I'm a slightly heavier user; I usually use a little under my nominal 4 GB per month. However, with this change, I'm pretty much just going to stop caring about my data usage, which will probably lead me to use 10-12 GB per month. They'll get a little more money from me, I'll get a lot more data from them. Works for me.
and is in line with other countries
You know what other countries do as well? They have low corporate tax rates and high personal tax rates.
And they don't tax overseas earnings at all.
If we're going to go "in line with other countries", it only seems right to go whole hog and crank up the personal tax rates as well.
I agree with that. We should abolish corporate taxes entirely and instead fund the government with individual taxes -- including a healthy capital gains tax rate. The reason is that corporations never actually pay taxes anyway; the money always comes from some mixture of investors, employees and customers. Better to tax those people directly rather than trying to hide it by pretending to tax the corporation. Then the legislature can make sure that the tax burden is allocated the way public policy wants, rather than the way corporate execs decide, too.
Making repair and electronic instructional videos on youtube;).
Out of curiosity, did you start doing it before or after YouTube started doing advertising? And if after, was making money your original goal, or did you do it for fun?
People get funny when money is involved. I suspect that a fair number of small-time YouTubers started doing it as a hobby... and would have been happy to continue doing it that way without any pay, just the fun of making the videos and knowing that people are watching them. BUT the instant they started making any money, even a pittance, the game changed, the expectations and the goals changed. Originally, it was cool that they could upload videos to the whole world -- for free! But now, take those ads away and the same people who were happy to make videos for nothing but the enjoyment of it are angry that YouTube is "exploiting" them. In spite of the fact that if YouTube doesn't show any ads, YouTube isn't making any money either, and is still offering unlimited free hosting and serving.
Some open source projects have found this out, too. Prolific contributors do such a great job that the community decides to throw a little cash their way as a token of appreciation. The contributor is duly grateful for a while, but now has different expectations and goals... and when additional cash isn't regularly forthcoming, in increasing amounts, gets angry and ceases contributing.
When I ask for a search term, I want accurate results about the term, not about how fast a page loaded.
And if there are two pages with accurate results about the term, which do you want ranked higher? The fast one or the slow one?
Google isn't doing this because they like to make web devs jump through hoops, they're doing it because getting results that are accurate and fast makes users happier. And users who are happier use the service more. And users who use the service more see more ads.
The conclusion is that if we don't want intrusive government surveillance (and we don't!), the solution is going to have to be through public policy. Technical countermeasures, and especially reliance on the fact that stuff that used to be hard used to be hard, are going to fail as technology continues to get cheaper and better.
The thing about cameras at every traffic light is largely untrue outside of very major US cities (can't speak to everywhere in the world). Unless they're red-light cameras, there's simply no money in it.
Not true. Nearly all new traffic light installations use cameras to detect when vehicles are approaching or waiting at the intersection. They're cheaper and more accurate than pressure plates or magnetometers, particularly with respect to small vehicles, especially motor scooters. It's so prevalent that many traffic light vendors are incorporating cameras into the light bodies themselves. If you're in an area with older lights that still haven't upgraded to efficient LEDs, odds are high that when they do upgrade to get away from incandescent bulbs, they'll also get cameras because it's cheaper to buy a standard light with camera and not bother hooking up the existing vehicle-presence sensor. And if there is no vehicle-presence sensor, and the light is purely timed (very, very uncommon), then a light with a camera will be a nice functionality upgrade.
Of course the video output of those vehicle-presence cameras is almost always processed locally and then discarded. But in your dystopic hypothetical it wouldn't be so difficult for government to hook those feeds up to something. It's practical now with computing power on the order of a Raspberry Pi to process all of the imagery and extract all the plate numbers, so the bandwidth requirement would be trivial, and could be wireless.
Robocars will also destroy privacy, since they'll be paid for via (trackable) electronic means and likely be loaded with cameras.
Cars today all have license plates, and most towns and cities have cameras at every intersection large enough to have a stoplight. And most every vehicle carries at least one cellular telephone. If you're worried about surreptitious government tracking, you should be worried now. Robocars won't significantly change the situation.
Maybe if America stopped being such a global dick, it wouldn't have to worry about hostile nations.
"Don't be a dick" is a good strategy for getting along, certainly. It doesn't really eliminate the need for having powerful armed forces, though, because your decision not to be a dick doesn't mean others won't be dicks. Having a powerful military is a good way to ensure they don't decide to be a dick to you, and being willing to use your military to stop them from being dicks to others is a good way to reduce global dickishness (actions, at least, not attitudes), which increases global stability and aids global economic development.
Of course, the flip side is that military might is expensive, and there's a strong tendency for political leaders to want to use their toys. The cost isn't a huge issue if you're also the biggest economy, though it's obviously a form of wealth redistribution (all government spending is wealth redistribution) that favors educated and already-wealthy people when perhaps it would make more sense to shift some of that redistribution to those who need it more (that's a political question). The second problem is the one you're alluding to. IMO, we should go back to a constitutional military structure, where all standing non-Naval military might is owned by the states and can't be used by the federal government without a formal declaration of war from Congress. That was what the framers intended when they banned multi-year military appropriations, though their strategy obviously didn't work.
Even leaving the military in federal hands but reducing the ability of the president to order strikes without Congressional approval would help.
In part. Satellites are conveniently cheap(when amortized across the amount of area they cover; and how long they cover it; they are not 'cheap' in terms of sticker price); but don't fly any lower than earth orbit and are predictable against any vaguely competent adversary
Against a highly competent adversary they're sitting ducks, tracking nice, predictable orbits and completely defenseless against a canister of ball bearings in their path. Given that, there may be value in having a more survivable and harder-to-stop camera platform. It may even be worth telling potential adversaries about your hypersonic spyplane in order to deter them from building anti-satellite capabilities. Though if they're sufficiently competent they may respond by building anti-satellite capabilities and their own hypersonic spyplane.
Then you need to develop practical terawatt lasers with precise aiming and tracking, at which point nothing in the sky is survivable, regardless of how high it flies or how fast it moves. Then come the hovertanks with iridium armor, crewed by hard-bitten mercenaries... er, I guess I've strayed into science fiction.
Getting back to reality, if you believe you may enter into a conflict with a technologically-advanced adversary, or perhaps if you wish to ensure you do not enter into a conflict with a technologically-advanced adversary, it may make sense to build a hypersonic spyplane.
A nice way to get people to submit a good image of their face so that google can build a database of faces and try to catch up to facebook in this area.
The app says "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
Strange how much US social media and web 2.0 now wants your pic?
The app says "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
Of course, if you then share the result on Facebook, Facebook will have (yet another) photo of you.
Who wants to give their pic to the companies that helped the security services?
PRISM (surveillance program)
It appears that the only data the NSA was getting from Google was from tapping fiber optic lines between Google data centers. There's no evidence that Google ever cooperated -- beyond complying with legal orders -- and Google has explicitly denied cooperating. Oh, and after the Snowden stuff came out, Google accelerated a project to encrypt all internal communications.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be vigilant and careful with what information you give to whom, or that you should just blindly trust anyone -- including Google -- but a lot of the paranoia that floats around is unjustified and serves mostly to distract from the things you really do need to be careful about.
The cynic in me see's this as just another ploy by Google to give up biometric data.
The app tells you "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
I mean, when I buy a new gun safe or document safe for my home or office, it comes from the factory with a default combination. I have to set it to one of my choosing.
And what about when you buy a new electric frying pan? Do you remember to change the default factory passcode for one of your own? Or do you not even realize that your new frying pan has a passcode that needs to be set?
The latter is the situation with a huge number of PC buyers.
I've been programming professionally now for over three decades...
Same here.
And these days, I work on the world's most widely-used operating system -- and it's open source, at least in the form that it's delivered to companies that make devices that run it. That's a HUGE change from 20 years ago, when no OS with non-trivial market share was open source.
So much of what happens is bullshit make-work that's unnecessary replication of effort, which happens only so that people can get paid.
For example?
I assume these make-work jobs must be in the public sector. If not, there are huge opportunities for sharp executives to cut costs by eliminating the make-work.
Maybe Manning is just trying to balance things out? I mean, right now the Republicans have four convicted criminals running for Congress in 2018 and the Democrats only have one. If Manning runs and the Dems can drum up two more, they'll have achieved parity.
The authors offer multiple solutions to your attack. See section 5.2.3 and section 7.
Although they propose some technical countermeasures like encrypting serial numbers, making them not human-readable, or arranging for the codes to disappear after a short time, I think the best countermeasure is one that must be used for any system of paper ballots: tight custodial control of the physical ballots. You're basically assuming a corrupt election official with unlimited access to the cast ballots. If that's the case, the corrupt official has a *much* easier attack, one that doesn't pose any risk of getting caught administering pipewrenches (which is assault, on top of election fraud): Just replace ballots. Assuming you have adequate controls on access to ballots to protect against that, and assuming you don't allow video recording of ballots during recounts, or allow recount officials to bring lists of serial numbers/codes to the recount, your attack is infeasible.
One other very simple countermeasure that occurs to me is that since it's only necessary for a very small percentage of voters to use their receipts in order to verify the election results to very high probability, the system could randomly deny most voters permission to take their receipts. That would limit the kneebreakers to being able to manipulate only a random fraction of the voters, and would offer every voter plausible deniability as to whether or not they were able to take a receipt.
Also, it's worth pointing out that in jurisdictions with reasonably-effective rule of law, vote buying and coercion is more of a theoretical risk than a practical one. Every state in the union has mail-in absentee ballots, which means that kneebreakers can simply fill your ballot out and mail it in for you, and yet we don't see significant problems with absentee ballots -- or with ballots in the three states that only allow voting by mail. Of course in countries with weak rule of law and very corrupt governments, that would be a recipe for disaster. Those countries often conduct their elections under the supervision of the UN or other outside parties, though, so there's an obvious trustworthy party to manage the ballots.
And now explain this to the Redneck claiming that them computer geeks stole his beloved candidate's election.
If the redneck wants, we can do a manual recount of the paper ballots. For that matter, as far as the redneck is concerned, the whole thing is just marks on paper ballots that get counted up. Of course, rednecks like me who also happen to be mathematicians and cryptographers can look at the deeper integrity guarantees.
You mean impossible to prove to a third party how you voted.... except for the fact that every ballot has a unique serial number. And you have to know that unique serial number to check the system. Someone with access to all the ballots (either in series or in a lump at the end) who had enough power to get you to divulge your serial could easily look up how you voted (think about Putin's representatives asking for your serial.)
Nope. Read the Scantegrity paper.
This system was designed by academic cryptographers who love to pick at tiny potential flaws like that. Where a system they design might fall down is in its practicality; you can be sure that the integrity and security guarantees are airtight. And, actually, they've worked out the practical issues as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a slightly heavier user; I usually use a little under my nominal 4 GB per month. However, with this change, I'm pretty much just going to stop caring about my data usage, which will probably lead me to use 10-12 GB per month. They'll get a little more money from me, I'll get a lot more data from them. Works for me.
Can any corporate finance experts explain why companies would do this? Should we buy that they're just being generous/trying to foster goodwill?
Why they'd give employees bonuses? Retention, mostly. This is obvious, isn't it?
and is in line with other countries You know what other countries do as well? They have low corporate tax rates and high personal tax rates.
And they don't tax overseas earnings at all.
If we're going to go "in line with other countries", it only seems right to go whole hog and crank up the personal tax rates as well.
I agree with that. We should abolish corporate taxes entirely and instead fund the government with individual taxes -- including a healthy capital gains tax rate. The reason is that corporations never actually pay taxes anyway; the money always comes from some mixture of investors, employees and customers. Better to tax those people directly rather than trying to hide it by pretending to tax the corporation. Then the legislature can make sure that the tax burden is allocated the way public policy wants, rather than the way corporate execs decide, too.
Who cares about "illegal"? This is Apple. They claim to be good global citizens.
Do you claim to be a good citizen? Do you take any legal tax deduction you can?
Making repair and electronic instructional videos on youtube ;).
Out of curiosity, did you start doing it before or after YouTube started doing advertising? And if after, was making money your original goal, or did you do it for fun?
People get funny when money is involved. I suspect that a fair number of small-time YouTubers started doing it as a hobby... and would have been happy to continue doing it that way without any pay, just the fun of making the videos and knowing that people are watching them. BUT the instant they started making any money, even a pittance, the game changed, the expectations and the goals changed. Originally, it was cool that they could upload videos to the whole world -- for free! But now, take those ads away and the same people who were happy to make videos for nothing but the enjoyment of it are angry that YouTube is "exploiting" them. In spite of the fact that if YouTube doesn't show any ads, YouTube isn't making any money either, and is still offering unlimited free hosting and serving.
Some open source projects have found this out, too. Prolific contributors do such a great job that the community decides to throw a little cash their way as a token of appreciation. The contributor is duly grateful for a while, but now has different expectations and goals... and when additional cash isn't regularly forthcoming, in increasing amounts, gets angry and ceases contributing.
When I ask for a search term, I want accurate results about the term, not about how fast a page loaded.
And if there are two pages with accurate results about the term, which do you want ranked higher? The fast one or the slow one?
Google isn't doing this because they like to make web devs jump through hoops, they're doing it because getting results that are accurate and fast makes users happier. And users who are happier use the service more. And users who use the service more see more ads.
Or, you know, put thrusters on the satellite, like they do. Orbits can change, some finite number of times.
Slowly. Not likely to interfere with the targeting of an anti-satellite missile, even if the launch were detected early, and immediate action taken.
I forgot to make the concluding point:
The conclusion is that if we don't want intrusive government surveillance (and we don't!), the solution is going to have to be through public policy. Technical countermeasures, and especially reliance on the fact that stuff that used to be hard used to be hard, are going to fail as technology continues to get cheaper and better.
The thing about cameras at every traffic light is largely untrue outside of very major US cities (can't speak to everywhere in the world). Unless they're red-light cameras, there's simply no money in it.
Not true. Nearly all new traffic light installations use cameras to detect when vehicles are approaching or waiting at the intersection. They're cheaper and more accurate than pressure plates or magnetometers, particularly with respect to small vehicles, especially motor scooters. It's so prevalent that many traffic light vendors are incorporating cameras into the light bodies themselves. If you're in an area with older lights that still haven't upgraded to efficient LEDs, odds are high that when they do upgrade to get away from incandescent bulbs, they'll also get cameras because it's cheaper to buy a standard light with camera and not bother hooking up the existing vehicle-presence sensor. And if there is no vehicle-presence sensor, and the light is purely timed (very, very uncommon), then a light with a camera will be a nice functionality upgrade.
Of course the video output of those vehicle-presence cameras is almost always processed locally and then discarded. But in your dystopic hypothetical it wouldn't be so difficult for government to hook those feeds up to something. It's practical now with computing power on the order of a Raspberry Pi to process all of the imagery and extract all the plate numbers, so the bandwidth requirement would be trivial, and could be wireless.
Robocars will also destroy privacy, since they'll be paid for via (trackable) electronic means and likely be loaded with cameras.
Cars today all have license plates, and most towns and cities have cameras at every intersection large enough to have a stoplight. And most every vehicle carries at least one cellular telephone. If you're worried about surreptitious government tracking, you should be worried now. Robocars won't significantly change the situation.
because offering Internet costs about $9/month, all costs included. Comcast admitted as much in their SEC filing.
Cite? I've spent some time looking through Comcast filings and haven't found that anywhere.
Maybe if America stopped being such a global dick, it wouldn't have to worry about hostile nations.
"Don't be a dick" is a good strategy for getting along, certainly. It doesn't really eliminate the need for having powerful armed forces, though, because your decision not to be a dick doesn't mean others won't be dicks. Having a powerful military is a good way to ensure they don't decide to be a dick to you, and being willing to use your military to stop them from being dicks to others is a good way to reduce global dickishness (actions, at least, not attitudes), which increases global stability and aids global economic development.
Of course, the flip side is that military might is expensive, and there's a strong tendency for political leaders to want to use their toys. The cost isn't a huge issue if you're also the biggest economy, though it's obviously a form of wealth redistribution (all government spending is wealth redistribution) that favors educated and already-wealthy people when perhaps it would make more sense to shift some of that redistribution to those who need it more (that's a political question). The second problem is the one you're alluding to. IMO, we should go back to a constitutional military structure, where all standing non-Naval military might is owned by the states and can't be used by the federal government without a formal declaration of war from Congress. That was what the framers intended when they banned multi-year military appropriations, though their strategy obviously didn't work.
Even leaving the military in federal hands but reducing the ability of the president to order strikes without Congressional approval would help.
In part. Satellites are conveniently cheap(when amortized across the amount of area they cover; and how long they cover it; they are not 'cheap' in terms of sticker price); but don't fly any lower than earth orbit and are predictable against any vaguely competent adversary
Against a highly competent adversary they're sitting ducks, tracking nice, predictable orbits and completely defenseless against a canister of ball bearings in their path. Given that, there may be value in having a more survivable and harder-to-stop camera platform. It may even be worth telling potential adversaries about your hypersonic spyplane in order to deter them from building anti-satellite capabilities. Though if they're sufficiently competent they may respond by building anti-satellite capabilities and their own hypersonic spyplane.
Then you need to develop practical terawatt lasers with precise aiming and tracking, at which point nothing in the sky is survivable, regardless of how high it flies or how fast it moves. Then come the hovertanks with iridium armor, crewed by hard-bitten mercenaries... er, I guess I've strayed into science fiction.
Getting back to reality, if you believe you may enter into a conflict with a technologically-advanced adversary, or perhaps if you wish to ensure you do not enter into a conflict with a technologically-advanced adversary, it may make sense to build a hypersonic spyplane.
A nice way to get people to submit a good image of their face so that google can build a database of faces and try to catch up to facebook in this area.
The app says "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
Strange how much US social media and web 2.0 now wants your pic?
The app says "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
Of course, if you then share the result on Facebook, Facebook will have (yet another) photo of you.
Who wants to give their pic to the companies that helped the security services? PRISM (surveillance program)
It appears that the only data the NSA was getting from Google was from tapping fiber optic lines between Google data centers. There's no evidence that Google ever cooperated -- beyond complying with legal orders -- and Google has explicitly denied cooperating. Oh, and after the Snowden stuff came out, Google accelerated a project to encrypt all internal communications.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be vigilant and careful with what information you give to whom, or that you should just blindly trust anyone -- including Google -- but a lot of the paranoia that floats around is unjustified and serves mostly to distract from the things you really do need to be careful about.
The cynic in me see's this as just another ploy by Google to give up biometric data.
The app tells you "Google won't use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches".
I mean, when I buy a new gun safe or document safe for my home or office, it comes from the factory with a default combination. I have to set it to one of my choosing.
And what about when you buy a new electric frying pan? Do you remember to change the default factory passcode for one of your own? Or do you not even realize that your new frying pan has a passcode that needs to be set?
The latter is the situation with a huge number of PC buyers.
I've been programming professionally now for over three decades...
Same here.
And these days, I work on the world's most widely-used operating system -- and it's open source, at least in the form that it's delivered to companies that make devices that run it. That's a HUGE change from 20 years ago, when no OS with non-trivial market share was open source.
So much of what happens is bullshit make-work that's unnecessary replication of effort, which happens only so that people can get paid.
For example?
I assume these make-work jobs must be in the public sector. If not, there are huge opportunities for sharp executives to cut costs by eliminating the make-work.
Maybe Manning is just trying to balance things out? I mean, right now the Republicans have four convicted criminals running for Congress in 2018 and the Democrats only have one. If Manning runs and the Dems can drum up two more, they'll have achieved parity.
You said you doubted it had been used. The link says several organizations use it. How in the world is that an argument in support of your position?
The authors offer multiple solutions to your attack. See section 5.2.3 and section 7.
Although they propose some technical countermeasures like encrypting serial numbers, making them not human-readable, or arranging for the codes to disappear after a short time, I think the best countermeasure is one that must be used for any system of paper ballots: tight custodial control of the physical ballots. You're basically assuming a corrupt election official with unlimited access to the cast ballots. If that's the case, the corrupt official has a *much* easier attack, one that doesn't pose any risk of getting caught administering pipewrenches (which is assault, on top of election fraud): Just replace ballots. Assuming you have adequate controls on access to ballots to protect against that, and assuming you don't allow video recording of ballots during recounts, or allow recount officials to bring lists of serial numbers/codes to the recount, your attack is infeasible.
One other very simple countermeasure that occurs to me is that since it's only necessary for a very small percentage of voters to use their receipts in order to verify the election results to very high probability, the system could randomly deny most voters permission to take their receipts. That would limit the kneebreakers to being able to manipulate only a random fraction of the voters, and would offer every voter plausible deniability as to whether or not they were able to take a receipt.
Also, it's worth pointing out that in jurisdictions with reasonably-effective rule of law, vote buying and coercion is more of a theoretical risk than a practical one. Every state in the union has mail-in absentee ballots, which means that kneebreakers can simply fill your ballot out and mail it in for you, and yet we don't see significant problems with absentee ballots -- or with ballots in the three states that only allow voting by mail. Of course in countries with weak rule of law and very corrupt governments, that would be a recipe for disaster. Those countries often conduct their elections under the supervision of the UN or other outside parties, though, so there's an obvious trustworthy party to manage the ballots.
And now explain this to the Redneck claiming that them computer geeks stole his beloved candidate's election.
If the redneck wants, we can do a manual recount of the paper ballots. For that matter, as far as the redneck is concerned, the whole thing is just marks on paper ballots that get counted up. Of course, rednecks like me who also happen to be mathematicians and cryptographers can look at the deeper integrity guarantees.
Nope. Read the paper.
You mean impossible to prove to a third party how you voted.... except for the fact that every ballot has a unique serial number. And you have to know that unique serial number to check the system. Someone with access to all the ballots (either in series or in a lump at the end) who had enough power to get you to divulge your serial could easily look up how you voted (think about Putin's representatives asking for your serial.)
Nope. Read the Scantegrity paper.
This system was designed by academic cryptographers who love to pick at tiny potential flaws like that. Where a system they design might fall down is in its practicality; you can be sure that the integrity and security guarantees are airtight. And, actually, they've worked out the practical issues as well.