Sure. Whatever. Like the $500k check showed up and just a few weeks later the EFF announced a big increase in their effort to stop SOPA? I'm sure the Google folks went back in time with a time machine.
Do you know anything about the EFF? Fighting SOPA was always consistent with their mission and goals. It's certainly possible that Google's money increased their ability to fight it, but fighting it would have been in their agenda regardless.
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
Yeah, Baen never did DRM. Jim Baen felt it was unnecessary, counterproductive and an insult to customers -- and he's been proven right on every count. A visionary man in many respects.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
Ah, very interesting. Does this mean new purchases of old titles will be DRM free?
I'm not up to date with my publishers, but that sounds a lot like what TOR is doing. The store was scheduled to launch in April, and it's now launching sometime in Summer 2012 (hopefully it hasn't been mothballed). I still have old PDFs of Sanderson's works from when they were emailing them to anybody who would sign up for a newsletter.
We'll see... Tor has been talking about Baen's model for many years now. Several years ago they actually started down the path of providing their books through Baen's site, and put a handful of books for sale. Then they stopped and started several times. I'd love to see it happen, because the combination of Tor and Baen would cover 95% of my fiction needs.
On the pricing, if you like the sort of books they sell, you should check out baenebooks.com. Baen is a regular publisher of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a military bent, which has for over a decade sold all of their books in electronic as well as print form. Single e-books are normally $4-6, with no sales tax or shipping (obviously). They also have a monthly bundle for $18 which includes six full novels, 1-2 of them new releases (usually available a few weeks before the books show up in stores) and the remainder older titles. $3 per book is a great price. It's often even better than that, because Baen tends to republish a lot of their older popular series in "omnibus" editions, so a single title of a bundle may actually contain a full trilogy. I've purchased bundles that contained 11-12 novels.
Also, Baen provides all of the major electronic formats, with no DRM, and encourages sharing your books with friends and families where "sharing" means "giving them copies". Baen also keeps all of your purchases on file so you can easily re-download books as needed.
Finally, Baen also provides an extensive free library so you can try out many of their authors and series at no cost, doesn't object to people sharing on-line copies of the CDs they put in the backs of some of their hardcovers (containing dozens of novels each, plus high-quality copies of cover art and other goodies), and provides free access to the first few chapters of all of their books, so you can try any book before buying.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Baen, other than having spent more money than I like to think about buying their books. My Baen library runs to nearly 500 titles.)
Well, I think the potential negative impact definitely has to be taken into consideration. What will the companies in question do with the data that could cause harm to me?
As the summary meantions: Sell it?
That would depend on who they sell it to. And if they would sell it at all. Google, for example, doesn't. But in general, companies would sell information to other companies, for whom the same arguments would apply. This isn't "magic", it's just self-interest.
This data is not 'creepy' when company's are using this data privately for profit, however when it's expressed publicly in a not-for-profit way it's a privacy concern.
God bless America.
Well, I think the potential negative impact definitely has to be taken into consideration. What will the companies in question do with the data that could cause harm to me? What could individuals do with the data that could harm me? In this case, it's conceivable that someone with a deep hatred for Democrats could decide to do me physical harm. More likely, perhaps I live in a heavily Republican area and my personal or business relationships could be damaged if it were known that I were registered as a Democrat.
In the case of companies, there are some possible cases that would cause me significant harm, such as my medical insurance company finding out about a health condition which might cause them to raise my premiums, but in general most companies wouldn't have any interest in harming me. At most they want to try to manipulate me into buying some product or service.
So, yes, I think it is creepier for the general public to know something about me than for companies to know something about me, mainly because companies tend to act in predictable and restrained ways. So, of course, do the vast majority of the public... but there are exceptions, some of them very extreme indeed.
No, I was talking about people's names being flagged and validated and flagged again repeatedly. That did happen.
Ah, okay. Perhaps that was part of the motivation for the implementation of the "verified by Google" flag. It would seem to me that once you've got that check mark on your account that future reports that your account is fraudulent somehow would be ignored.
There were a shitload of these last year, I don't have a handy collection of URLs to hand, but lotsa people with odd names got put through multiple jeopardy. Perhaps G+ has its shit back together now.
No, there weren't. There were a lot of people who got their Google+ accounts shut down, but the only one I saw where the guy got his full Google account (including Gmail) shut down turned out to be because of kiddie porn.
If you're talking about automatic upgrades, so do the other browsers. If you're talking about something else, what? I'm curious.
watches and records my every move and reports its finding back to the mother ship
Only if you turn that on. I don't recall whether "instant" is on by default, but go to settings and there's a checkbox right next to the dropdown that lets you pick which search engine to use. Uncheck that and it doesn't send keystrokes to Google. If you want more detailed control, click on "Advanced" and look under the Privacy section. In 20 seconds you can make sure your copy of Chrome doesn't send anything to Google unless you ask it to.
Once you'd proved your pseudonym's status (or not), then your account wouldn't be at risk of that again.
See, you might think that, but it turns out that's not the case.
Cite? If you've gone through this process and proved that your pseudonym is valid, as I understand it you get the "verified by Google" flag. Once that's on, it's on. If you have evidence that's not the case, I'd be interested to see it.
Few friends bloggers some time ago have tested it: how easy it is to get blocked from G+. One guy simply "reported" (whatever that meant in the context) another for a made up violation. Within pretty short time second guy's account got completely disabled, barring him from all Google services, not only the G+.
I don't buy it.
Well, that's a pretty good description of the problem - lack of certainty.
That's the assumption of the problem, anyway, but without any evidence showing that Google really would act against its own interests in this way. Normally, innocence is assumed until guilt is proven, not the other way around.
It was demonstrated that it is sufficient for one user to report something as offensive on G+ and the author's account gets disabled.
It was demonstrated? Where, when?
The post or comment doesn't have to contain anything offensive - it just has to be reported by somebody as such - those are bots handling the clicks in the background, disabling accounts pronto.
Cite?
I can't say that I know for certain, but I seriously doubt that accounts are disabled automatically in response to complaints.
Where are the guarantees that I will not lose access to every Google service just because some [censored] for fun clicked a button on me, claiming I have posted something criminal??
If you didn't actually post something criminal, why would Google believe the complaint? It's easy enough for Google to distinguish what came from your account and what did not. Now, there certainly is the risk that someone who got access to your account actually posted something illegal using it... but in that case you've got much bigger concerns than Google locking your account.
"When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed. "
But that explicitly covers *only* the "common name standard" violation!? Or?
What about *other* violations? Because it was already tested in real world that Google disables accounts based on a *single* report of any random violation.
What kind of violation are you talking about? Posting kiddie porn? Yeah, you'll get shut down completely. Same with any other serious criminal act. What other sorts of violations are there? Google's ToS don't include a lot of restrictions.
Horowitz is a VP working on Google+. Here's the relevant excerpt:
MYTH: Not abiding by the Google+ common name policy can lead to wholesale suspension of one’s entire Google account.
When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed. Please help get the word out: if your Google+ Profile is suspended for not using a common name, you won't be able to use Google services that require a Google+ Profile, but you'll still be able to use Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Blogger, and so on. (Of course there are other Google-wide policies (e.g. egregious spamming, illegal activity, etc) that do apply to all Google products, and violations of these policies could in fact lead to a Google-wide suspension.)
This also just makes sense. Since you don't need a Google+ profile to use Gmail, etc., killing your Google+ profile doesn't cut off access to Gmail or other services.
It didn't work in South Korea. Perhaps it won't work on YouTube. Facebook has a higher S/N ratio than most comment threads, though, and Google+ is higher still. We'll see.
Well, that's completely idiotic. So basically all someone has to do is piss someone off, who would then fake-report the person's profile to get them suspended?
That would only work if someone had an apparently-pseudonymous Google+ profile name, and it would only work once. For example, I could probably get your account suspended pending verification, but you couldn't get mine suspended, because I use my real name. Once you'd proved your pseudonym's status (or not), then your account wouldn't be at risk of that again.
Hopefully it takes many multiple reportings to get someone suspended?
That wouldn't make any sense at all. Does multiple reports of a fake identity make it more fake? Would it make any sense to suspend an apparently-real identity because someone was reporting it as a fake?
The one failing of the Google feedback system, IMO, is that it lacks feedback.
Which means they're wasting your time. As a general policy, I never use "feedback" systems that don't generate a response, a public posting, or a ticket number.
While it's clearly less satisfying to the user, I don't see that it's a waste of time if it causes the problem to get fixed. And Google feedback does generate a ticket number, just not one that users see.
Same happens at MS.. upload a file that violates their code of conduct policy to MS sky drive, and your windows 7 phone account will be permanently blocked without telling what file caused it or getting any good response.
Note that that includes files that are not yet shared of, and includes partial nudity
Not just like Google, then, because if Google blocks your Google+ account, only your Google+ account gets blocked, regardless of a bunch of widely-repeated erroneous reporting early on.
Ahh, that would probably explain it. I've been Zorin since 1995 at least.
More likely it's just that no one has reported your account. There are probably some automated filters that look for really obvious fake names, but Zorin is a real name, though typically a surname. "Zorin Lynx" is obviously a pseudonym, but one that isn't likely to be flagged by an automated check. I suspect that if someone reported your account you'd have to send Google some documentation proving it's a well-established and well-known alias (and you might be unsuccessful).
Personally, I can see both sides of this debate. It appears that real name policies actually do improve the S/N ratio significantly, which makes for a better user experience. On the other hand, pseudonymity is important to some people. It will be interesting to see if the real names push on YouTube is successful at cleaning up a large portion of the crapflood which is the typical YouTube comment stream.
BTW, I want to put in a plug for using Google's "Send Feedback" link. Not only is a pretty cool piece of work technically (it basically has to implement a full HTML rendering engine in Javascript in order to dynamically construct the image of the page you're seeing, with your problem areas highlighted), it actually does get a lot of internal attention. Feedback gets classified and similar comments tracked over time, with lots of pretty graphs and charts, and teams scrub their feedback regularly. Things that are bothering lots of people get bug reports generated and added to the internal bug reporting system, and they get prioritized and fixed.
The one failing of the Google feedback system, IMO, is that it lacks feedback. By that I mean that there's no response back to the submitter letting them know what's being done or when the problem is fixed. I think I'm going to submit feedback on feedback, pointing out that feedback needs feedback.
What's the first piece of the address? Every IPv6-capable TCP stack has a link-local fe80 address, but that doesn't mean you can use it for anything. What's more interesting is if they have an address in a usable region of the IPv6 address space.
Hmm, I just checked on my Galaxy Nexus (on Verizon -- 3G at the moment) and it has an address beginning with 2600:100e, which is in an assigned, globally-routable unicast address space. Cool! I notice that I can't ping it, though. Of course it's probably firewalled by default. nmap indicates no listening ports, but again that's probably because of a firewall.
It's a respectable size, of course, and one that requires a intelligent management, but in 2012 it isn't a large codebase.
Linux 3.5 comprises 10,389,941 lines of code (per sloccount), and that's just a kernel + drivers + architecture dependent files. I'm sure Windows is at least 50M LOC, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it tops 100M. I work for Google, and while I'm not sure I can say how much code we have, it's far, far more than 10M lines. I used to do a lot of work with major financial institutions, and I'd estimate that most of them have on the order of 100M LOC.
I'm sure Intuit does some useful things that would be interesting to learn about, but I don't think I'd consider them a case study in how to manage a large codebase. They don't have a large codebase. I suppose they have a large codebase for a small to medium-sized software company, but many enterprises and large software companies manage much more code.
Slashdot Mirror
(2) It may reduce where it appears in the results (read this as: it will not remove it from the results).
Solution: "filetype:torrent"
Sure. Whatever. Like the $500k check showed up and just a few weeks later the EFF announced a big increase in their effort to stop SOPA? I'm sure the Google folks went back in time with a time machine.
Do you know anything about the EFF? Fighting SOPA was always consistent with their mission and goals. It's certainly possible that Google's money increased their ability to fight it, but fighting it would have been in their agenda regardless.
A big part of their budget come from Google billionaires and so it shouldn't be surprising that they're seeing eye to eye.
I think you've got the cause-effect order backward.
Baen was pretty much DRM-free from the get-go - a personal decision by Jim Baen himself, who alas, is no longer with us.
Yeah, Baen never did DRM. Jim Baen felt it was unnecessary, counterproductive and an insult to customers -- and he's been proven right on every count. A visionary man in many respects.
TOR has been working on it, but as I understand it, there were existing obligations to be cleared. Effective July 2012, however, all new TOR offerings are supposed to be DRM-free. Sadly, older purchases are not generally convertable.
Ah, very interesting. Does this mean new purchases of old titles will be DRM free?
I'm not up to date with my publishers, but that sounds a lot like what TOR is doing. The store was scheduled to launch in April, and it's now launching sometime in Summer 2012 (hopefully it hasn't been mothballed). I still have old PDFs of Sanderson's works from when they were emailing them to anybody who would sign up for a newsletter.
We'll see... Tor has been talking about Baen's model for many years now. Several years ago they actually started down the path of providing their books through Baen's site, and put a handful of books for sale. Then they stopped and started several times. I'd love to see it happen, because the combination of Tor and Baen would cover 95% of my fiction needs.
On the pricing, if you like the sort of books they sell, you should check out baenebooks.com. Baen is a regular publisher of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a military bent, which has for over a decade sold all of their books in electronic as well as print form. Single e-books are normally $4-6, with no sales tax or shipping (obviously). They also have a monthly bundle for $18 which includes six full novels, 1-2 of them new releases (usually available a few weeks before the books show up in stores) and the remainder older titles. $3 per book is a great price. It's often even better than that, because Baen tends to republish a lot of their older popular series in "omnibus" editions, so a single title of a bundle may actually contain a full trilogy. I've purchased bundles that contained 11-12 novels.
Also, Baen provides all of the major electronic formats, with no DRM, and encourages sharing your books with friends and families where "sharing" means "giving them copies". Baen also keeps all of your purchases on file so you can easily re-download books as needed.
Finally, Baen also provides an extensive free library so you can try out many of their authors and series at no cost, doesn't object to people sharing on-line copies of the CDs they put in the backs of some of their hardcovers (containing dozens of novels each, plus high-quality copies of cover art and other goodies), and provides free access to the first few chapters of all of their books, so you can try any book before buying.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Baen, other than having spent more money than I like to think about buying their books. My Baen library runs to nearly 500 titles.)
As the summary meantions: Sell it?
That would depend on who they sell it to. And if they would sell it at all. Google, for example, doesn't. But in general, companies would sell information to other companies, for whom the same arguments would apply. This isn't "magic", it's just self-interest.
This data is not 'creepy' when company's are using this data privately for profit, however when it's expressed publicly in a not-for-profit way it's a privacy concern. God bless America.
Well, I think the potential negative impact definitely has to be taken into consideration. What will the companies in question do with the data that could cause harm to me? What could individuals do with the data that could harm me? In this case, it's conceivable that someone with a deep hatred for Democrats could decide to do me physical harm. More likely, perhaps I live in a heavily Republican area and my personal or business relationships could be damaged if it were known that I were registered as a Democrat.
In the case of companies, there are some possible cases that would cause me significant harm, such as my medical insurance company finding out about a health condition which might cause them to raise my premiums, but in general most companies wouldn't have any interest in harming me. At most they want to try to manipulate me into buying some product or service.
So, yes, I think it is creepier for the general public to know something about me than for companies to know something about me, mainly because companies tend to act in predictable and restrained ways. So, of course, do the vast majority of the public... but there are exceptions, some of them very extreme indeed.
No, I was talking about people's names being flagged and validated and flagged again repeatedly. That did happen.
Ah, okay. Perhaps that was part of the motivation for the implementation of the "verified by Google" flag. It would seem to me that once you've got that check mark on your account that future reports that your account is fraudulent somehow would be ignored.
There were a shitload of these last year, I don't have a handy collection of URLs to hand, but lotsa people with odd names got put through multiple jeopardy. Perhaps G+ has its shit back together now.
No, there weren't. There were a lot of people who got their Google+ accounts shut down, but the only one I saw where the guy got his full Google account (including Gmail) shut down turned out to be because of kiddie porn.
Chrome installs invisible shit whenever it wants
If you're talking about automatic upgrades, so do the other browsers. If you're talking about something else, what? I'm curious.
watches and records my every move and reports its finding back to the mother ship
Only if you turn that on. I don't recall whether "instant" is on by default, but go to settings and there's a checkbox right next to the dropdown that lets you pick which search engine to use. Uncheck that and it doesn't send keystrokes to Google. If you want more detailed control, click on "Advanced" and look under the Privacy section. In 20 seconds you can make sure your copy of Chrome doesn't send anything to Google unless you ask it to.
Once you'd proved your pseudonym's status (or not), then your account wouldn't be at risk of that again.
See, you might think that, but it turns out that's not the case.
Cite? If you've gone through this process and proved that your pseudonym is valid, as I understand it you get the "verified by Google" flag. Once that's on, it's on. If you have evidence that's not the case, I'd be interested to see it.
Few friends bloggers some time ago have tested it: how easy it is to get blocked from G+. One guy simply "reported" (whatever that meant in the context) another for a made up violation. Within pretty short time second guy's account got completely disabled, barring him from all Google services, not only the G+.
I don't buy it.
Well, that's a pretty good description of the problem - lack of certainty.
That's the assumption of the problem, anyway, but without any evidence showing that Google really would act against its own interests in this way. Normally, innocence is assumed until guilt is proven, not the other way around.
It was demonstrated that it is sufficient for one user to report something as offensive on G+ and the author's account gets disabled.
It was demonstrated? Where, when?
The post or comment doesn't have to contain anything offensive - it just has to be reported by somebody as such - those are bots handling the clicks in the background, disabling accounts pronto.
Cite?
I can't say that I know for certain, but I seriously doubt that accounts are disabled automatically in response to complaints.
Where are the guarantees that I will not lose access to every Google service just because some [censored] for fun clicked a button on me, claiming I have posted something criminal??
If you didn't actually post something criminal, why would Google believe the complaint? It's easy enough for Google to distinguish what came from your account and what did not. Now, there certainly is the risk that someone who got access to your account actually posted something illegal using it... but in that case you've got much bigger concerns than Google locking your account.
"When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed. "
But that explicitly covers *only* the "common name standard" violation!? Or?
What about *other* violations? Because it was already tested in real world that Google disables accounts based on a *single* report of any random violation.
What kind of violation are you talking about? Posting kiddie porn? Yeah, you'll get shut down completely. Same with any other serious criminal act. What other sorts of violations are there? Google's ToS don't include a lot of restrictions.
I can't hear you.
There were some official posts around the time all this controversy was going on, but the first thing that came up when I searched seems adequate:
https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/VJoZMS8zVqU
Horowitz is a VP working on Google+. Here's the relevant excerpt:
MYTH: Not abiding by the Google+ common name policy can lead to wholesale suspension of one’s entire Google account. When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed. Please help get the word out: if your Google+ Profile is suspended for not using a common name, you won't be able to use Google services that require a Google+ Profile, but you'll still be able to use Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Blogger, and so on. (Of course there are other Google-wide policies (e.g. egregious spamming, illegal activity, etc) that do apply to all Google products, and violations of these policies could in fact lead to a Google-wide suspension.)
This also just makes sense. Since you don't need a Google+ profile to use Gmail, etc., killing your Google+ profile doesn't cut off access to Gmail or other services.
It appears that real name policies actually do improve the S/N ratio significantly
No it doesn't, according to recent studies:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/07/29/1848211/will-real-name-policies-improve-comments
It didn't work in South Korea. Perhaps it won't work on YouTube. Facebook has a higher S/N ratio than most comment threads, though, and Google+ is higher still. We'll see.
Well, that's completely idiotic. So basically all someone has to do is piss someone off, who would then fake-report the person's profile to get them suspended?
That would only work if someone had an apparently-pseudonymous Google+ profile name, and it would only work once. For example, I could probably get your account suspended pending verification, but you couldn't get mine suspended, because I use my real name. Once you'd proved your pseudonym's status (or not), then your account wouldn't be at risk of that again.
Hopefully it takes many multiple reportings to get someone suspended?
That wouldn't make any sense at all. Does multiple reports of a fake identity make it more fake? Would it make any sense to suspend an apparently-real identity because someone was reporting it as a fake?
The one failing of the Google feedback system, IMO, is that it lacks feedback.
Which means they're wasting your time. As a general policy, I never use "feedback" systems that don't generate a response, a public posting, or a ticket number.
While it's clearly less satisfying to the user, I don't see that it's a waste of time if it causes the problem to get fixed. And Google feedback does generate a ticket number, just not one that users see.
Same happens at MS.. upload a file that violates their code of conduct policy to MS sky drive, and your windows 7 phone account will be permanently blocked without telling what file caused it or getting any good response.
Note that that includes files that are not yet shared of, and includes partial nudity
Not just like Google, then, because if Google blocks your Google+ account, only your Google+ account gets blocked, regardless of a bunch of widely-repeated erroneous reporting early on.
Ahh, that would probably explain it. I've been Zorin since 1995 at least.
More likely it's just that no one has reported your account. There are probably some automated filters that look for really obvious fake names, but Zorin is a real name, though typically a surname. "Zorin Lynx" is obviously a pseudonym, but one that isn't likely to be flagged by an automated check. I suspect that if someone reported your account you'd have to send Google some documentation proving it's a well-established and well-known alias (and you might be unsuccessful).
Personally, I can see both sides of this debate. It appears that real name policies actually do improve the S/N ratio significantly, which makes for a better user experience. On the other hand, pseudonymity is important to some people. It will be interesting to see if the real names push on YouTube is successful at cleaning up a large portion of the crapflood which is the typical YouTube comment stream.
Even Google has bugs!
Indeed.
BTW, I want to put in a plug for using Google's "Send Feedback" link. Not only is a pretty cool piece of work technically (it basically has to implement a full HTML rendering engine in Javascript in order to dynamically construct the image of the page you're seeing, with your problem areas highlighted), it actually does get a lot of internal attention. Feedback gets classified and similar comments tracked over time, with lots of pretty graphs and charts, and teams scrub their feedback regularly. Things that are bothering lots of people get bug reports generated and added to the internal bug reporting system, and they get prioritized and fixed.
The one failing of the Google feedback system, IMO, is that it lacks feedback. By that I mean that there's no response back to the submitter letting them know what's being done or when the problem is fixed. I think I'm going to submit feedback on feedback, pointing out that feedback needs feedback.
What's the first piece of the address? Every IPv6-capable TCP stack has a link-local fe80 address, but that doesn't mean you can use it for anything. What's more interesting is if they have an address in a usable region of the IPv6 address space.
Hmm, I just checked on my Galaxy Nexus (on Verizon -- 3G at the moment) and it has an address beginning with 2600:100e, which is in an assigned, globally-routable unicast address space. Cool! I notice that I can't ping it, though. Of course it's probably firewalled by default. nmap indicates no listening ports, but again that's probably because of a firewall.
It's a respectable size, of course, and one that requires a intelligent management, but in 2012 it isn't a large codebase.
Linux 3.5 comprises 10,389,941 lines of code (per sloccount), and that's just a kernel + drivers + architecture dependent files. I'm sure Windows is at least 50M LOC, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it tops 100M. I work for Google, and while I'm not sure I can say how much code we have, it's far, far more than 10M lines. I used to do a lot of work with major financial institutions, and I'd estimate that most of them have on the order of 100M LOC.
I'm sure Intuit does some useful things that would be interesting to learn about, but I don't think I'd consider them a case study in how to manage a large codebase. They don't have a large codebase. I suppose they have a large codebase for a small to medium-sized software company, but many enterprises and large software companies manage much more code.