be interrupted now.
Privacy isn't an all or nothing proposition. I don't "trade in" my privacy, I disclose information selectively. When I search on a search engine, necessarily that search engine know what I searched for. Google has defined retention policies, and there is no reason to believe that they don't comply with them.
However, there are other aspects of privacy I don't have control over. There's a good chance my ISP is sniffing my packets and my government is digging through them to find whatever the political hangup of the day is, and there's a good chance that what ever they are doing, they are doing incompetently.
Now, I'd like to be able to do web searches without having to second guess whether those searches (innocuous and legal as they are) trigger some stupid keyword alert in some badly written network surveillance system. Hence, I like my connections to my search engine to be encrypted.
What Google does with those searches isn't much of a concern for me: there are no known instances of Google doing data mining on behalf of governments (all they do is respond to specific requests), and all they want to do is show me ads.
So, an encrypted connection to Google protects my privacy in exactly the way I want it to: it keeps the people who have no business looking at my web searches from looking at my web searches. Simple, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the only nuclear waste disposal problems are legal, not technical.
Actually, they are technical: nobody knows how to dispose of the waste safely. No, not even the French.
Someone obviously needed to get into the press desperately again.
Well, I don't know how to do 1, 2, or 3, even if I had superpowers. What exactly is it you want?
If you don't like the same company doing search, ads, mail, and docs, well, just use Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Zoho as separate services. If you're really concerned, use some of the privacy options or use desktop software.
Data retention is already limited in the EU by law. The US could do the same thing.
What else do you want? What else do you want to be protected from?
Let's say your ISP offers you search, document storage, E-mail etc. (they do some of that already). Or let's say you go with Mobile.Me. Now, why exactly do you have any more reason to trust them than Google or Yahoo or any of the other services? Do you seriously think Comcast or Apple are any more likely to keep your private data private than other companies?
Nobody cares until somebody has a reason to care. Say your future employer, or your insurance company, or your opponent's lawyers in a future lawsuit, or your spouse in divorce proceedings, or any malicious person who is trying to find any damaging information about you etc etc
And they get Google's data... how? Where is the web page where people can buy Google data on other people?
Google can collect this data, they can use it for marketing, but they can't sell most of it. If there is anything they can sell, we can make that illegal too.
And they can't and don't retain the data forever either unless you ask them to.
Well, so you sign up and don't put up any personal information other than your name and E-mail. What's the big deal?
Trying to re-assemble information after being passed through a lossy pipe is hard.
It's called a "modem". We have had those things for years. You could treat cell phone audio like a lossy analog channel and run a robust modem over it. But what's the point?
If you want something that sounds speech-like, that's not a lot harder.
I don't think they knew how to end the story when they were starting. For that, it was a decent ending.
However, if they had fully planned out the entire story arc from the start, it could have been spectacular.
It sounds, however, that compatibility across android and handset versions is not only not guaranteed with android, but that the incompatibility is to be expected...according to their chief architect.
Most Android apps work fine on all major Android versions. The ones that don't work fine usually use some capability that doesn't exist in the old version. They can usually fall back gracefully.
This is no different from what Apple is doing with iPhone, iPad, and iPod hardware, and it is no different with forward incompatibilities between iPhone OS versions.
It has little to do with Apple. People are used to having their software up to date when they use smart phones.
Wrong. Few other manufacturers provide major upgrades.
Android has plenty of defects in the earlier iterations that you need to develop work arounds for.
Bullshit again. Android 1.5 and later are robust, high quality systems. Newer versions just give people a bit more functionality and performance.
Maybe you should simply get some programming skills so that your software works well on all Android devices. You know, like 99% of all Android apps and developers already do.
Oh, stop astroturfing and spreading FUD.
To be clear: if you develop for Android 1.5, it will run on all newer phones. The additions in later versions are functions you generally don't even get on iPhone.
Furthermore, the hardware is standardized. There are four standard buttons and two screen sizes. You know, like the iPhone also has two standard screen sizes and one button.
I was helping a friend set up an Android phone a few days ago. It came with a manufacturer home page theme. The market was full of the standard apps, they installed, and I didn't even notice that it was a 1.6 phone.
For the vast majority of apps, the differences between versions don't seem to matter.
Punishment should come in the form of criminal indictments against the persons responsible.
The fact that they are paying, however, isn't punishment (that would be ineffective), it's simply a reflection of the cost of doing this kind of exploration. If that raises the gas price and causes people to switch to other energy sources, then externalities have been accounted for and economics has done its job.
You state as fact that all of this is due to unexpected, low-probability failures. However, from news reports, it appears that BP deliberately disregarded protocols for cementing and pumping mud, and that they continued despite the fact that the blowout preventer may have been damaged. And that is consistent with their past disregard for safety.
The best guess at this point is that the disaster is due to deliberate negligence on the part of BP. That's not legal proof, but it's a good basis to keep in mind as the response goes forward. I hope they are being closely watched now...
The odds of both failing at the same time are astronomical.
They are not astronomical if you continue operations despite knowing that some of your safeties have already failed.
I suspect we'll never see an identical failure, its just too unusual. Oh we'll see other failures, just not exactly like this.
This wasn't a "failure", it appears to have been blatant disregard for safety procedures.
So what do you do?
You stop drilling until you have found a way to get a new blowout preventer installed. That may require abandoning this well and drilling a new one.
Maybe that will teach them to take user interface issues more seriously, since the root cause seems to have been that billions of dollars could be lost by just touching a joystick the wrong way, without confirmation.
Pretty much what they did - cotinue and hope for the best.
Wrong answer.
I think you overestimate the size and effect of underground nukes. The Gulf is geologically active; there are a lot bigger earthquakes than a small nuke.
The Russians nuked gas wells; different thing. The failure was failure to extinguish. Stopping a big, burning gas leak is different from stopping an oil flow. I suspect stopping the oil flow is easier; it's a tiny hole through 3 miles of rock; it shouldn't take much to block it.
However, experts should make the call. I just hope they do so based on geology and other science and engineering, without being swayed by anti-nuclear hysteria.
(FWIW, am generally against nuclear energy because nuclear waste disposal hasn't been solved).
and nobody saw it as a problem that end-users could not rebuild it without also purchasing the compiler.
Yes, and times have changed, and now people are starting to see it as a problem. It's even more of a problem because much of the proprietary build environment probably consists itself of GPL'ed software and the only thing keeping it from being usable is some glue and loader code.
A strict interpretation would be that one cannot use GPL source code in embedded products using traditional embedded development tools, because those tools have incompatible licensing terms which prevent end-user modification of systems.
Yes. I don't know whether that is a good step to take yet, but it is certainly reasonable to consider at some point; given the prevalence of free software-based toolchains for embedded development, it may be easy to do for most companies. And it would prevent the kind of dangerous bullshit Apple is doing with AppStore and iPhone.
Well, it might be good to have that as an additional option (as well as prohibitions against Apple AppStore-like usage). However, when the GPL was created, that was not an option, because most users were using it on machines where the compilers and other essential software was closed source.
Do you really think intelligence agencies use the shittiest tools and waste their time and resources whenever "bomb" passes over the wire? Or perhaps they have a very efficient system which can process all of this information easily and hone in on real targets.
There is no such tool, no matter how much money you spend. Nobody knows how to write it.
Look at the size of the no-fly list; that alone shows you that text and data mining isn't working.
but lets not underestimate them and congradulate ourselves thinking that an SSL wrapped Google search will be their undoing. It's not like they can't see a log of every other site you open from Google's results, which I'm sure they could use to piece together your search (if they cared at all).
Google SSL isn't a total answer, but it is one small step towards making routine, warrantless recording of Internet communications harder for people who have no business recording such data.
Self-signed certificates still protect pretty well against eavesdropping (i.e., passive attacks). They don't protect against MITM attacks. But whether a certificate is self-signed is really irrelevant; even officially signed certificates are not secure against MITM attacks, since certificate authorities can forge them. The organizations likely to be able to pull off a MITM attack on my SSL connections usually can also generate certificates. In different words, there is no reason for me to trust certificate authorities; they do not have my interests at heart.
SSL needs a web of trust and mechanisms like ssh. And with a web of trust, whether something is self-signed or not doesn't matter.
As for Firefox, a simple dialog box should be sufficient; the current multi-step process is idiotic. It makes using legitimate self-signed certificates unnecessarily hard and gives people an excessive level of trust in certificates signed by a CA.
(given google's questionable record on privacy issues)?
Really? Like what?
moved to other search engines
Like which one? Bing? What reason do I have to trust them any more than Google?
I can't help but question who this feature is for.
Pretty much anybody. Right now, your ISP and your government likely are scanning your unencrypted web communications for keywords and prohibited content. Even if you don't do anything wrong, you may trigger those systems, with potentially unpleasant consequences. An SSL connection makes that harder for them.
And it's a matter of principle: my web searches are nobody's business other than my own and my search engine's.
SSL will only protect against man-in-the-middle attacks;
SSL protects against eavesdropping.
In other words, you still trade your privacy for the service provided by Google; the difference is the trade being less likely to be interrupted now.
Privacy isn't an all or nothing proposition. I don't "trade in" my privacy, I disclose information selectively. When I search on a search engine, necessarily that search engine know what I searched for. Google has defined retention policies, and there is no reason to believe that they don't comply with them.
However, there are other aspects of privacy I don't have control over. There's a good chance my ISP is sniffing my packets and my government is digging through them to find whatever the political hangup of the day is, and there's a good chance that what ever they are doing, they are doing incompetently.
Now, I'd like to be able to do web searches without having to second guess whether those searches (innocuous and legal as they are) trigger some stupid keyword alert in some badly written network surveillance system. Hence, I like my connections to my search engine to be encrypted.
What Google does with those searches isn't much of a concern for me: there are no known instances of Google doing data mining on behalf of governments (all they do is respond to specific requests), and all they want to do is show me ads.
So, an encrypted connection to Google protects my privacy in exactly the way I want it to: it keeps the people who have no business looking at my web searches from looking at my web searches. Simple, eh?