Why would I use three different client types for different communications when one covers them all? That sounds a lot like having one car to go shopping, one to go to work, and one for the weekend. Personally, I don't have the inclination to maintain three cars, and one which does all three jobs is ideal.
Well, I might have a van or SUV to do my shopping, a Prius or other hybrid for the commute, and a motorcycle for the weekend. And a truck for when friends need to move.
I don't know. The pool of unemployed astronauts will probably dry up pretty quick. The competition to provide cheap space flights will put inexorable pressure on firms to reduce costs, and you will see (eventually) poorly maintained rockets/shuttles, and poorly trained pilots flying on little or no sleep.
They have jurisdiction over commercial flights to space that originate in the US, or fly over US airspace (up to an altitude of 50-80k feet I'd guess).
They instead plug your name into an automated report and it returns a sorted list of your most interesting contacts, probably based on a simple scoring system.
Yes, of course - if they are adept at information analysis, reporting, querying or whatever you want to call it. I don't think the government is very good at that stuff, certainly not at the state/local level. Perhaps there are parts of the FBI that are getting better at it, and the NSA is probably pretty good at it - they may even rival Facebook. All I'm saying is that companies such as Facebook or Google are going to be way better than most government agencies and coalescing this data.
Where did I say I was? I am a FB user, and will continue to be. I hope I will never be cowed into quitting a service like FB (or gmail) because I fear the government accessing my meta-data, but I can envision scenarios where I might.
Then the problem isn't Facebook; it's the FBI,
I agree that the FBI is a problem if they abuse or misuse this data. But I also think that FB has a responsibility (moral/ethical mind you, not legal) to safeguard the data of their users and not hand it over to 3rd parties, especially the government, without disclosure to the user. Other companies, such as Twitter and Google, have fought against the government meta-data grabs in the past, and I think FB should as well.
Seriously, though, the police are bound to look at any associates of someone in a drug cartel. The only thing you can do is choose your friends carefully, whether online or in real life.
That's not really the concern. I don't have that much of an issue with the idea of law enforcement/intelligence services investigating associates of criminals. The problem is when they start investigating people who have joined an anti-war group on FB, or liked the wikileaks page. The FBI has a history of investigating people and groups with links to criminal activity that are tenuous at best.
The aspect of this (and the related stories about law enforcement having access to your cell phone meta-data directly from your carrier, for a small fee) that pushes it to the next level is that this information becomes very easy to obtain. It's one thing if an Agent has to individual interview and/or sift through mountains of paper data, it's quite another for him to be able to run a query against a database at the push of a button. I'm all for giving law enforcement the tools to do their job better, but we have to be very cognizant of the power we give them, and establish safe guards against the abuse that is sure to come from this extra power.
The problem with your notion is that the government has already revealed that they are reading the subject, to, and from lines on every piece of email.
I agree with the other reply to your post, with a couple of other points. I'm willing to bet that FB is much better at aggregating and parsing all the data signals they have than the government is. Also, it is much much easier to discern the social network by looking at FB meta data (mostly just the relationships) than by looking at email patterns. This is not to say email header information is worth less, it is just different. I can see why a government would want both. If I was Gadahfi (sp?), I'd probably lean towards the FB (or Twitter) data, but it's a close call. Mostly though, I'd go for the FB data because it's probably much better packaged than the raw email headers.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends,
Someone said this up above, so I won't take credit, but "your friends" is the piece of data that is most valuable to intelligence and law enforcement. If one of your FB friends pops up on some watch list, the FBI can (in theory) log into Facebook and get a list of all his "friends." Now you are on an FBI watch list. Your employer may be interviewed, maybe your neighbor or co-workers.
But hey, who cares if you have nothing to hide right?
For me, the problem isn't the voluntary gift of this information from users (including me) to Facebook. It is the voluntary gift of this information from Facebook to the government.
Also, the info in question is (allegedly?) only open to the government, not everyone.
But I think Assange wants openness for people and institutions he wants openness for. They possess and have released documents belonging to publicly traded corporations, private clubs, etc. I'd guess that if he had medical records of a public figure he'd release those as well. In a lot of these cases, he may have a compelling argument that this data should be released, but it's not as simple as "only governments."
Should this be allowed to stand, traffic stops will become a new tool for police to conduct what would in any other context be considered illegal suspicionless searches.
From what I hear (from Leo Laporte on This Week in Tech podcast), the police can already request (for a nominal fee) many data from your cell phone carrier. Data such as geolocation, time of phone call and number called are not considered "content" like an actual phone conversation is, and thus have a much lower hurdle as far as the law goes.
See thesetwo Ars Technica articles for more info, including this gem:
Soghoian describes how "the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time."
I don't see this new tool as that big a boon to cops from the standpoint of normal folks. I can see the cops wanting it to get this data from phones who's number or carrier they don't know, for example pre-paid phones used by drug dealers. That said, I think this is all an outrage and they should reverse the 2005 ruling. Having a smartphone has some very serious drawbacks.
"impact of crime" does not mean "deterring/preventing crime." These cameras do have an impact on crime, namely that it tremendously assists in the investigation and prosecution (every episode of Law & Order UK starts with them going to the CCTV footage). Still, it does seem fairly trivial to argue against that benefit, when weighing the costs to civil liberties, though it's not as trivial as you seem to think.
I use my real Gmail address when I sign up for most things. If they are going to be sending me things I want (e.g. e-receipts or shipping confirmations from Best Buy, Amazon, etc.) then I'll do nothing. If they are only going to send me spam newsletters and sales offers, then I will set up a filter in Gmail.
What I'd really like to be able to do though is have a filter which puts a time bomb on an email, so that it deletes it after 30 days. That way, I could save the sales offer by default in case I end up shopping there in the next 30 days. But then Gmail will auto delete it for me so I don't have to worry about keeping my account clean (not that you really have to do that with Gmail anyway).
It seems to me there was a government sys admin in San Francisco that stood up to his bosses and ended up in jail. OK, so not exactly the same situation, but still....
So did my boss. Though in his defense he was expecting an email from UPS. Luckily MSSE caught it and neutralized it completely, as far as I can tell. I ran a DDS log which looked clean, and an F-Secure online scan came back with only tracking cookies.
But shouldn't Win7 and no admin rights go a long ways towards negating these types of malware?
There's no way a small business will be able to afford the type of security required to keep hackers off their systems
Really? I understand that anti-malware security is somewhat esoteric to the lay-user still, but any business collecting CC details and payments should have the money to invest in either A) a payment service that takes care of securing customer data for them or B) an IT consultant to install free software on their system and give the owner a few hours of training in using and maintaining it.
Well, I agree $15 is too much; somewhere between $5 and $10 is probably the right price, depending on how big the library is. Pandora One is only $3/month.
But your solution doesn't work for the mass market. Not many people have the technical know how to do what you're describing.
Also, how much have you spent on your music collection over the years? At $10 per CD, a 1000 disc collection is $10k. That equates to 55 years of Zune Pass or 277 years of Pandora One. For someone with a small collection, or a tween just starting out, these types of streaming services are economically viable choices. My boss's husband put a similar system in their second home, so now he can listen to (almost) anything he wants and didn't have to worry about copying his music library over to a 2nd computer.
Still, there is something to be said for actually owning your music, as opposed to a license to it, which they can revoke whenever they want (or increase the cost). And it really comes down to teh quality of the library. Can you get your favorite artist? Can you get new, independent artists? If so, then I might go for it? If not, then probably not.
Digital ads also potentially get more backlash. A paper ad can't really be annoying.
Sure it can. There are plenty of annoying display ads in newspapers, and I gloss over them on those rare occasions I read the dead tree edition. The same goes for inserts, which produce a messy pile on my dining room table when I open the Sunday paper.
A pop-over window, annoying animated banner or anything like that can be. As viewers grow more and more accustomed to ignoring ads, the temptation to make them more intrusive grows.
I rarely see flashing banner ads anymore, though that could be a function of the sites I visit. I think as people get more accustomed to ignoring ads (which don't interest them), advertisers will grow more accustomed to creating more targeted advertising. But, your point about backlash is valid. Consumers need to realize that "tracking" is what allows those targeted ads, and maybe they shouldn't get creeped out because they see an ad for something they just searched for. Or maybe they should. Anyways, if people get more comfortable with that, then I think we will see more targeted ads, and the digital ad revenue model could be viable for freely distributed content.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I use three different client types for different communications when one covers them all? That sounds a lot like having one car to go shopping, one to go to work, and one for the weekend. Personally, I don't have the inclination to maintain three cars, and one which does all three jobs is ideal.
Well, I might have a van or SUV to do my shopping, a Prius or other hybrid for the commute, and a motorcycle for the weekend. And a truck for when friends need to move.
I don't know. The pool of unemployed astronauts will probably dry up pretty quick. The competition to provide cheap space flights will put inexorable pressure on firms to reduce costs, and you will see (eventually) poorly maintained rockets/shuttles, and poorly trained pilots flying on little or no sleep.
The US FAA has no jurisdiction over space.
They have jurisdiction over commercial flights to space that originate in the US, or fly over US airspace (up to an altitude of 50-80k feet I'd guess).
If the spacecraft's pilot thinks it's safe enough to fly, then I'll fly with him.
Doubtless the passengers on Continental Connection Flight 3407 thought the same thing.
for many creative individuals and IT employees, there can be lulls in their job,
My code's compiling.
They instead plug your name into an automated report and it returns a sorted list of your most interesting contacts, probably based on a simple scoring system.
Yes, of course - if they are adept at information analysis, reporting, querying or whatever you want to call it. I don't think the government is very good at that stuff, certainly not at the state/local level. Perhaps there are parts of the FBI that are getting better at it, and the NSA is probably pretty good at it - they may even rival Facebook. All I'm saying is that companies such as Facebook or Google are going to be way better than most government agencies and coalescing this data.
Why are you prepared to do that?
Where did I say I was? I am a FB user, and will continue to be. I hope I will never be cowed into quitting a service like FB (or gmail) because I fear the government accessing my meta-data, but I can envision scenarios where I might.
Then the problem isn't Facebook; it's the FBI,
I agree that the FBI is a problem if they abuse or misuse this data. But I also think that FB has a responsibility (moral/ethical mind you, not legal) to safeguard the data of their users and not hand it over to 3rd parties, especially the government, without disclosure to the user. Other companies, such as Twitter and Google, have fought against the government meta-data grabs in the past, and I think FB should as well.
Seriously, though, the police are bound to look at any associates of someone in a drug cartel. The only thing you can do is choose your friends carefully, whether online or in real life.
That's not really the concern. I don't have that much of an issue with the idea of law enforcement/intelligence services investigating associates of criminals. The problem is when they start investigating people who have joined an anti-war group on FB, or liked the wikileaks page. The FBI has a history of investigating people and groups with links to criminal activity that are tenuous at best.
The aspect of this (and the related stories about law enforcement having access to your cell phone meta-data directly from your carrier, for a small fee) that pushes it to the next level is that this information becomes very easy to obtain. It's one thing if an Agent has to individual interview and/or sift through mountains of paper data, it's quite another for him to be able to run a query against a database at the push of a button. I'm all for giving law enforcement the tools to do their job better, but we have to be very cognizant of the power we give them, and establish safe guards against the abuse that is sure to come from this extra power.
The problem with your notion is that the government has already revealed that they are reading the subject, to, and from lines on every piece of email.
I agree with the other reply to your post, with a couple of other points. I'm willing to bet that FB is much better at aggregating and parsing all the data signals they have than the government is. Also, it is much much easier to discern the social network by looking at FB meta data (mostly just the relationships) than by looking at email patterns. This is not to say email header information is worth less, it is just different. I can see why a government would want both. If I was Gadahfi (sp?), I'd probably lean towards the FB (or Twitter) data, but it's a close call. Mostly though, I'd go for the FB data because it's probably much better packaged than the raw email headers.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends,
Someone said this up above, so I won't take credit, but "your friends" is the piece of data that is most valuable to intelligence and law enforcement. If one of your FB friends pops up on some watch list, the FBI can (in theory) log into Facebook and get a list of all his "friends." Now you are on an FBI watch list. Your employer may be interviewed, maybe your neighbor or co-workers.
But hey, who cares if you have nothing to hide right?
For me, the problem isn't the voluntary gift of this information from users (including me) to Facebook. It is the voluntary gift of this information from Facebook to the government.
Also, the info in question is (allegedly?) only open to the government, not everyone.
But I think Assange wants openness for people and institutions he wants openness for. They possess and have released documents belonging to publicly traded corporations, private clubs, etc. I'd guess that if he had medical records of a public figure he'd release those as well. In a lot of these cases, he may have a compelling argument that this data should be released, but it's not as simple as "only governments."
Should this be allowed to stand, traffic stops will become a new tool for police to conduct what would in any other context be considered illegal suspicionless searches.
From what I hear (from Leo Laporte on This Week in Tech podcast), the police can already request (for a nominal fee) many data from your cell phone carrier. Data such as geolocation, time of phone call and number called are not considered "content" like an actual phone conversation is, and thus have a much lower hurdle as far as the law goes.
See these two Ars Technica articles for more info, including this gem:
Soghoian describes how "the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time."
I don't see this new tool as that big a boon to cops from the standpoint of normal folks. I can see the cops wanting it to get this data from phones who's number or carrier they don't know, for example pre-paid phones used by drug dealers. That said, I think this is all an outrage and they should reverse the 2005 ruling. Having a smartphone has some very serious drawbacks.
I'm sure some smart folks will come up with a nice app that provides backup and an easily triggerable secure wipe.
Which will be rejected from the App store thanks to the lobbying efforts of Police Unions and law makers. See also, DUI Checkpoint apps.
1+i factorial months sounds like a long time.
"impact of crime" does not mean "deterring/preventing crime." These cameras do have an impact on crime, namely that it tremendously assists in the investigation and prosecution (every episode of Law & Order UK starts with them going to the CCTV footage). Still, it does seem fairly trivial to argue against that benefit, when weighing the costs to civil liberties, though it's not as trivial as you seem to think.
I use my real Gmail address when I sign up for most things. If they are going to be sending me things I want (e.g. e-receipts or shipping confirmations from Best Buy, Amazon, etc.) then I'll do nothing. If they are only going to send me spam newsletters and sales offers, then I will set up a filter in Gmail.
What I'd really like to be able to do though is have a filter which puts a time bomb on an email, so that it deletes it after 30 days. That way, I could save the sales offer by default in case I end up shopping there in the next 30 days. But then Gmail will auto delete it for me so I don't have to worry about keeping my account clean (not that you really have to do that with Gmail anyway).
Would I take a pay cut to telecommute? No, but then I only live 15 minutes for work (which includes stopping for coffee).
It seems to me there was a government sys admin in San Francisco that stood up to his bosses and ended up in jail. OK, so not exactly the same situation, but still....
So did my boss. Though in his defense he was expecting an email from UPS. Luckily MSSE caught it and neutralized it completely, as far as I can tell. I ran a DDS log which looked clean, and an F-Secure online scan came back with only tracking cookies.
But shouldn't Win7 and no admin rights go a long ways towards negating these types of malware?
There's no way a small business will be able to afford the type of security required to keep hackers off their systems
Really? I understand that anti-malware security is somewhat esoteric to the lay-user still, but any business collecting CC details and payments should have the money to invest in either A) a payment service that takes care of securing customer data for them or B) an IT consultant to install free software on their system and give the owner a few hours of training in using and maintaining it.
Well, I agree $15 is too much; somewhere between $5 and $10 is probably the right price, depending on how big the library is. Pandora One is only $3/month.
But your solution doesn't work for the mass market. Not many people have the technical know how to do what you're describing.
Also, how much have you spent on your music collection over the years? At $10 per CD, a 1000 disc collection is $10k. That equates to 55 years of Zune Pass or 277 years of Pandora One. For someone with a small collection, or a tween just starting out, these types of streaming services are economically viable choices. My boss's husband put a similar system in their second home, so now he can listen to (almost) anything he wants and didn't have to worry about copying his music library over to a 2nd computer.
Still, there is something to be said for actually owning your music, as opposed to a license to it, which they can revoke whenever they want (or increase the cost). And it really comes down to teh quality of the library. Can you get your favorite artist? Can you get new, independent artists? If so, then I might go for it? If not, then probably not.
And that seems like a pretty insignificant note seeing as how iTunes effectively does the same thing.
-Rick
iTunes automatically adds the songs you buy to a cloud-based storage system? My version stores it locally. Which one are you using?
And I know his wife, Morgan Fairchild.
http://goo.gl/maps/44af
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/TX3155/
Google "Superconducting Super Collider address". Third result.
Digital ads also potentially get more backlash. A paper ad can't really be annoying.
Sure it can. There are plenty of annoying display ads in newspapers, and I gloss over them on those rare occasions I read the dead tree edition. The same goes for inserts, which produce a messy pile on my dining room table when I open the Sunday paper.
A pop-over window, annoying animated banner or anything like that can be. As viewers grow more and more accustomed to ignoring ads, the temptation to make them more intrusive grows.
I rarely see flashing banner ads anymore, though that could be a function of the sites I visit. I think as people get more accustomed to ignoring ads (which don't interest them), advertisers will grow more accustomed to creating more targeted advertising. But, your point about backlash is valid. Consumers need to realize that "tracking" is what allows those targeted ads, and maybe they shouldn't get creeped out because they see an ad for something they just searched for. Or maybe they should. Anyways, if people get more comfortable with that, then I think we will see more targeted ads, and the digital ad revenue model could be viable for freely distributed content.