Or how about: A bug didn't filter out that data before it was stored.
Think beyond the end of your nose, and you might have the slightest clue as to how the real world works - meaning - in many different ways than you think.
They collected SSID and MAC because they were mapping public WAPs. This was announced years ago as part of the Street View project.
There's nothing illegal about searching for open wireless networks. If there was, then every single person with a wireless laptop would be a criminal every time they turned it on.
I don't know exactly what software they were using for this. It sounds like it was custom written, and includes components that were written for different projects. So, if you use a module from something written 2-3 years ago in a current program, how do you know it's not doing more than you need for this application? Unless you review all the source code, you don't, even if you wrote it yourself.
If you want to write a web app that logs IP addresses of visitors, and you know a few years back you wrote a module that gathered and stored IP addresses, browser identifiers, and HTTP result codes, you could use that module for what you needed. But unless you hacked it to not store the other bits you don't need, you'd be gathering more info than you intended.
Was there a database field specifically called "Collected traffic"?
Unless this traffic was separated out from the rest of the packet, and stored separately in their database, it could easily have been part of a large binary blob that was the entirety of what was collected from that network. This collected data would include SSID, MAC, and would be just the raw data. Anything that was separated out and stored like that was collected intentionally. The network identifiers undoubtedly were, but was the traffic?
So tell me.....what is the schema of Google's street view database? Since you know so much about it, it must be right there in your head.
Oh. You haven't seen it? You have no connection to anybody who has?
Do you have any clue what information is stored in the Windows registry regarding wireless networks in the area?
You've got all that data, but you've got no idea you have it, and probably wouldn't know how to look for it if you did.
Just because the information is in a file in Google's possession doesn't mean they're actively using it, or even aware of it.
If they automatically parse out SSID, MAC, and GPS coordinates, they'll never see that there are other things in that file.
There's a big difference between realizing an appendage of your body is in a particular physical location, and realizing you have data that is impossible for a human to comprehend without computer interpretation.
They collected it by accident, and when they realized they had it, they publicly stated that they had the information, and were purging it.
They didn't need to say anything, because nobody knew they had it until they announced it. But in the spirit of openness, they stated what had happened, how it had happened, and their proposed remedy for the situation.
The fact that various regulators are getting pissy about it isn't their fault.
Really? Where on that page do I click to buy the game? Oh. I can't? Ok...where do I click to go to the game's homepage so I can buy it? What? That's not there either?
What a useless advertisement. Oh....I guess it's not an advertisement after all....
But there's a difference of scale. You probably don't care if some random guy walking down the street sees your traffic. You don't expect that same guy being there all day, every day, and record everything, now do you? There's a difference between looking out the window and seeing the neighbor naked, and pointing a camera at their house. While the obvious solution is to close the shades, there's still a fucking camera pointed at your house.
Guess what Google does.
Huh? Google isn't there all day, every day, monitoring traffic. They picked up the SSID, and at most a dozen packets of data from any given network while driving by momentarily in a car. It's not like they parked out front of your house to sniff traffic for days, then moved on to your neighbour and did the same thing. I don't see anything different between that and the actual street view imagery. They drove by and snapped a couple of pictures. There's a camera pointed at your house, sure, but it's only there for a matter of 10 seconds or so, and at most three pictures that show a usable view.
If people are really concerned about this minuscule amount of data collection, then they sure as hell _should_ have their network encrypted. And they shouldn't be using an SSID like a lot I see, with their name, phone number, address, or anything else identifiable.
Ireland brought in a carbon tax last year, claiming it would fund a cut in the value-added tax. However, the price of gasoline immediately rose by more than four per cent to the equivalent of $1.60 a litre while the cost of heating fuels, including oil, natural gas, coal and peat briquettes, went up between six per cent and 11 per cent, forcing the government to introduce a fuel-poverty subsidy. Britain, when faced with the same situation, had to raise its fuel-poverty subsidy to 100 per cent of the revenue it collected through the tax. Every European nation that has levied a carbon tax has seen weaker economic growth, the loss of industrial jobs, deterioration of public finances and negligible impact on greenhouse gas emissions -- facts that are misrepresented by carbon tax advocates. Germany reduced its emissions by more than 22 per cent between 1990 and 2008. It does not have a carbon tax.
Thou mangled clay-brained strumpet! In thine exhaustive listing of profane, uncouth vocabulary, thouest did misseth "asshat". But without, you speak an infinite deal of nothing. The most infectious pestilence upon thee!
I generally don't give a crap about poor grammar on/., or the Internet as a whole. I've come to expect it. However, if somebody is taking the time to bitch about somebody else's poor grammar, then they'd sure as hell better have correct grammar in their post.
Poor grammar doesn't piss me off, but hypocrisy sure as hell does.
It's alright, GP, we forgive you. Contrary to popular belief, not EVERY poster on Slashdot is a soulless, humorless, grammar-Nazi waste of life fuckwit.
Considering said GP _is_ one of those grammar-Nazi waste of life fuckwits, you might want to rephrase that sentence....
The problem with that is that the ballot that goes in that ballot box usually looks something like this:
O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because he's got his own agenda. O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because he doesn't understand the issues. O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because they're in the back pocket of the corps.
Slashdot Mirror
By my calculations of the Zimbabwean dollar that would be about $3 Billion. Still a bit steep though.
Maybe today.
But wait a couple of days, and then it'll only be $1.5 Billion.
If you can manage to hold off for a couple of weeks, it'll probably be an easily doable couple of grand.
No, the zeroes are fine.
It's the 1 and the 5 at the beginning that shouldn't be there.....
You realize you can buy monopoly money separate from the game, right?
Or how about: A bug didn't filter out that data before it was stored.
Think beyond the end of your nose, and you might have the slightest clue as to how the real world works - meaning - in many different ways than you think.
Really? So every piece of software you've ever written was completely, 100% bug-free?
Let me guess: You've never written software.
They collected SSID and MAC because they were mapping public WAPs. This was announced years ago as part of the Street View project.
There's nothing illegal about searching for open wireless networks. If there was, then every single person with a wireless laptop would be a criminal every time they turned it on.
I don't know exactly what software they were using for this. It sounds like it was custom written, and includes components that were written for different projects.
So, if you use a module from something written 2-3 years ago in a current program, how do you know it's not doing more than you need for this application? Unless you review all the source code, you don't, even if you wrote it yourself.
If you want to write a web app that logs IP addresses of visitors, and you know a few years back you wrote a module that gathered and stored IP addresses, browser identifiers, and HTTP result codes, you could use that module for what you needed. But unless you hacked it to not store the other bits you don't need, you'd be gathering more info than you intended.
Now, translate that into WiFi scanning.
Was there a database field specifically called "Collected traffic"?
Unless this traffic was separated out from the rest of the packet, and stored separately in their database, it could easily have been part of a large binary blob that was the entirety of what was collected from that network.
This collected data would include SSID, MAC, and would be just the raw data.
Anything that was separated out and stored like that was collected intentionally. The network identifiers undoubtedly were, but was the traffic?
So tell me.....what is the schema of Google's street view database? Since you know so much about it, it must be right there in your head.
Oh. You haven't seen it? You have no connection to anybody who has?
Then shut up.
Do you have any clue what information is stored in the Windows registry regarding wireless networks in the area?
You've got all that data, but you've got no idea you have it, and probably wouldn't know how to look for it if you did.
Just because the information is in a file in Google's possession doesn't mean they're actively using it, or even aware of it.
If they automatically parse out SSID, MAC, and GPS coordinates, they'll never see that there are other things in that file.
There's a big difference between realizing an appendage of your body is in a particular physical location, and realizing you have data that is impossible for a human to comprehend without computer interpretation.
Google didn't just "waltz right in."
They collected it by accident, and when they realized they had it, they publicly stated that they had the information, and were purging it.
They didn't need to say anything, because nobody knew they had it until they announced it. But in the spirit of openness, they stated what had happened, how it had happened, and their proposed remedy for the situation.
The fact that various regulators are getting pissy about it isn't their fault.
I don't know about the galoshes, but since the rest keep my junk covered, they'd definitely qualify for the "privacy" label. :)
It is advertising Pac-Man.
Really? Where on that page do I click to buy the game?
Oh. I can't?
Ok...where do I click to go to the game's homepage so I can buy it?
What? That's not there either?
What a useless advertisement.
Oh....I guess it's not an advertisement after all....
But there's a difference of scale. You probably don't care if some random guy walking down the street sees your traffic. You don't expect that same guy being there all day, every day, and record everything, now do you? There's a difference between looking out the window and seeing the neighbor naked, and pointing a camera at their house. While the obvious solution is to close the shades, there's still a fucking camera pointed at your house.
Guess what Google does.
Huh? Google isn't there all day, every day, monitoring traffic. They picked up the SSID, and at most a dozen packets of data from any given network while driving by momentarily in a car. It's not like they parked out front of your house to sniff traffic for days, then moved on to your neighbour and did the same thing.
I don't see anything different between that and the actual street view imagery. They drove by and snapped a couple of pictures. There's a camera pointed at your house, sure, but it's only there for a matter of 10 seconds or so, and at most three pictures that show a usable view.
If people are really concerned about this minuscule amount of data collection, then they sure as hell _should_ have their network encrypted. And they shouldn't be using an SSID like a lot I see, with their name, phone number, address, or anything else identifiable.
So basically what you're saying is, if somebody patents the automobile, then nobody can sell wheels?
Sorry...that's bullshit, too.
I realize what I said was stupid.
That was the point.
Maybe I should have included sarcasm tags.
The parent poster of my reply basically stated that all "software patents" include language stating that it includes "a hardware appliance".
If this was true, then no pure software developer could be sued for violating the patent, because what they sell does not include "a hardware device."
It's only the end user that could be sued, because they're running it on their computer hardware.
Obviously, this is not even remotely true, so the parent poster must be full of it.
That was my point.
So that means if I sell software, without any hardware with it, then I'm not infringing on _any_ software patents, right?
The users might be, if they run said software on "a hardware appliance, comprising of a CPU, blahblah", but not the developer.
But then, why do pure software developers get sued, huh?
I would tax all foreigners living abroad.
Whether they were politically active scientists or not.
Err....what evidence, exactly?
Last I heard, it was making negligible impacts in Europe, and in some cases was even counter-productive:
http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/carbon+conundrum/2781956/story.html
Ireland brought in a carbon tax last year, claiming it would fund a cut in the value-added tax. However, the price of gasoline immediately rose by more than four per cent to the equivalent of $1.60 a litre while the cost of heating fuels, including oil, natural gas, coal and peat briquettes, went up between six per cent and 11 per cent, forcing the government to introduce a fuel-poverty subsidy. Britain, when faced with the same situation, had to raise its fuel-poverty subsidy to 100 per cent of the revenue it collected through the tax. Every European nation that has levied a carbon tax has seen weaker economic growth, the loss of industrial jobs, deterioration of public finances and negligible impact on greenhouse gas emissions -- facts that are misrepresented by carbon tax advocates. Germany reduced its emissions by more than 22 per cent between 1990 and 2008. It does not have a carbon tax.
(Bold emphasis mine...)
And yes, my wife IS hot AND real ;)
...and robotic.... :)
Yeah, and besides, he's wrong.
I can think of a LOT of places where duding a dude would get you kicked out.
Thou mangled clay-brained strumpet!
In thine exhaustive listing of profane, uncouth vocabulary, thouest did misseth "asshat".
But without, you speak an infinite deal of nothing.
The most infectious pestilence upon thee!
"Hey, everybody! Look. It's an asshole."
I generally don't give a crap about poor grammar on /., or the Internet as a whole. I've come to expect it.
However, if somebody is taking the time to bitch about somebody else's poor grammar, then they'd sure as hell better have correct grammar in their post.
Poor grammar doesn't piss me off, but hypocrisy sure as hell does.
It's alright, GP, we forgive you. Contrary to popular belief, not EVERY poster on Slashdot is a soulless, humorless, grammar-Nazi waste of life fuckwit.
Considering said GP _is_ one of those grammar-Nazi waste of life fuckwits, you might want to rephrase that sentence....
Sorry that does not make sense.
Neither does your sentence without the appropriate comma.
Why are things so heavy in the future?
Is there a problem with the galaxy's gravitational pull?
The problem with that is that the ballot that goes in that ballot box usually looks something like this:
O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because he's got his own agenda.
O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because he doesn't understand the issues.
O - idiot who won't listen to the populace, because they're in the back pocket of the corps.
The government should buy them from Bell and lease them out to ISPs in a non-discriminatory way.
Why the hell should the government buy something from a private corporation that was largely paid for by the government in the first place?
No...Bell should be _giving_ the lines to the government, then being fined for all this gouge and screw bullshit they've been pulling lately.