That's an interesting proposal. The downside I see is that it requires installing a lot of toll infrastructure. A few years ago Denmark looked hard at doing something like this, but rather than installing toll infrastructure on the streets they were going to install GPS tracking in all vehicles, with a cellular data connection to report travel. This was much more cost-effective, but ultimately died due to privacy concerns; and Danes are much less worried than Americans about being tracked by their government. There's no way that would fly here.
For that matter, convenient tolling infrastructure would also present an excellent tracking opportunity, so I'd expect privacy advocate opposition.
Gas taxes don't create privacy concerns and all of the collection infrastructure is already in place.
A little more information: Some Note 3s can do HCE and some cannot. It's definitely an unusual case. Samsung decided to source NFC chipsets from both NXP and Broadcom. All Broadcom chipsets can do NFC and all of the newer NXP chipsets can as well but older ones had some bits hardwired that makes it impossible for the handset to send certain types of NFC messages. The Note 3s with NXP chips have an early version of a later-generation NXP chipset and still has that limitation, even though the final version of the chipset doesn't have it.
So... roughly half of Note 3 owners got screwed (on NFC Wallet). Nearly all other major devices of the last 2-3 years used Broadcom chips, though, and I'd be surprised if anything released in the last 12-18 months had an HCE-incapable NFC chipset.
It's possible that all of the Verizon Note 3s have NXP, since Verizon doesn't like Google Wallet.
Yes, but you have to be a mathematician of Grothendieck's calibre to understand that 57 is prime. Lesser intellects fixate on its being the product of 3 and 19 and jabber on about the definition of primeness, but Grothendieck saw the deeper truth.
Basically what they are saying is that you should not use Tor at home or at work, but in other places, where you don't do your normal browsing. Make normal and Tor browsing mutually network exlusive!
If browsing from coffee shops is necessary and sufficient to provide anonymity, why use Tor?
Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
Ah, correction. My wife has the Note 2. It turns out that HCE payments aren't supported on NXP NFC chipsets (per XDA). The Broadcom chipsets are far more common and work fine. I don't know if this is changing for 5.0. It does seem like a pure software limitation if what I was reading is correct.
Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
That being said, it's not that Google doesn't want Wallet to succeed. But Carriers have screwed them over by limiting the devices to ISIS/Soft Card.
Google solved that problem by moving from SE to HCE.
Question: Have you ever actually used Google Wallet to buy digital goods from a seller other than Google?
I haven't, and I worked on Google Wallet. This doesn't surprise me at all; this facet of Google Wallet never saw significant uptake. I doubt there were more than a handful of merchants who offered it.
Serious question. Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?
Some are clearly necessary. Others not so much.
Which ones, and why? What problems do they solve? Why do those apply or not apply to Uber and Lyft?
Okay, what were the problems and how did the regulations address them? This is precisely the point. Unless we can determine how/why the regulations are (or are not?) useful for taxis, we can't really decide whether or not they should apply to Uber and Lyft.
I did. I suggested that they should switch to a general graph rather than a hierarchy, explained why a hierarchy is the wrong structure, and proposed that the process of building the map could be accelerated with machine learning techniques.
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers.
Why?
Serious question. Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?
Human Factors is sometimes classified as engineering and sometimes classified as aerospace and sometimes classified as psychology.
I think I just broke it.
I had the same problem and solution. I went with google apps to host my domain. Painless, great spam filtering, and integrates with other google services like the Android play store, G+ and hangouts.
Ditto, though I did it when it was free. It's not any more, and depending on how many users you have on your domain (I've got around 30), it can get quite expensive.
I don't know why you would say this. There is a single platform that runs on almost all devices. It's called Android. Everything else is a bit player that you can safely ignore.
The discussion was about Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't own Android.
However, let's move the discussion to Google. Barring some significant culture and management changes, I cannot see Google becoming another Microsoft. Google's leadership and culture are too idealistic. Seriously, and that's not just wishful thinking. I work for Google and see it from the inside, and the company doesn't have the laser focus on squashing the competition and racking up profits that Microsoft did.
This difference is visible in many ways. One is Google's "Data Liberation Front" project, which is a real and serious effort to ensure that you can, at any time, take all of your data out of any Google service and walk away. This is the anti lock-in, and it has significant support and funding. Google could do a little more in this space if all product designs were required to identify their data liberation strategy up front like they are with privacy, but the DLF team does a great job and gets solid cooperation from product teams.
Another way it's visible is in Google's focus on open standards and open source. Android is open source, for example. It's becoming less so, unfortunately (and the Android team does see it as unfortunate (I work on Android)), because OEM reluctance to push updates means that to give users timely security fixes and patches Google has had to push more and more of the system into the Google Apps -- because Google doesn't need OEM cooperation to update them.
I could go on but I think that's enough to make the point. Note that I'm not saying Google dominance is or would be a good thing, just that it would be less bad than Microsoft dominance was.
However, I don't see Google obtaining dominance, either. You say "everything [non-Android] is a bit player that you can safely ignore", but that's simply untrue. iOS is a minority of the mobile market, but it's most definitely not one that can be ignored, and while it's declining in market share on a percentage basis, in absolute numbers it continues to grow. In addition, while desktop computing is on the decline, it also is not going away, and Windows still dominates that space, and will for many years to come.
Yes, Microsoft wants to play, and that's great. We should all want them to play. They have a lot of smart people, and huge financial resources, and more competition is better for consumers. My point is that they've lost the ability to own the platforms and therefore control the market. Which is a good thing. We don't want any one player owning all the platforms and controlling the market.
I would like to believe you. I really really want to but what's the guarantee?
There are no guarantees.
How do you know that it won't 'extinguish' cross platform support when it defeats the competitive options.
Because Microsoft has failed in the mobile space, and mobile computing is becoming the dominant form of individual computing. Desktops and laptops aren't going away, but they're being relegated to smaller niches, and even in those niches people increasingly expect to be able to work cross-device. I don't expect my tablet or phone to be as convenient for, say, editing a spreadsheet or writing code, as my laptop or desktop, but I increasingly demand that I be able to work on the same stuff on all sorts of devices and to be able to move seamlessly between them.
This inherently means that big chunks of any solution must be cross-platform, because there is no single platform that runs on all devices. Microsoft would like to change this by unifying desktop and mobile Windows, but to be successful at that they'd have to get a dominant position in mobile computing, and they've failed at that. The webification of everything is also making it increasingly impossible to bind users to one operating system.
So, Microsoft is simply not going to have the ability to extinguish cross-platformness, because to do that they'd have to own all the platforms, and they don't, and won't.
This is like we had a bad tyrant and we suffered tremendously under this tyrant and it took a DoJ anti-trust lawsuit and a very long amount of time to see meaningful competition in this space again.
The DoJ suit had nothing to do with it. Microsoft was never meaningfully limited by that suit.
They're trying to model a database of human skills as a hierarchy. That's the most common sort of categorization system we design, because it's simple and logical, but there are lots of things that simply don't fit such a model. Arguably, it's not even a particularly natural model for humans since our internal category systems are generally prototype-based.
But in this case, the real problem is that whatever clear divisions you try to define to segregate skills into classes will be essentially arbitrary. Skills shade into one another based on various common elements. Some pairs of skills are deeply similar because they involve the same sorts of processes, so a person who knows one can easily learn the other even if they're used in completely different contexts, so the taxonomy as-is will incorrectly separate them. Ideally, you really want a skill map that identifies skills that have high degrees of similarity, and between which people can transition easily, regardless of context (I suppose I'm presuming an application of the map which may not be intended, but it seems like a pretty darned valuable application).
There are also real issues of granularity. Take C++ programming... you can be a competent programmer without knowing anything about template metaprogramming, and you can be an expert metaprogrammer without being able to write useful code. Think about it for a moment and you can come up with a hundred examples of sub-skills for any skill. Of course, you can just decide to arbitrarily cut it off at a particular level, and sometimes that level is obvious... but I have a strong suspicion that different people will disagree on the where those "obvious" cut-offs are.
Building the data up the ad-hoc way they're going about it is going to lead to lots of other strangenesses. For example, right now under "Technology" there are three categories "Computer Science", "Aerospace" and "Engineering". Umm, what? We can argue about whether or not software engineers are real engineers, but aerospace engineers definitely are. Do those three things really belong at the same level? Clearly not, and no individual taxonomist would put them there. I hope they have some way for the crowd (or someone) to restructure or the inevitably-flawed and inconsistent hierarchical taxonomy is also going to be silly.
I'm not saying that their idea is impossible, I'm saying that it doesn't fit within a structure of classical categories. Instead it should be modeled as a graph, with multiple relationships between nodes, and the edges labeled to indicate the nature of the relationship. Of course, this will make it impossible to find a skill in the graph except by searching, but that's going to be the case anyway. Except in the most obvious cases people won't know which branches of the tree to follow to find a given skill, and if you're going to start by searching anyway a graph facilitates finding what you want, because you can search for something related and then from there navigate to precisely what you wanted (assuming it's present and properly-connected).
I think there'd also be a lot of value in jump-starting (or perhaps refining) crowd-sourced data with automated analysis and clustering, derived from relevant documents. But the approach to collecting and building the data is less important than getting the data model right.
You know, I really don't think so. I think Microsoft has gotten knocked down hard and learned a little humility. They now have to compete on merit, rather than just leverage their IBM-gifted monopoly to squash any competition. It's even possible that the lesson will sink deeply enough into the corporate culture to effect a permanent change (plus, it's unlikely they'll achieve another world-dominating position to leverage).
But even if you're right, I don't think it matters because their monopoly is eroding fast and without that leverage they can't execute step 3.
(Just to head off some inevitable replies to that last comment, when I say their monopoly is eroding it's not so much that Windows is being replaced on the desktop -- though it is, some, and I think the trend will accelerate -- but that the desktop is becoming much less important.)
I was wondering how the Chinese were hiding all those billions of extra people.
In underground shelters. They're preparing for the day they'll swarm out of hiding and bring the whole world into the light and harmony of Chinese Communism. The world will like this very much[*].
But even secret armies deserve to go home for the holidays.
Can you or I buy fuel cheap fuel from NASA? No. It's favoritism, pure and simple.
Well, it's favoritism to an organization that has helped to fund maintenance and restoration projects on NASA's airfield and hangars, and has allowed NASA to fly scientific research missions on its jets (granted, in exchange for the right to park said jets on NASA's airfield). For several years Google has collaborated with NASA on various Moffet Field-related issues and endeavors, and in the process Google has pumped many millions into it. I'm sure if you or I did the same sort of thing we also could buy cheap fuel from NASA.
Unless Bing funds the Rose Foundation. But I carried this ball so far; I'll let others use available tools if they care for this ball to go any farther.
They're not likely to get far. The Rose Foundation says it's committed to protecting the privacy of its donors. http://rosefdn.org/privacy-pol...
Assuming it is MS or Apple (which I'm not claiming; I have no idea), you might be able to find their donations to the Rose Foundation in their filings, but even that wouldn't be any sort of proof, because the foundation does a lot of different things. And you might not find it, because the money might first pass through one or two other foundations. "Donor-directed" programs (like the Rose Foundation provides), are kind of like Tor nodes for technically-charitable donations. The donor gives the money and directs how the foundation spends it, but neither the donor nor the foundation have to disclose the directives. So a company could give a million dollars to Rose and observers have no way of knowing whether that money was to fund an anti-Google campaign or to attract better teachers to inner-city schools, or any of a thousand other things... or many of them.
And if that doesn't provide enough deniability, the donor can route the money through multiple nodes, directing each to apply some of the money to other things so each donation is a different amount. With a little care they could probably even arrange for some of the downstream donations to occur before the upstream donations.
Slashdot Mirror
That's basically their business model. They sell information.
Well, that's what people believe their business model is, even though it's not. Google sells eyeballs, not information.
That's an interesting proposal. The downside I see is that it requires installing a lot of toll infrastructure. A few years ago Denmark looked hard at doing something like this, but rather than installing toll infrastructure on the streets they were going to install GPS tracking in all vehicles, with a cellular data connection to report travel. This was much more cost-effective, but ultimately died due to privacy concerns; and Danes are much less worried than Americans about being tracked by their government. There's no way that would fly here.
For that matter, convenient tolling infrastructure would also present an excellent tracking opportunity, so I'd expect privacy advocate opposition.
Gas taxes don't create privacy concerns and all of the collection infrastructure is already in place.
A little more information: Some Note 3s can do HCE and some cannot. It's definitely an unusual case. Samsung decided to source NFC chipsets from both NXP and Broadcom. All Broadcom chipsets can do NFC and all of the newer NXP chipsets can as well but older ones had some bits hardwired that makes it impossible for the handset to send certain types of NFC messages. The Note 3s with NXP chips have an early version of a later-generation NXP chipset and still has that limitation, even though the final version of the chipset doesn't have it.
So... roughly half of Note 3 owners got screwed (on NFC Wallet). Nearly all other major devices of the last 2-3 years used Broadcom chips, though, and I'd be surprised if anything released in the last 12-18 months had an HCE-incapable NFC chipset.
It's possible that all of the Verizon Note 3s have NXP, since Verizon doesn't like Google Wallet.
> Grothendieck prime
You mean 3*19?
Yes, but you have to be a mathematician of Grothendieck's calibre to understand that 57 is prime. Lesser intellects fixate on its being the product of 3 and 19 and jabber on about the definition of primeness, but Grothendieck saw the deeper truth.
Basically what they are saying is that you should not use Tor at home or at work, but in other places, where you don't do your normal browsing. Make normal and Tor browsing mutually network exlusive!
If browsing from coffee shops is necessary and sufficient to provide anonymity, why use Tor?
Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
Ah, correction. My wife has the Note 2. It turns out that HCE payments aren't supported on NXP NFC chipsets (per XDA). The Broadcom chipsets are far more common and work fine. I don't know if this is changing for 5.0. It does seem like a pure software limitation if what I was reading is correct.
Verizon Galaxy Note 3. No NFC Payments, and probably will never have them.
That's the phone my wife has, and NFC payments work fine. Did you enable NFC in the settings? When you go into the Google Wallet app what do you see about "tap and pay"?
That being said, it's not that Google doesn't want Wallet to succeed. But Carriers have screwed them over by limiting the devices to ISIS/Soft Card.
Google solved that problem by moving from SE to HCE.
Question: Have you ever actually used Google Wallet to buy digital goods from a seller other than Google?
I haven't, and I worked on Google Wallet. This doesn't surprise me at all; this facet of Google Wallet never saw significant uptake. I doubt there were more than a handful of merchants who offered it.
My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?
Huh? Google Wallet NFC payments should work on any NFC-capable device with KitKat or higher. What phone do you have, and in what way does it not work?
Some are clearly necessary. Others not so much.
Which ones, and why? What problems do they solve? Why do those apply or not apply to Uber and Lyft?
Okay, what were the problems and how did the regulations address them? This is precisely the point. Unless we can determine how/why the regulations are (or are not?) useful for taxis, we can't really decide whether or not they should apply to Uber and Lyft.
Easier to tear down than to build. Care to help?
I did. I suggested that they should switch to a general graph rather than a hierarchy, explained why a hierarchy is the wrong structure, and proposed that the process of building the map could be accelerated with machine learning techniques.
Yes. Because people are fucking assholes. Yes.
The depth and clarity of your analysis is astounding.
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers.
Why?
Serious question. Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?
Human Factors is sometimes classified as engineering and sometimes classified as aerospace and sometimes classified as psychology. I think I just broke it.
It's very easy to break.
I had the same problem and solution. I went with google apps to host my domain. Painless, great spam filtering, and integrates with other google services like the Android play store, G+ and hangouts.
Ditto, though I did it when it was free. It's not any more, and depending on how many users you have on your domain (I've got around 30), it can get quite expensive.
I don't know why you would say this. There is a single platform that runs on almost all devices. It's called Android. Everything else is a bit player that you can safely ignore.
The discussion was about Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't own Android.
However, let's move the discussion to Google. Barring some significant culture and management changes, I cannot see Google becoming another Microsoft. Google's leadership and culture are too idealistic. Seriously, and that's not just wishful thinking. I work for Google and see it from the inside, and the company doesn't have the laser focus on squashing the competition and racking up profits that Microsoft did.
This difference is visible in many ways. One is Google's "Data Liberation Front" project, which is a real and serious effort to ensure that you can, at any time, take all of your data out of any Google service and walk away. This is the anti lock-in, and it has significant support and funding. Google could do a little more in this space if all product designs were required to identify their data liberation strategy up front like they are with privacy, but the DLF team does a great job and gets solid cooperation from product teams.
Another way it's visible is in Google's focus on open standards and open source. Android is open source, for example. It's becoming less so, unfortunately (and the Android team does see it as unfortunate (I work on Android)), because OEM reluctance to push updates means that to give users timely security fixes and patches Google has had to push more and more of the system into the Google Apps -- because Google doesn't need OEM cooperation to update them.
I could go on but I think that's enough to make the point. Note that I'm not saying Google dominance is or would be a good thing, just that it would be less bad than Microsoft dominance was.
However, I don't see Google obtaining dominance, either. You say "everything [non-Android] is a bit player that you can safely ignore", but that's simply untrue. iOS is a minority of the mobile market, but it's most definitely not one that can be ignored, and while it's declining in market share on a percentage basis, in absolute numbers it continues to grow. In addition, while desktop computing is on the decline, it also is not going away, and Windows still dominates that space, and will for many years to come.
Yes, Microsoft wants to play, and that's great. We should all want them to play. They have a lot of smart people, and huge financial resources, and more competition is better for consumers. My point is that they've lost the ability to own the platforms and therefore control the market. Which is a good thing. We don't want any one player owning all the platforms and controlling the market.
Yes. This article isn't exactly news as it pretty much confirms what the global peanut gallery has already said about this stuff.
Still, data is better than emergent collective perceptions from distributed anecdotes.
I would like to believe you. I really really want to but what's the guarantee?
There are no guarantees.
How do you know that it won't 'extinguish' cross platform support when it defeats the competitive options.
Because Microsoft has failed in the mobile space, and mobile computing is becoming the dominant form of individual computing. Desktops and laptops aren't going away, but they're being relegated to smaller niches, and even in those niches people increasingly expect to be able to work cross-device. I don't expect my tablet or phone to be as convenient for, say, editing a spreadsheet or writing code, as my laptop or desktop, but I increasingly demand that I be able to work on the same stuff on all sorts of devices and to be able to move seamlessly between them.
This inherently means that big chunks of any solution must be cross-platform, because there is no single platform that runs on all devices. Microsoft would like to change this by unifying desktop and mobile Windows, but to be successful at that they'd have to get a dominant position in mobile computing, and they've failed at that. The webification of everything is also making it increasingly impossible to bind users to one operating system.
So, Microsoft is simply not going to have the ability to extinguish cross-platformness, because to do that they'd have to own all the platforms, and they don't, and won't.
This is like we had a bad tyrant and we suffered tremendously under this tyrant and it took a DoJ anti-trust lawsuit and a very long amount of time to see meaningful competition in this space again.
The DoJ suit had nothing to do with it. Microsoft was never meaningfully limited by that suit.
They're trying to model a database of human skills as a hierarchy. That's the most common sort of categorization system we design, because it's simple and logical, but there are lots of things that simply don't fit such a model. Arguably, it's not even a particularly natural model for humans since our internal category systems are generally prototype-based.
But in this case, the real problem is that whatever clear divisions you try to define to segregate skills into classes will be essentially arbitrary. Skills shade into one another based on various common elements. Some pairs of skills are deeply similar because they involve the same sorts of processes, so a person who knows one can easily learn the other even if they're used in completely different contexts, so the taxonomy as-is will incorrectly separate them. Ideally, you really want a skill map that identifies skills that have high degrees of similarity, and between which people can transition easily, regardless of context (I suppose I'm presuming an application of the map which may not be intended, but it seems like a pretty darned valuable application).
There are also real issues of granularity. Take C++ programming... you can be a competent programmer without knowing anything about template metaprogramming, and you can be an expert metaprogrammer without being able to write useful code. Think about it for a moment and you can come up with a hundred examples of sub-skills for any skill. Of course, you can just decide to arbitrarily cut it off at a particular level, and sometimes that level is obvious... but I have a strong suspicion that different people will disagree on the where those "obvious" cut-offs are.
Building the data up the ad-hoc way they're going about it is going to lead to lots of other strangenesses. For example, right now under "Technology" there are three categories "Computer Science", "Aerospace" and "Engineering". Umm, what? We can argue about whether or not software engineers are real engineers, but aerospace engineers definitely are. Do those three things really belong at the same level? Clearly not, and no individual taxonomist would put them there. I hope they have some way for the crowd (or someone) to restructure or the inevitably-flawed and inconsistent hierarchical taxonomy is also going to be silly.
I'm not saying that their idea is impossible, I'm saying that it doesn't fit within a structure of classical categories. Instead it should be modeled as a graph, with multiple relationships between nodes, and the edges labeled to indicate the nature of the relationship. Of course, this will make it impossible to find a skill in the graph except by searching, but that's going to be the case anyway. Except in the most obvious cases people won't know which branches of the tree to follow to find a given skill, and if you're going to start by searching anyway a graph facilitates finding what you want, because you can search for something related and then from there navigate to precisely what you wanted (assuming it's present and properly-connected).
I think there'd also be a lot of value in jump-starting (or perhaps refining) crowd-sourced data with automated analysis and clustering, derived from relevant documents. But the approach to collecting and building the data is less important than getting the data model right.
Step 1: Embrace.
Step 2: Extend.
Step 3: Extinguish.
They see this as step 1.
You know, I really don't think so. I think Microsoft has gotten knocked down hard and learned a little humility. They now have to compete on merit, rather than just leverage their IBM-gifted monopoly to squash any competition. It's even possible that the lesson will sink deeply enough into the corporate culture to effect a permanent change (plus, it's unlikely they'll achieve another world-dominating position to leverage).
But even if you're right, I don't think it matters because their monopoly is eroding fast and without that leverage they can't execute step 3.
(Just to head off some inevitable replies to that last comment, when I say their monopoly is eroding it's not so much that Windows is being replaced on the desktop -- though it is, some, and I think the trend will accelerate -- but that the desktop is becoming much less important.)
I was wondering how the Chinese were hiding all those billions of extra people.
In underground shelters. They're preparing for the day they'll swarm out of hiding and bring the whole world into the light and harmony of Chinese Communism. The world will like this very much[*].
But even secret armies deserve to go home for the holidays.
[*] Extensive re-education may be required.
Can you or I buy fuel cheap fuel from NASA? No. It's favoritism, pure and simple.
Well, it's favoritism to an organization that has helped to fund maintenance and restoration projects on NASA's airfield and hangars, and has allowed NASA to fly scientific research missions on its jets (granted, in exchange for the right to park said jets on NASA's airfield). For several years Google has collaborated with NASA on various Moffet Field-related issues and endeavors, and in the process Google has pumped many millions into it. I'm sure if you or I did the same sort of thing we also could buy cheap fuel from NASA.
No. Probably Bing.
Well, Bing is MS.
Unless Bing funds the Rose Foundation. But I carried this ball so far; I'll let others use available tools if they care for this ball to go any farther.
They're not likely to get far. The Rose Foundation says it's committed to protecting the privacy of its donors. http://rosefdn.org/privacy-pol...
Assuming it is MS or Apple (which I'm not claiming; I have no idea), you might be able to find their donations to the Rose Foundation in their filings, but even that wouldn't be any sort of proof, because the foundation does a lot of different things. And you might not find it, because the money might first pass through one or two other foundations. "Donor-directed" programs (like the Rose Foundation provides), are kind of like Tor nodes for technically-charitable donations. The donor gives the money and directs how the foundation spends it, but neither the donor nor the foundation have to disclose the directives. So a company could give a million dollars to Rose and observers have no way of knowing whether that money was to fund an anti-Google campaign or to attract better teachers to inner-city schools, or any of a thousand other things... or many of them.
And if that doesn't provide enough deniability, the donor can route the money through multiple nodes, directing each to apply some of the money to other things so each donation is a different amount. With a little care they could probably even arrange for some of the downstream donations to occur before the upstream donations.