I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
I feel funny defending the NSA, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't spy on US citizens. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
Absent evidence to the contrary -- which we now possess -- I would agree. The thing about large-scale deceptions is that they tend to get outed. That applies both to government and private industry.
Lesson Learned - if you're going to report a crime involving State secrets, you should probably use more discretion.
Preferably, enough discretion that the State can quietly quash your report. If the government isn't actually embarrassed by it, they'll be less motivated to go after you. Though they may have to take steps to ensure that your discretion is permanent.
Actually a pardon is not law enforcement. It is specifically an executive order outside and above the law made for just such an occasion. Snowden must be convicted first, then the President can pardon him. The pardon does not stop anything. It simply supersedes it after the fact.
Not true. Most famously, Ford pardoned Nixon before he'd even been charged, and made it a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he might have committed while in office. Similarly, Carter granted a blanket amnesty to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers, which was effectively a pre-emptive pardon on a large scale.
The issue has even come before the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson pardoned A. H. Garland in 1865, before he'd been charged with anything, and the Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment."
How can you pardon someone who hasn't been convicted?
It's been done, several times. Most famously, Ford pardoned Nixon before he'd even been charged, and made it a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he might have committed while in office. Similarly, Carter granted a blanket amnesty to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers, which was effectively a pre-emptive pardon on a large scale.
The issue has even come before the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson pardoned A. H. Garland in 1865, before he'd been charged with anything, and the Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment."
It wasn't a turnaround. He voted for warrantless wiretaps before becoming president. It's just the usual dichotomy between campaign promises and real intentions.
That's a reasonable analysis. I don't agree with your perspective on Romney -- though I also don't think he'd have dismantled any of these programs, I consider him the lesser evil. I really wanted to vote for Gary Johnson, since Ron Paul wasn't an option, but I live in a swing state and wanted to get Obama out of office, so I voted for Romney (Obama got my state's votes anyway).
There is no will in either of the major parties to change course in this area; we need to elect a radical. Of course that will never happen, so we keep plodding along the path to fascism/communism (they're difficult to distinguish from the ground).
I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
It is relevant because the kind of testing seems to be pretty similar.
Actually, it's not. Unfortunately I can't really explain why. I don't think there would be any harm in it -- might even be some good in it, actually -- and people would definitely find it interesting, but confidential is confidential.
Suffice it to say that Google attempts to maximize the ability of users to distinguish ads from organic results. I can probably say that much.
I'm sure everyone who reads this is going to think "that's such a lame and content-free post, why did he even bother?". Sorry.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but they don't speak for me and I don't speak for them.)
Except you do a heck of a lot of Google defending on Slashdot, so, go fuck yourself. Fuck Google and anyone who works for such a privacy invasive parasite.
Hey man, it's been a while. I kinda missed you. I hope you've been well.
From our perspective, Android gets a new, usable feature once every three to four years
Nonsense. Most of the new Android features are backported, and even if what you said was true, it's a pile of new, usable features every couple of years... just features that were first released 3-4 years earlier.
Guess what that means for users.
It means that apps get a little larger because they have to incorporate the libraries necessary for the backported features, and it means that some of the new features don't arrive until they buy a new phone -- but since Android has been out-innovating iOS for a while now, their available feature set isn't far behind. Not to mention the fact that even the latest generation of iOS restricts app developers from doing many things they can do on Android, so even old Android phones have apps with capabilities that iOS devices don't.
All in all, it's a pretty mixed bag, and one that isn't really that bad for Android owners, on balance. I, personally, find my Android phones far more usable than I did my iPhone.
Regardless, the point is that users continue buying Android, and barring some significant change the trend lines mean that before too long developers will almost universally find it the more profitable platform, which means that iOS users will fall behind in that area as well.
Pretty much everyone who was crowing about Hope and Change. How many was that? I don't know, but too many.
You are implying that a significant number of people who campaign and vote for a candidate believe everything that the candidate says during the campaign.
Nonsense. I neither said nor implied anything of the sort.
Yet not only is he aware of the secret spying programs, he is actively defending them.
If it had happend on the watch of any previous president they would have done the same thing. The game isn't us against the terrorists, it's us against the new aristocracy.
It did happen and they did the same thing. I don't think anyone is disputing that. The point is that Obama claimed to be different... and a bunch of people were dumb enough to actually believe it.
This article is missing the point. It was a dig at Android for hurting developers, not necessarily users.
That was the point of the Apple graphic, sure, but who cares? Developers, sure, but the evidence is that that doesn't matter, because developers will follow the users.
If you project the trends out another year or two -- and I see no reason why that's an unreasonable thing to do -- we're rapidly approaching the point where even if average Android users spend less money on apps, Android is going to so completely dominate the smartphone market that it won't matter. Already some app developers (particular game makers) are seeing Android revenues surpass iOS revenues, and that's just going to increase.
Ultimately, if fragmentation doesn't hurt user adoption, it won't hurt developer adoption.
I actually hope the current trends don't continue; I'd like to see Ubuntu phone or Windows phone, or something, start to gain some share, and for Apple to hold onto its share, because I believe that competition is important.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but they don't speak for me and I don't speak for them.)
I still remember Douglas Bowman's blog post about why he left Google.
You mean this one? While I suppose the data-driven mindset of Google does have its problems (as well as its advantages), I don't really see the relevance to the GP's claim of evilness in choosing a subtler background color for ads.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on or have any particular affiliation with AppEngine other than being a very satisfied user for some of my personal projects.)
Depending on the software you're using, AppEngine may or may not work for you, but if it does it's highly reliable, arbitrarily scalable and quite easy to work with. At the volumes you're talking about it's not free, but it's also not too expensive; perhaps less than what you're paying now.
I guess electric vehicles are only cheaper to operate if you build some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity.
The electricity cost of that full battery is negligible. At 12 cents per kWh, an 85 kWh battery costs $10.20 to fill. Also, I believe Tesla's plan is to power all of their superchargers with solar power, so presumably they'd use the same source for filling the battery packs for swapping. Hmm... to make the supercharger stations work they have to have large batteries on-site to accumulate the current from the solar canopy. I wonder if perhaps they're using car battery packs for that storage and are just looking at delivering that stored energy in a different way.
+1 for building some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity, though:-)
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public
I don't think that's enough.
It was fine in the past because it simply wasn't feasible for government to surveil everyone all of the time. It was too costly. As technology reduces the cost, we may get to a point where it is perfectly feasible for everyone to be watched all of the time except when they're in their homes with blinds drawn -- and given enough data collected on your movements and actions in public, they can probably deduce most of what you do at home as well.
I think we're eventually going to have to either start imposing limits on data collected in public, or else just give up on the idea of privacy. I know which approach I prefer.
"We're closing this down in 6 months" is barely enough time to plan a migration, much less actually PERFORM the migration. And that's the point: if Google wants BUSINESSES to trust that Google isn't going to pull the rug out from under them, then Google needs to start taking migrations and end-of-life's seriously.
In the OLD days (e.g. up through the early 1990s), MOST successful tech companies had research labs doing far out things. AT&T, Xerox, DEC, IBM... I think the fact that today, few companies have such a research arm, is the real problem.
I think Google takes this concept a bit further, than those companies did, though, investing a far larger percentage of revenues into R&D, and even encouraging engineers whose day job isn't R&D to spend part of their time building new things.
Because Google itself doesn't have to use Google Docs. That's why. It's for *users*.
Google makes very heavy use of Google Docs. It's the format for internal documentation, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. I've been at Google for over two years and never seen anything done in LibreOffice, much less MS Office.
I am not sure I can fit the driveless car anywhere in the picture, but probably they don't want you to go offline during commute, they want you to be able to see their ads, especially since you will be near stores that do the advertising.
Actually, I think the driverless cars are just really cool, world-changing tech that Sergey really wanted to work on. Google is a company of geeks, and while fitting everything into an overarching business strategy is a good idea, sometimes stuff is done just because it's awesome and no one else is doing it.
I love how all these companies who had no qualms about collecting our personal data and slinging it to anyone with a paycheck have all of a sudden become Constitutional warriors.
Google does not sell user data, except in the form of aggregated, anonymized statistics. Google's major profits are made by using user data internally to target ads, but without giving user data to advertisers. It all stays in-house -- and Google is very careful about keeping it secure against intrusions, leaks and even access by employees.
This is why the government request stories are so damaging to Google.
Google's "deal" with its users is that Google collects and uses information from searches, e-mails, etc., in order to figure out what ads to show the users. The users get high-quality free services, including "better" ads -- hardly anyone likes ads, but most everyone would prefer that if they have to see ads that the ads be for products which interest them. Advertisers get cost-effective advertising, since they only pay when someone actually clicks their ad, which means they only pay for good leads. Google, of course, gets money from the advertisers. The more information Google has about users, the better it can target the ads, which means the more ads are clicked.
As long as Google does a good job of ensuring that user data is only used in that way, most people consider it to be a reasonable trade. That trade depends on Google doing a good job of keeping user data tightly controlled, and I think most people have the perception that Google can and does do a good job of keeping their private data private. But if some external entity has carte blanche to rummage through the data at will, then the balance of value changes, because the risk to users is greater.
We grant government permission to do that sort of rummaging for good reasons, but generally don't give carte blanche. Government should only be able to request specific information about specific individuals when it has proven to a skeptical magistrate that it has good reason. That's the theory. But the telcos have, apparently, been giving free rein to federal agencies, and now we have this allegation that Google does, too. Or that government has been legally compelling Google to provide open access, which amounts to the same thing.
Google wants to be able to prove that it has not been providing open access, but government gag orders prevent that. This means that those government gag orders are materially damaging Google's business, because it doesn't matter how good Google is at safeguarding the user data it possesses, if everyone figures that government agencies have wide-open backdoors.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't, however, speak for Google and they don't speak for me.)
Slashdot Mirror
I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
I feel funny defending the NSA, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't spy on US citizens. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
Absent evidence to the contrary -- which we now possess -- I would agree. The thing about large-scale deceptions is that they tend to get outed. That applies both to government and private industry.
Lesson Learned - if you're going to report a crime involving State secrets, you should probably use more discretion.
Preferably, enough discretion that the State can quietly quash your report. If the government isn't actually embarrassed by it, they'll be less motivated to go after you. Though they may have to take steps to ensure that your discretion is permanent.
Actually a pardon is not law enforcement. It is specifically an executive order outside and above the law made for just such an occasion. Snowden must be convicted first, then the President can pardon him. The pardon does not stop anything. It simply supersedes it after the fact.
Not true. Most famously, Ford pardoned Nixon before he'd even been charged, and made it a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he might have committed while in office. Similarly, Carter granted a blanket amnesty to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers, which was effectively a pre-emptive pardon on a large scale.
The issue has even come before the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson pardoned A. H. Garland in 1865, before he'd been charged with anything, and the Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment."
How can you pardon someone who hasn't been convicted?
It's been done, several times. Most famously, Ford pardoned Nixon before he'd even been charged, and made it a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he might have committed while in office. Similarly, Carter granted a blanket amnesty to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers, which was effectively a pre-emptive pardon on a large scale.
The issue has even come before the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson pardoned A. H. Garland in 1865, before he'd been charged with anything, and the Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Garland that the pardon power "extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment."
It wasn't a turnaround. He voted for warrantless wiretaps before becoming president. It's just the usual dichotomy between campaign promises and real intentions.
That's a reasonable analysis. I don't agree with your perspective on Romney -- though I also don't think he'd have dismantled any of these programs, I consider him the lesser evil. I really wanted to vote for Gary Johnson, since Ron Paul wasn't an option, but I live in a swing state and wanted to get Obama out of office, so I voted for Romney (Obama got my state's votes anyway).
There is no will in either of the major parties to change course in this area; we need to elect a radical. Of course that will never happen, so we keep plodding along the path to fascism/communism (they're difficult to distinguish from the ground).
I'm from Ireland, so it's actually OK for the NSA to spy on me and my communications.
And it's also fine for the NSA to share what they discover with GCHQ, right?
I feel funny defending Facebook, but unless they're blatantly violating their own published privacy policy, they don't sell personally-identifiable information to others. While it's possible they're intentionally violating their policy, I think that's unlikely.
It is relevant because the kind of testing seems to be pretty similar.
Actually, it's not. Unfortunately I can't really explain why. I don't think there would be any harm in it -- might even be some good in it, actually -- and people would definitely find it interesting, but confidential is confidential.
Suffice it to say that Google attempts to maximize the ability of users to distinguish ads from organic results. I can probably say that much.
I'm sure everyone who reads this is going to think "that's such a lame and content-free post, why did he even bother?". Sorry.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but they don't speak for me and I don't speak for them.)
Except you do a heck of a lot of Google defending on Slashdot, so, go fuck yourself. Fuck Google and anyone who works for such a privacy invasive parasite.
Hey man, it's been a while. I kinda missed you. I hope you've been well.
From our perspective, Android gets a new, usable feature once every three to four years
Nonsense. Most of the new Android features are backported, and even if what you said was true, it's a pile of new, usable features every couple of years... just features that were first released 3-4 years earlier.
Guess what that means for users.
It means that apps get a little larger because they have to incorporate the libraries necessary for the backported features, and it means that some of the new features don't arrive until they buy a new phone -- but since Android has been out-innovating iOS for a while now, their available feature set isn't far behind. Not to mention the fact that even the latest generation of iOS restricts app developers from doing many things they can do on Android, so even old Android phones have apps with capabilities that iOS devices don't.
All in all, it's a pretty mixed bag, and one that isn't really that bad for Android owners, on balance. I, personally, find my Android phones far more usable than I did my iPhone.
Regardless, the point is that users continue buying Android, and barring some significant change the trend lines mean that before too long developers will almost universally find it the more profitable platform, which means that iOS users will fall behind in that area as well.
How many people is a "bunch"?
Pretty much everyone who was crowing about Hope and Change. How many was that? I don't know, but too many.
You are implying that a significant number of people who campaign and vote for a candidate believe everything that the candidate says during the campaign.
Nonsense. I neither said nor implied anything of the sort.
I have no doubts that some app developers are doing better on Android than on iOS, but overall the numbers still favor Apple.
And a year from now? Or two?
Yet not only is he aware of the secret spying programs, he is actively defending them.
If it had happend on the watch of any previous president they would have done the same thing. The game isn't us against the terrorists, it's us against the new aristocracy.
It did happen and they did the same thing. I don't think anyone is disputing that. The point is that Obama claimed to be different... and a bunch of people were dumb enough to actually believe it.
This article is missing the point. It was a dig at Android for hurting developers, not necessarily users.
That was the point of the Apple graphic, sure, but who cares? Developers, sure, but the evidence is that that doesn't matter, because developers will follow the users.
If you project the trends out another year or two -- and I see no reason why that's an unreasonable thing to do -- we're rapidly approaching the point where even if average Android users spend less money on apps, Android is going to so completely dominate the smartphone market that it won't matter. Already some app developers (particular game makers) are seeing Android revenues surpass iOS revenues, and that's just going to increase.
Ultimately, if fragmentation doesn't hurt user adoption, it won't hurt developer adoption.
I actually hope the current trends don't continue; I'd like to see Ubuntu phone or Windows phone, or something, start to gain some share, and for Apple to hold onto its share, because I believe that competition is important.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but they don't speak for me and I don't speak for them.)
Code to record packet data was _intentionally_ added by a Google engineer
Cite?
I still remember Douglas Bowman's blog post about why he left Google.
You mean this one? While I suppose the data-driven mindset of Google does have its problems (as well as its advantages), I don't really see the relevance to the GP's claim of evilness in choosing a subtler background color for ads.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but I don't work on or have any particular affiliation with AppEngine other than being a very satisfied user for some of my personal projects.)
Depending on the software you're using, AppEngine may or may not work for you, but if it does it's highly reliable, arbitrarily scalable and quite easy to work with. At the volumes you're talking about it's not free, but it's also not too expensive; perhaps less than what you're paying now.
I guess electric vehicles are only cheaper to operate if you build some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity.
The electricity cost of that full battery is negligible. At 12 cents per kWh, an 85 kWh battery costs $10.20 to fill. Also, I believe Tesla's plan is to power all of their superchargers with solar power, so presumably they'd use the same source for filling the battery packs for swapping. Hmm... to make the supercharger stations work they have to have large batteries on-site to accumulate the current from the solar canopy. I wonder if perhaps they're using car battery packs for that storage and are just looking at delivering that stored energy in a different way.
+1 for building some more nuclear plants to make cheaper electricity, though :-)
On the other hand, no warrant, no privacy-violating surveillance. They can still watch/listen to you when you are in public
I don't think that's enough.
It was fine in the past because it simply wasn't feasible for government to surveil everyone all of the time. It was too costly. As technology reduces the cost, we may get to a point where it is perfectly feasible for everyone to be watched all of the time except when they're in their homes with blinds drawn -- and given enough data collected on your movements and actions in public, they can probably deduce most of what you do at home as well.
I think we're eventually going to have to either start imposing limits on data collected in public, or else just give up on the idea of privacy. I know which approach I prefer.
"We're closing this down in 6 months" is barely enough time to plan a migration, much less actually PERFORM the migration. And that's the point: if Google wants BUSINESSES to trust that Google isn't going to pull the rug out from under them, then Google needs to start taking migrations and end-of-life's seriously.
What paid products has Google shut down?
In the OLD days (e.g. up through the early 1990s), MOST successful tech companies had research labs doing far out things. AT&T, Xerox, DEC, IBM... I think the fact that today, few companies have such a research arm, is the real problem.
I think Google takes this concept a bit further, than those companies did, though, investing a far larger percentage of revenues into R&D, and even encouraging engineers whose day job isn't R&D to spend part of their time building new things.
Because Google itself doesn't have to use Google Docs. That's why. It's for *users*.
Google makes very heavy use of Google Docs. It's the format for internal documentation, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. I've been at Google for over two years and never seen anything done in LibreOffice, much less MS Office.
I am not sure I can fit the driveless car anywhere in the picture, but probably they don't want you to go offline during commute, they want you to be able to see their ads, especially since you will be near stores that do the advertising.
Actually, I think the driverless cars are just really cool, world-changing tech that Sergey really wanted to work on. Google is a company of geeks, and while fitting everything into an overarching business strategy is a good idea, sometimes stuff is done just because it's awesome and no one else is doing it.
I love how all these companies who had no qualms about collecting our personal data and slinging it to anyone with a paycheck have all of a sudden become Constitutional warriors.
Google does not sell user data, except in the form of aggregated, anonymized statistics. Google's major profits are made by using user data internally to target ads, but without giving user data to advertisers. It all stays in-house -- and Google is very careful about keeping it secure against intrusions, leaks and even access by employees.
This is why the government request stories are so damaging to Google.
Google's "deal" with its users is that Google collects and uses information from searches, e-mails, etc., in order to figure out what ads to show the users. The users get high-quality free services, including "better" ads -- hardly anyone likes ads, but most everyone would prefer that if they have to see ads that the ads be for products which interest them. Advertisers get cost-effective advertising, since they only pay when someone actually clicks their ad, which means they only pay for good leads. Google, of course, gets money from the advertisers. The more information Google has about users, the better it can target the ads, which means the more ads are clicked.
As long as Google does a good job of ensuring that user data is only used in that way, most people consider it to be a reasonable trade. That trade depends on Google doing a good job of keeping user data tightly controlled, and I think most people have the perception that Google can and does do a good job of keeping their private data private. But if some external entity has carte blanche to rummage through the data at will, then the balance of value changes, because the risk to users is greater.
We grant government permission to do that sort of rummaging for good reasons, but generally don't give carte blanche. Government should only be able to request specific information about specific individuals when it has proven to a skeptical magistrate that it has good reason. That's the theory. But the telcos have, apparently, been giving free rein to federal agencies, and now we have this allegation that Google does, too. Or that government has been legally compelling Google to provide open access, which amounts to the same thing.
Google wants to be able to prove that it has not been providing open access, but government gag orders prevent that. This means that those government gag orders are materially damaging Google's business, because it doesn't matter how good Google is at safeguarding the user data it possesses, if everyone figures that government agencies have wide-open backdoors.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't, however, speak for Google and they don't speak for me.)