If you accept that argument, then all economic activity falls under the umbrella of national security, and the Constitution goes out the window.
Only if you accept that it's okay to toss the Constitution out the window any time "national security" is invoked. Granted that that is the position of the current (and last several) administrations, but that doesn't mean it's true.
However, I think it clearly is true that all economic activity of sufficient scope and scale is relevant to national security. And, actually, I think the NSA even has a legitimate role in assuring the security of large-scale US economic activities.
I once worked on a project with serious implications to the security of a major piece of the US payments infrastructure, and the NSA provided oversight for the project, reviewing all designs, double-checking the implementation and generally providing a lot of really high-quality advice on how to make sure it was properly secured. It was really helpful, and I greatly appreciated their assistance. Unfortunately, the NSA has apparently decided in the last few years to ignore that part of their mission -- increasing US infrastructure security -- in favor of being able to spy on everything, and so switched to trying to pre-compromise all of our most important security tools.
I don't care too much one way or the other about the NSA spying on foreign corporations to help their US-based competitors, mostly because I assume that everyone does it so telling the NSA not to would just tilt the playing field against US companies. But it really pisses me off that the NSA appears to be actively working against the security of US companies.
You don't really understand the English language. The OP inferred it, ergo it was implied (intentionally, or not)
I think I have a pretty solid handle on the English language.
"hey!" wrote "The book is much less clear on exactly how Frankenstein constructs his monster, but it implies alchemy or other discredited pseudoscience is involved", emphasis mine.
"SuricouRaven" wrote "It doesn't really imply that", and then went on to explain that Frankenstein abandoned the pseudoscience and employed medical science to create his monster.
Please try to read the posts you're responding to before calling people stupid.
More correct, but not correct. I'll take a shot at a correct explanation.
There are several things that can keep an unprofitable product alive at Google. One is employee interest. Google's culture is quite bottom-up, and if a group of people are willing to invest time -- and, along with it, a portion of their bonus/promotion prospects -- then the company is reluctant to kill it. Another is user impact. If a product has broad and/or rapidly-growing usage, and users use it very regularly, then Google will almost certainly keep it going. In both cases, the theory is similar: If there are enough people sufficiently interested, then the product probably has a path to profitability, perhaps on its own or perhaps in conjunction with other products. Products that are profitable, with good margins and good growth prospects are quite safe, unless some other product's strategy is harmed by them. Paid products, especially those with long-term contracts, are extremely safe. If you're paying Google money for the service you're using, it's not going away, though the pricing may change if it's not profitable.
Google's reputation for being willing to kill products is a direct and inevitable result of Google's willingness to try things that may not work out. You can't have the latter without the former, because most new ideas won't work. Wave didn't work because no one used it. Reader didn't work because there was no path to profit.
Users should probably treat speculative new Google products the same way they'd treat products from a startup... cautiously until the product looks like it really has legs, either in the form of serious resource commitment from Google, or in the form of clear profitability. Once a product is well-established (say, hundreds of millions of users) and/or making money, then they can be sure it'll stick around.
The total 2.7 million split into pocket change to the hundreds that will find some exploit
$150K is pocket change to you? From the contest rules:
7. REWARDS: Rewards for eligible Exploits will be allocated to eligible entrants on a first-come-first-served basis, based on time of submission during the Program Period specified above, until such time as the total reward pool of $2.71828 million USD is exhausted:
An entrant submitting an Exploit demonstrating a Chrome OS system-level compromise delivered via a web page and triggerable when browsing in Guest mode and affecting all subsequent Guest mode sessions across reboots (“persistent Guest-to-Guest exploit”) using bugs in Chrome OS, as determined in the sole discretion of the Judges, will receive a reward of $150,000 USD (one hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars).
An entrant submitting an Exploit demonstrating a Chrome browser-level compromise delivered via a web page using bugs in Chrome OS as determined in the sole discretion of the Judges, will receive a reward of $110,000 USD (one hundred and ten thousand U.S. dollars).
Google reserves the right to issue partial rewards, in its sole discretion, for partial, incomplete or unreliable Exploits. Google may also consider issuing significant bonuses for any Entrant who demonstrates a particularly impressive or surprising exploit.
So system-level compromises with $150K. Browser-level compromises win $110K. On top of that, particularly impressive or surprising exploits may get additional money.
Maybe that's pocket change to you, but I doubt it is to the average security researcher, regardless of the color of his hat.
An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in
Which is the whole point of Google fiber. Google fiber is more than a stunt, it's a real, profit-generating business, but the purpose of the project is exactly to create competition, making truly high-speed Internet widely available.
Yeah, I've wondered about that choice. I think the search page is to help the less-clued, but the choice of focus favors the power user, who prefers to use the location bar where he or she can type either a url or search terms.
Why exactly do you need to use google search to look for gmail when you're already logged in? Hundreds of people are doing that per hour, wtf? Hello? Address bar?
Vast numbers of people search google for "google".
From their perspective, they want to search for something so they type "google" into their web browser and it takes them to google.com where they can do their search, never realizing that they could have skipped the first step and just typed their search query in the same place they typed "google".
I've heard a rumor (no idea if it's real) that at one point the Chrome team tried popping up a tooltip explaining to people who typed "google" into the location bar that they can just search from the location bar, but focus group testing showed that (a) it annoyed people and (b) most of them continued typing "google" into the location bar anyway.
Now, of course, Chrome gives you a page that looks like a Google search page by default whenever you create a new tab. I have no idea if this has gotten people to just type their search query there, rather than typing "google" first.
But even if it has gotten them to stop searching for "google", I'm sure many of them type "gmail" into that faux search page.
Cool. I'd love to see more of this. And I think Google would still count this as a win, given the pricing changes and the fact that they led to wider adoption.
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
Was the rollout spurred on by the news of Google Fiber? If so, then Google will call that a win for them.
We are the stronger species, we win. Empathy is evolutionarily expensive.
I'd say that empathy is so evolutionarily valuable that it's the fundamental reason we are the stronger species.
It seems very likely that we evolved the capacity for empathy because people who have it are more effective at understanding the points of view of others, which is a pre-requisite to the more effective forms of cooperation. It's clearly our ability to cooperate which makes us the dominant species on the planet because as individuals we're pretty weak and ineffectual compared to other megafauna.
Of course, it's only really empathy for others who are likely to be willing to cooperate with us that is evolutionarily useful. This extends beyond our own species, though, and encompasses animals whose companionship or service we value (think dogs, horses). You'll get better service from a horse that you treat well, and you're more likely to treat it well if you can empathize with it. But our brains don't distinguish degrees of utility that finely, so many animals get empathy from us, largely in correlation to how easy it is for us to identify with them. Dolphins, with their obvious intelligence, sociability and playfulness, generate strong empathic responses in people, even though as marine animals they're quite different from us.
Insiders don't pose "just as great" a risk, they're by far the bigger risk.
Nearly any attack vector usable by an outsider is also usable by an insider, but the converse is not true. This means that insiders are the primary risk to consider, in fact insiders are almost the only risk you need to think about. "Almost" because attack vectors aren't the only consideration, you also have to look at motivations and capabilities, and it may be that external attackers have motivations or capabilities that insiders do not. In most contexts, though, if you can protect against insiders, addressing the remaining external risks will be trivial.
My day job is about securing a substantial database of very sensitive information, in a commercial context that has highly capable insiders. Insiders are, to a first approximation, the only attackers I think about. This sometimes annoys people who really want to say "But I can be trusted!" (but mostly are smart enough not to actually say it).
In my previous job, I was a security consultant, working with many fortune 500 firms, and the same viewpoint was the right perspective nearly all of the time there as well. Of course, most clients didn't want to hear that, because protecting against insider threats is generally hard, tedious and unsexy.
One doesn't accidentally store such an amount of data for such an amount of time.
Umm, Google kept the data because they recognized that the logging was going to provoke regulatory investigations, and deleting it could be construed as destruction of evidence.
Google, with its reputation for pulling the plug on projects for no obvious reason
That reputation is a product of/. groupthink, not reality. The reality is that Google has a history of pulling the plug on projects that aren't successful, niche products used only by a tiny percentage of the user base.
Chrome, however, is wildly successful. Plus, the code is all open source and has an active developer community outside of Google. Google isn't going to drop Chrome, and even if Google did, Chromium wouldn't be going away any time soon.
It really doesn't answer the question of what happens when Google proper loses interest and pulls funding.
Google's purpose in creating Dart was so that Google could use it to build its own apps. So if Dart is better than Javascript for that purpose (it is), and if Dart can get enough penetration into the browser market that Google can actually use it for its own services (debatable), then Google will continue supporting it.
So, rather than asking what Google is going to do, you're better off asking what Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla are going to do.
That's irrelevant. It was never a significant revenue source.
Broadcast radio was never a moneymaker for artists or labels, in fact labels often paid large amounts of money under the table to radio stations in order to get them to play their artists' music (and, of course, recouped those payments from artists' royalties). The government stepped into stop this activity, though they never really succeeded. Yes, radio stations paid a nominal royalty fee for the right to broadcast, but it was a token at best.
Why did labels/artists pay for airplay? Because airplay translated into exposure, and exposure translated into album sales. They effectively paid radio stations to advertise their music, and then made money on record/cassette/CD sales. This was particularly effective because the album only had to have one or two songs which achieved popularity, and listeners bought the whole album for those songs (hoping the rest was good).
Now, the new version of broadcast radio doesn't advertise music and generate purchases, so much as it eliminates the need for customers to buy albums (or even individual songs) at all. This is an entirely different market structure, and the fact that broadcast radio "worked" means absolutely nothing about whether or not streaming will work.
Personally, I think it will work out. If artists are making too little to live, they'll start agitating for more royalties, or maybe even just signing deals directly with the streaming services rather than going through labels -- which will motivate the labels to structure their deals with artists more attractively. As long as there is a good revenue stream to be divided, the industry will eventually restructure to divide that revenue stream more or less reasonably so that artists can produce music to motivate more revenue. The transition will be painful, and some artists will get screwed (a few labels may even get screwed -- but not nearly as hard as the artists), but it'll shake out.
Really, the bottom line is that people like music and are willing to spend their money for it. Artists like to make music and would like to take the listeners' money. Some system (likely just as imperfect as every other iteration of the system, but one that is Good Enough) will be collaboratively devised and implemented to connect those two bodies, with some number of middlemen siphoning off their take in exchange for various non-obvious but necessary services.
Slashdot Mirror
If you accept that argument, then all economic activity falls under the umbrella of national security, and the Constitution goes out the window.
Only if you accept that it's okay to toss the Constitution out the window any time "national security" is invoked. Granted that that is the position of the current (and last several) administrations, but that doesn't mean it's true.
However, I think it clearly is true that all economic activity of sufficient scope and scale is relevant to national security. And, actually, I think the NSA even has a legitimate role in assuring the security of large-scale US economic activities.
I once worked on a project with serious implications to the security of a major piece of the US payments infrastructure, and the NSA provided oversight for the project, reviewing all designs, double-checking the implementation and generally providing a lot of really high-quality advice on how to make sure it was properly secured. It was really helpful, and I greatly appreciated their assistance. Unfortunately, the NSA has apparently decided in the last few years to ignore that part of their mission -- increasing US infrastructure security -- in favor of being able to spy on everything, and so switched to trying to pre-compromise all of our most important security tools.
I don't care too much one way or the other about the NSA spying on foreign corporations to help their US-based competitors, mostly because I assume that everyone does it so telling the NSA not to would just tilt the playing field against US companies. But it really pisses me off that the NSA appears to be actively working against the security of US companies.
You don't really understand the English language. The OP inferred it, ergo it was implied (intentionally, or not)
I think I have a pretty solid handle on the English language.
"hey!" wrote "The book is much less clear on exactly how Frankenstein constructs his monster, but it implies alchemy or other discredited pseudoscience is involved", emphasis mine.
"SuricouRaven" wrote "It doesn't really imply that", and then went on to explain that Frankenstein abandoned the pseudoscience and employed medical science to create his monster.
Please try to read the posts you're responding to before calling people stupid.
I thought Google Reader was very well used?
No, it wasn't. Google Reader pretty much owned the space it was in, but it was a small space. Not hundreds of millions.
This is a more correct translation.
More correct, but not correct. I'll take a shot at a correct explanation.
There are several things that can keep an unprofitable product alive at Google. One is employee interest. Google's culture is quite bottom-up, and if a group of people are willing to invest time -- and, along with it, a portion of their bonus/promotion prospects -- then the company is reluctant to kill it. Another is user impact. If a product has broad and/or rapidly-growing usage, and users use it very regularly, then Google will almost certainly keep it going. In both cases, the theory is similar: If there are enough people sufficiently interested, then the product probably has a path to profitability, perhaps on its own or perhaps in conjunction with other products. Products that are profitable, with good margins and good growth prospects are quite safe, unless some other product's strategy is harmed by them. Paid products, especially those with long-term contracts, are extremely safe. If you're paying Google money for the service you're using, it's not going away, though the pricing may change if it's not profitable.
Google's reputation for being willing to kill products is a direct and inevitable result of Google's willingness to try things that may not work out. You can't have the latter without the former, because most new ideas won't work. Wave didn't work because no one used it. Reader didn't work because there was no path to profit.
Users should probably treat speculative new Google products the same way they'd treat products from a startup... cautiously until the product looks like it really has legs, either in the form of serious resource commitment from Google, or in the form of clear profitability. Once a product is well-established (say, hundreds of millions of users) and/or making money, then they can be sure it'll stick around.
The primary purpose of a phone is to make phone calls.
Really? I use my phone dozens of times per day. I make or receive telephone calls on it perhaps twice per week.
Translation : " We will kill off any money-losing product that our employees get too bored to maintain"
FTFY
So, don't have any. Got it.
Link?
The total 2.7 million split into pocket change to the hundreds that will find some exploit
$150K is pocket change to you? From the contest rules:
7. REWARDS: Rewards for eligible Exploits will be allocated to eligible entrants on a first-come-first-served basis, based on time of submission during the Program Period specified above, until such time as the total reward pool of $2.71828 million USD is exhausted:
An entrant submitting an Exploit demonstrating a Chrome OS system-level compromise delivered via a web page and triggerable when browsing in Guest mode and affecting all subsequent Guest mode sessions across reboots (“persistent Guest-to-Guest exploit”) using bugs in Chrome OS, as determined in the sole discretion of the Judges, will receive a reward of $150,000 USD (one hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars).
An entrant submitting an Exploit demonstrating a Chrome browser-level compromise delivered via a web page using bugs in Chrome OS as determined in the sole discretion of the Judges, will receive a reward of $110,000 USD (one hundred and ten thousand U.S. dollars).
Google reserves the right to issue partial rewards, in its sole discretion, for partial, incomplete or unreliable Exploits. Google may also consider issuing significant bonuses for any Entrant who demonstrates a particularly impressive or surprising exploit.
So system-level compromises with $150K. Browser-level compromises win $110K. On top of that, particularly impressive or surprising exploits may get additional money.
Maybe that's pocket change to you, but I doubt it is to the average security researcher, regardless of the color of his hat.
An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in
Which is the whole point of Google fiber. Google fiber is more than a stunt, it's a real, profit-generating business, but the purpose of the project is exactly to create competition, making truly high-speed Internet widely available.
Yeah, I've wondered about that choice. I think the search page is to help the less-clued, but the choice of focus favors the power user, who prefers to use the location bar where he or she can type either a url or search terms.
Why exactly do you need to use google search to look for gmail when you're already logged in? Hundreds of people are doing that per hour, wtf? Hello? Address bar?
Vast numbers of people search google for "google".
From their perspective, they want to search for something so they type "google" into their web browser and it takes them to google.com where they can do their search, never realizing that they could have skipped the first step and just typed their search query in the same place they typed "google".
I've heard a rumor (no idea if it's real) that at one point the Chrome team tried popping up a tooltip explaining to people who typed "google" into the location bar that they can just search from the location bar, but focus group testing showed that (a) it annoyed people and (b) most of them continued typing "google" into the location bar anyway.
Now, of course, Chrome gives you a page that looks like a Google search page by default whenever you create a new tab. I have no idea if this has gotten people to just type their search query there, rather than typing "google" first.
But even if it has gotten them to stop searching for "google", I'm sure many of them type "gmail" into that faux search page.
Cool. I'd love to see more of this. And I think Google would still count this as a win, given the pricing changes and the fact that they led to wider adoption.
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
Was the rollout spurred on by the news of Google Fiber? If so, then Google will call that a win for them.
Note that "gold" also has a finite amount available that gets progressively harder/more expensive to mine.
Gold can be manufactured.
We are the stronger species, we win. Empathy is evolutionarily expensive.
I'd say that empathy is so evolutionarily valuable that it's the fundamental reason we are the stronger species.
It seems very likely that we evolved the capacity for empathy because people who have it are more effective at understanding the points of view of others, which is a pre-requisite to the more effective forms of cooperation. It's clearly our ability to cooperate which makes us the dominant species on the planet because as individuals we're pretty weak and ineffectual compared to other megafauna.
Of course, it's only really empathy for others who are likely to be willing to cooperate with us that is evolutionarily useful. This extends beyond our own species, though, and encompasses animals whose companionship or service we value (think dogs, horses). You'll get better service from a horse that you treat well, and you're more likely to treat it well if you can empathize with it. But our brains don't distinguish degrees of utility that finely, so many animals get empathy from us, largely in correlation to how easy it is for us to identify with them. Dolphins, with their obvious intelligence, sociability and playfulness, generate strong empathic responses in people, even though as marine animals they're quite different from us.
Even better, where the person asking the question knows several partial answers, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Drivers older than 25 do get reduced insurance rates.
Insiders don't pose "just as great" a risk, they're by far the bigger risk.
Nearly any attack vector usable by an outsider is also usable by an insider, but the converse is not true. This means that insiders are the primary risk to consider, in fact insiders are almost the only risk you need to think about. "Almost" because attack vectors aren't the only consideration, you also have to look at motivations and capabilities, and it may be that external attackers have motivations or capabilities that insiders do not. In most contexts, though, if you can protect against insiders, addressing the remaining external risks will be trivial.
My day job is about securing a substantial database of very sensitive information, in a commercial context that has highly capable insiders. Insiders are, to a first approximation, the only attackers I think about. This sometimes annoys people who really want to say "But I can be trusted!" (but mostly are smart enough not to actually say it).
In my previous job, I was a security consultant, working with many fortune 500 firms, and the same viewpoint was the right perspective nearly all of the time there as well. Of course, most clients didn't want to hear that, because protecting against insider threats is generally hard, tedious and unsexy.
One doesn't accidentally store such an amount of data for such an amount of time.
Umm, Google kept the data because they recognized that the logging was going to provoke regulatory investigations, and deleting it could be construed as destruction of evidence.
Google, with its reputation for pulling the plug on projects for no obvious reason
That reputation is a product of /. groupthink, not reality. The reality is that Google has a history of pulling the plug on projects that aren't successful, niche products used only by a tiny percentage of the user base.
Chrome, however, is wildly successful. Plus, the code is all open source and has an active developer community outside of Google. Google isn't going to drop Chrome, and even if Google did, Chromium wouldn't be going away any time soon.
I think I'll patent device shapes that can be represented as an arbitrary number of small polygons.
How is that different from what Impy said, except in the (often erroneous) assumption that paying enough lawyers enough money guarantees a win?
It really doesn't answer the question of what happens when Google proper loses interest and pulls funding.
Google's purpose in creating Dart was so that Google could use it to build its own apps. So if Dart is better than Javascript for that purpose (it is), and if Dart can get enough penetration into the browser market that Google can actually use it for its own services (debatable), then Google will continue supporting it.
So, rather than asking what Google is going to do, you're better off asking what Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla are going to do.
It was called broadcast radio.
That's irrelevant. It was never a significant revenue source.
Broadcast radio was never a moneymaker for artists or labels, in fact labels often paid large amounts of money under the table to radio stations in order to get them to play their artists' music (and, of course, recouped those payments from artists' royalties). The government stepped into stop this activity, though they never really succeeded. Yes, radio stations paid a nominal royalty fee for the right to broadcast, but it was a token at best.
Why did labels/artists pay for airplay? Because airplay translated into exposure, and exposure translated into album sales. They effectively paid radio stations to advertise their music, and then made money on record/cassette/CD sales. This was particularly effective because the album only had to have one or two songs which achieved popularity, and listeners bought the whole album for those songs (hoping the rest was good).
Now, the new version of broadcast radio doesn't advertise music and generate purchases, so much as it eliminates the need for customers to buy albums (or even individual songs) at all. This is an entirely different market structure, and the fact that broadcast radio "worked" means absolutely nothing about whether or not streaming will work.
Personally, I think it will work out. If artists are making too little to live, they'll start agitating for more royalties, or maybe even just signing deals directly with the streaming services rather than going through labels -- which will motivate the labels to structure their deals with artists more attractively. As long as there is a good revenue stream to be divided, the industry will eventually restructure to divide that revenue stream more or less reasonably so that artists can produce music to motivate more revenue. The transition will be painful, and some artists will get screwed (a few labels may even get screwed -- but not nearly as hard as the artists), but it'll shake out.
Really, the bottom line is that people like music and are willing to spend their money for it. Artists like to make music and would like to take the listeners' money. Some system (likely just as imperfect as every other iteration of the system, but one that is Good Enough) will be collaboratively devised and implemented to connect those two bodies, with some number of middlemen siphoning off their take in exchange for various non-obvious but necessary services.