So many of us turn up our noses, pay for Internet access, and keep using systems that may be less powerful than Free-PC's offer (333 MHz, 4GB hard drive, and 32MB of memory).
Yes, you're right, that is not a new concept. Servers get hacked all the time. Stolen data is in the headlines every day.
The new concept that everyone is bitching about is the legal "theft" of your data, which is outlined on page 3,742 in the hardcopy version of the EULA. I found a copy once, in one of Google's old abandoned data centers. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
That's the issue. Trusting a cloud provider. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I uploaded a truecrypt volume that was absolutely unreadable to anyone but me if I started getting targeted ads for TrueCrypt...
I'm just trying to figure out how people rationalized the first problem, the fact that no online solution is 100% secure, if they're taking offense to the new one, the "lack of trust".
What Google does with the data is immaterial if the data is sensitive enough to have a privacy concern in the first place. If you don't want people seeing it, you should not put it on the internet. Period. If you're willing to take the risk of putting your super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place, why would Google scraping it to target ads be what concerns you? I would think that the possibility of it being seen by anyone (which is always a possibility, as long as human beings are involved any step of the way) would have been enough of a motivating factor to not put the super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place.
I don't know, maybe it's just easier for me to be objective because I have no real need for a cloud storage solution and use them simply as a convenience, but I would think that any enterprise that had information sensitive enough to warrant these privacy concerns wouldn't be going to a third party to host their data in the first place. Coca-Cola isn't going to ask Google to store a copy of their secret recipe, and if they did, the last thing they should be worried about is a bot scraping it to target ads. That's why all this privacy hysteria cracks me up as concerns cloud storage, because it requires the user to have already decided that the base insecurity inherent in any network attached computer (any computer at all, really) wasn't enough of a concern to make them stay away in the first place. If you care about your data's privacy, for fuck's sake, keep it off the internet, and damn sure don't trust a third party like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc, to keep an eye on it. That's just retarded.
I use them to store files I don't give a shit about. If they want to scrape my cannabutter recipes and pirated MP3's looking for something to 'monetize', they can be my guest.
The only data they can steal is the data you give them. People aren't powerless victims, here, they're making a deliberate choice to put their files in someone else's control. I don't much give a shit who that someone else is, if you don't want them to see it, don't give it to them to hold.
This is just simple common sense, but it seems like people would rather keep stamping their feet and bitching about how insecure it all is rather than just making the simple decision to not fucking upload sensitive shit to these services in the first place and moving on with their lives. Anyone looking for an impenetrable bank vault for their data via an internet connection is an idiot. The weak point in any security system is the user, and as we all know, users come up with novel ways to compromise their shit every single day. According to a recent study, the most common password in business is Password1. If that doesn't make you think twice about trusting any of these services with your data I don't know what will...
To be honest, I think anyone that thinks "The Cloud" is secure in any way, shape, or form is an idiot.
Doesn't much matter who's fucking 'cloud' it is, it's just common sense. If you put data on the internet, you're taking a risk in that data being seen by someone else. This is not a new concept.
That's why the privacy hysteria concerning these cloud storage providers cracks me up. Of course there's a risk in doing so. There's a risk in connecting a computer to the internet at all. If that risk isn't a factor in the decision making process of the end user, that's their own fault.
If you want to lock your data in a vault, go rent a fucking vault...but let's not pretend that a person should have any reasonable expectation of a risk-free cloud storage solution. Not gonna happen, not in our lifetimes. We still can't seem to not use passwords like '123456' or 'abcdefg' for fuck's sake. You think there isn't some moron at Google or Dropbox or Skydrive or whoever the fuck that's not doing the exact same shit? Come on, now, people.
And after you were thrown in jail (assuming you weren't killed by police officers during your violent rampage), who would protect your 4 year old daughter then? Do you truly think her childhood would be better with you dead or in jail?
And that's exactly why shit like this continues year after year despite overwhelming public disapproval.
To quote a film: "Wars are not fought only by childless men." There are some things that are worth taking a stand for, even with such grave consequences. Maybe you think this is one of those things, maybe not, but eventually it's going to come down to that. Our forefathers risked their lives and the lives of their families fighting a war of independence to prevent injustices like these because, to them, the injustices themselves were worse than death. I have no doubt that we're going to be facing those kinds of decisions in earnest within a generation. This shit cannot continue.
You cannot escape the TSA. Believe me, within a generation, you're going to need to submit to a TSA search every time you leave your fucking house. They already watch all your electronic communication so even being inside your home is not enough to escape the eye of TSAuron.
Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It's the same fucking bullshit with the DEA. Proceeds from property confiscations make up a huge chunk of their budget. The real question is, when are enough people going to start getting pissed off about this shit to do something about it? I'm sick and tired of the TSA apologists but it seems like there is a significant number of people in this country that really believe that they're being protected by these corrupt agencies...
Not a very long time ago...early-mid 2010, I think?
That's got to be something they added since then, because I spent days going back and forth with the Windows Live team just trying to get them to delete the account. That's all I wanted, I wanted an email sent to that address to get bounced back, and I explained this clearly to them multiple times, but they wouldn't do it. Then they closed the ticket. Totally unhelpful all around, they were.
I'm glad they added the functionality, but I'm done with Microsoft as far as this shit goes.
Of course I changed my password. That was the first thing I did when I got word that spam from my account was going out.
As I said, I made sure to let everyone in my contact list know to block that email address. The issue wasn't getting hacked, that happens to people all the time, the issue was the fact that Microsoft wouldn't delete my account. At first they told me that they "couldn't" because it was tied to my Xbox Live Account. Once I moved my XBL account to my Gmail, I contacted Microsoft again (specifically the Live Mail team) and they still wouldn't delete the account. That's when I got the 'You just have to wait a year for it to automatically be deleted, sorry' bullshit.
The reason I wanted the account deleted entirely was so I didn't have to ever worry about it again. Moving all of my shit to Gmail and going through over a decade worth of emails was a huge pain in the ass, and I just wanted the account closed for good, which as the person that created the account, I feel wasn't unreasonable. Microsoft's refusal to do so was unreasonable, in my opinion.
They got in, skimmed it for the contact list, and they are done.
Well, I obviously sent everyone an email letting them know that my account had been compromised and to delete the contact info for that email address, but either way, my main gripe was Microsoft's refusal to delete my account, even after confirming that I was the account holder to their satisfaction (which they required to even talk to me in the first place, obviously). This "You have to wait a year for it to automatically be deleted due to inactivity" garbage is complete bullshit. It's my fucking account. I don't want it anymore. Delete it. What is so unreasonable about that request?
I know they have the capability to do that, so why won't they? What on earth could they hope to gain by being so obstinate about this? Is there some legitimate excuse for why they couldn't just do what I asked? I'm seriously asking, because their response made zero sense to me at all...
It's possible, but I honestly doubt it. I've been a long time adblock/noscript user, do regular OS reinstalls, have browsers set to automatically delete cookies and shit on close, run CCleaner nightly before shut down, and install a new piece of software at all maybe once a month, if even that. Not to say those behaviors are an impenetrable shield or anything, but I feel I'm reasonably careful on the net.
The fact that none of the other email addresses were compromised leads me to believe they managed to puzzle out my password, but I honestly don't know how. Either way, the point is moot...all I wanted was for Microsoft to close the fucking account and they just would not. I really don't understand why they couldn't just delete the email address completely. I was the verified owned of the account, I had to give them all the info to even open the ticket in the first place...how hard could it have been? Even if I wasn't hacked and just wanted to close the damn account, what right do they have to tell me "no"? It's my damn email for fuck's sake, I created that account before it was even a Microsoft property...
It's funny, but that was exactly the same thing that convinced me to leave Hotmail once and for all 2 years ago, and I'd had the same Hotmail email address since before Microsoft even bought it back in the late 90's.
The thing that really pissed me off was that, when I contacted Microsoft and told them I got hacked and requested they delete the account, they flat out refused to do so, and told me I'd just have to wait until it was deleted due to inactivity. Because I'd had that email address for so long, I had literally hundreds of contacts that got hit with spam messages (to include former employers and companies that I had job applications on file for, how embarrassing THAT was). I wanted the email address dead so that I didn't have to worry about it happening again in 8 months, but apparently that was just too much to ask. My password was not some ridiculous '123456', either, it was a non-dictionary stream of mixed-case letters with numbers and special characters, so simply changing the password was not a satisfactory course of action in my opinion (and I told them that), but of course, what the hell can I do when they just say "no"? Sue them? I wish I had that kind of time and money. For all I know, they could have hacked the email again and reset the clock, but I made sure to delete every contact, set the inbox to exclusive, and set it to delete junk immediately upon receipt before I abandoned the account, so if the assholes manage to steal it again, it won't be much use to them.
The Xbox Live people were much, much more helpful with migrating my account to Gmail. For the days it took for the Live Mail team to respond to me, I was squared away in minutes with the XBL rep, and we even ended up bullshitting about old school video games for like 25 minutes afterwards.
Funny how much different two arms of the same fucking company can be.
I know people that fucking think Farmville is the best "game" ever made. I even knew someone that honestly believed Star Wars: Galaxies was the best MMO of all time.
This is why 'best $THING ever!' is only appropriate as a humorous interjection, not to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, that's a reality that these guys are going to have to face. No amount of DRM or lawsuits or even infomercials has stopped it from happening yet, and likely never will.
DRM only punishes legitimate customers, anyway. It makes the pirated version of a work, be it an eBook, video game, whatever, a better product than the legitimate one. A pirated eBook works on any device that can read the file format. No stupid account tied to a particular store tied to a particular piece of hardware tied to a credit card number required.
I mean, you know it's bad when people are starting to buy legit products and still download pirate copies so they don't have to deal with the bullshit. I actually know people that do that, particularly with PC games.
The war on piracy is just as effective as the war on drugs or the war on terrorism. Something like 70% of people here in the states think that there is nothing wrong with sharing media between family and friends, according to a poll I read during the SOPA debacle. The general public is not on their side in this fight.
Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.
So don't put anything sensitive on there. I mean, Jesus, why is this such a big deal? It's Google. They scrape data to serve ads. We all know that. Nothing new here. So why are we having the same fucking arguments again and again and again as concerns privacy and Google?
If you don't want anyone to know something, you don't tell anyone. If you don't want someone to possibly get access to your data one day, then don't put your fucking data in a place where that could possibly happen, like ever. Your soopersecretfiles don't belong on a cloud storage site, obviously. They don't even belong on a computer with an internet connection at all, if they're that sensitive.
Good God, the lack of common sense, it's mind-boggling.
Naturally I wouldn't trust them with anything too sensitive and use AdBlock.
Holy shit, someone sensible, I just may have a heart attack.
It's a free, voluntary service for fuck's sake. Nobody is being forced to use it, and certainly nobody is being forced to use it for sensitive content. I plan on using mine to share media with friends and family so I don't need to carry a physical flash drive around. If Google wants to rip off the MP3's I already ripped off on The Pirate Bay, c'est la vie.
AdBlock and NoScript take care of everything else I'm concerned about. The sky isn't falling.
Not everyone wants to run a local executable from a company that has demonstrated a lot of interest in prying into your privacy
Not everyone is planning on using it for shit that actually matters. For me, it's nothing but a virtual flash drive to share media without carrying a physical one around (and probably lose/forget somewhere). 5 GBs is more than enough to share photos, music, and video clips.
I totally get the privacy concerns people have, but let's not pretend that every fucking piece of data people generate has some use to Google. If they want to scrape my cookie recipes looking for something to monetize, I couldn't give less of a shit.
I guess it's just not the sort of thing I can understand being worked up over. If someone is worried Google might look at their shit, they shouldn't upload their shit to Google Drive. If they don't want it on their computer, they don't have to install it. There are plenty of paid options out there that treat your cloud storage like a bank vault. Go with one of them.
Even Korea, though, ended in a stalemate. There was no victory there; we pretty much just put tens of thousands of people in the ground and accomplished jack squat. We're still dealing with NK's bullshit today.
Well, unless you count the fact that the DMZ has become a nature reserve of sorts, due to the fact that humans will get their face shot off if they step foot inside it. Humanity's loss is natures gain, I suppose...
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but around these parts most people didn't believe that any one particular nation was behind the attacks and that a large-scale mobilization of an invasion force was pointless, especially in Afghanistan, the USSR's Vietnam. Later, when Bush went into Iraq, there was a significant number of people here that were against the invasion from day one (I was one of them). I admit, though, that this is a very liberal area (Madison, WI), so it may not necessarily be the norm, but it was a far cry from the historical response to Pearl Harbor and WWII. In my opinion, if they'd even tried to introduce something like the rationing they did for WWII there would have been an uproar, which leads me to believe that support was not nearly as widespread as that at all.
From what my brother tells me, where he was stationed (Camp LeJeune, NC), the civilians were decidedly more gung-ho for the war, which isn't surprising in a town that pretty much exists solely due to the USMC base and depends on it completely for it's economy. However, the Marines themselves were (privately) much more reserved about things. There were people champing at the bit to get over to Iraq and start shooting people, as there is in any war, I'm sure, but they were the exception, not the rule. Most people just wanted to get their fucking job done and get home alive. There were few that truly believe they were "saving the world" or "fighting terrorists" or "making the world safe for democracy"...most of them didn't feel they belonged in Iraq at all, and this was in the beginning, while being fed a steady diet of propaganda, before body-bags started piling up and opposition to the war back home reached fever pitch. My brother jokingly refers to it as "the effect of the Generation-Y Marine", and apparently, it's something that our military has actually been examining. As he says, "How can you tell a Gen-Y marine? Because they always ask 'Why?' when given an order." Not something that the higher-ups were used to, especially in the USMC...or so he tells me.
I suppose the propaganda was much more effective in those days when there were only a handful of avenues of information available to people, and the opposition groups to WWII have probably become footnotes of history, but I've yet to hear any vets of any wars since WWII tell me how proud they were of their service like my grandparents did. Half a century later and there was still none of the cynicism in their attitudes regarding it that you hear from our service members coming back from overseas today. They honestly felt they made a positive difference in the world and that the lives laid down towards achieving that goal were worth it. I doubt there are many that would say the same thing about anything they've done in the Middle East over the last 10+ years.
Slashdot Mirror
So many of us turn up our noses, pay for Internet access, and keep using systems that may be less powerful than Free-PC's offer (333 MHz, 4GB hard drive, and 32MB of memory).
Wow. Talk about a trip down memory lane...
Yes, you're right, that is not a new concept. Servers get hacked all the time. Stolen data is in the headlines every day.
The new concept that everyone is bitching about is the legal "theft" of your data, which is outlined on page 3,742 in the hardcopy version of the EULA. I found a copy once, in one of Google's old abandoned data centers. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
That's the issue. Trusting a cloud provider. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I uploaded a truecrypt volume that was absolutely unreadable to anyone but me if I started getting targeted ads for TrueCrypt...
I'm just trying to figure out how people rationalized the first problem, the fact that no online solution is 100% secure, if they're taking offense to the new one, the "lack of trust".
What Google does with the data is immaterial if the data is sensitive enough to have a privacy concern in the first place. If you don't want people seeing it, you should not put it on the internet. Period. If you're willing to take the risk of putting your super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place, why would Google scraping it to target ads be what concerns you? I would think that the possibility of it being seen by anyone (which is always a possibility, as long as human beings are involved any step of the way) would have been enough of a motivating factor to not put the super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place.
I don't know, maybe it's just easier for me to be objective because I have no real need for a cloud storage solution and use them simply as a convenience, but I would think that any enterprise that had information sensitive enough to warrant these privacy concerns wouldn't be going to a third party to host their data in the first place. Coca-Cola isn't going to ask Google to store a copy of their secret recipe, and if they did, the last thing they should be worried about is a bot scraping it to target ads. That's why all this privacy hysteria cracks me up as concerns cloud storage, because it requires the user to have already decided that the base insecurity inherent in any network attached computer (any computer at all, really) wasn't enough of a concern to make them stay away in the first place. If you care about your data's privacy, for fuck's sake, keep it off the internet, and damn sure don't trust a third party like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc, to keep an eye on it. That's just retarded.
I use them to store files I don't give a shit about. If they want to scrape my cannabutter recipes and pirated MP3's looking for something to 'monetize', they can be my guest.
The only data they can steal is the data you give them. People aren't powerless victims, here, they're making a deliberate choice to put their files in someone else's control. I don't much give a shit who that someone else is, if you don't want them to see it, don't give it to them to hold.
This is just simple common sense, but it seems like people would rather keep stamping their feet and bitching about how insecure it all is rather than just making the simple decision to not fucking upload sensitive shit to these services in the first place and moving on with their lives. Anyone looking for an impenetrable bank vault for their data via an internet connection is an idiot. The weak point in any security system is the user, and as we all know, users come up with novel ways to compromise their shit every single day. According to a recent study, the most common password in business is Password1. If that doesn't make you think twice about trusting any of these services with your data I don't know what will...
To be honest, I think anyone that thinks "The Cloud" is secure in any way, shape, or form is an idiot.
Doesn't much matter who's fucking 'cloud' it is, it's just common sense. If you put data on the internet, you're taking a risk in that data being seen by someone else. This is not a new concept.
That's why the privacy hysteria concerning these cloud storage providers cracks me up. Of course there's a risk in doing so. There's a risk in connecting a computer to the internet at all. If that risk isn't a factor in the decision making process of the end user, that's their own fault.
If you want to lock your data in a vault, go rent a fucking vault...but let's not pretend that a person should have any reasonable expectation of a risk-free cloud storage solution. Not gonna happen, not in our lifetimes. We still can't seem to not use passwords like '123456' or 'abcdefg' for fuck's sake. You think there isn't some moron at Google or Dropbox or Skydrive or whoever the fuck that's not doing the exact same shit? Come on, now, people.
I submit to the record, exhibit A:
TSA screeners at LAX arrested on narcotics trafficking charges
CNN front page right now...it'd almost be funny if it wasn't so fucking sad and infuriating.
And after you were thrown in jail (assuming you weren't killed by police officers during your violent rampage), who would protect your 4 year old daughter then? Do you truly think her childhood would be better with you dead or in jail?
And that's exactly why shit like this continues year after year despite overwhelming public disapproval.
To quote a film: "Wars are not fought only by childless men." There are some things that are worth taking a stand for, even with such grave consequences. Maybe you think this is one of those things, maybe not, but eventually it's going to come down to that. Our forefathers risked their lives and the lives of their families fighting a war of independence to prevent injustices like these because, to them, the injustices themselves were worse than death. I have no doubt that we're going to be facing those kinds of decisions in earnest within a generation. This shit cannot continue.
Just take the train, eh? Sorry, TSA is there, too.
I know, let's take a boat! Oops, TSA is there, too.
Fuck it, let's just drive to our destination. Fuck! TSA is there, too!
Okay, fuck traveling, let's just go to a football game. Whaddaya know, TSA is there, too!
You cannot escape the TSA. Believe me, within a generation, you're going to need to submit to a TSA search every time you leave your fucking house. They already watch all your electronic communication so even being inside your home is not enough to escape the eye of TSAuron.
Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Oh, it doesn't need to be cash. They'll happily auction off your confiscated personal property as well.
It's the same fucking bullshit with the DEA. Proceeds from property confiscations make up a huge chunk of their budget. The real question is, when are enough people going to start getting pissed off about this shit to do something about it? I'm sick and tired of the TSA apologists but it seems like there is a significant number of people in this country that really believe that they're being protected by these corrupt agencies...
Not saying that TSA screeners are pedos
Believe me, if you'd proctored the TSA testing as I have, and seen the people that sit for these tests, you wouldn't be so quick to say that.
Best and brightest, they are most definitely not.
Not a very long time ago...early-mid 2010, I think?
That's got to be something they added since then, because I spent days going back and forth with the Windows Live team just trying to get them to delete the account. That's all I wanted, I wanted an email sent to that address to get bounced back, and I explained this clearly to them multiple times, but they wouldn't do it. Then they closed the ticket. Totally unhelpful all around, they were.
I'm glad they added the functionality, but I'm done with Microsoft as far as this shit goes.
Of course I changed my password. That was the first thing I did when I got word that spam from my account was going out.
As I said, I made sure to let everyone in my contact list know to block that email address. The issue wasn't getting hacked, that happens to people all the time, the issue was the fact that Microsoft wouldn't delete my account. At first they told me that they "couldn't" because it was tied to my Xbox Live Account. Once I moved my XBL account to my Gmail, I contacted Microsoft again (specifically the Live Mail team) and they still wouldn't delete the account. That's when I got the 'You just have to wait a year for it to automatically be deleted, sorry' bullshit.
The reason I wanted the account deleted entirely was so I didn't have to ever worry about it again. Moving all of my shit to Gmail and going through over a decade worth of emails was a huge pain in the ass, and I just wanted the account closed for good, which as the person that created the account, I feel wasn't unreasonable. Microsoft's refusal to do so was unreasonable, in my opinion.
They got in, skimmed it for the contact list, and they are done.
Well, I obviously sent everyone an email letting them know that my account had been compromised and to delete the contact info for that email address, but either way, my main gripe was Microsoft's refusal to delete my account, even after confirming that I was the account holder to their satisfaction (which they required to even talk to me in the first place, obviously). This "You have to wait a year for it to automatically be deleted due to inactivity" garbage is complete bullshit. It's my fucking account. I don't want it anymore. Delete it. What is so unreasonable about that request?
I know they have the capability to do that, so why won't they? What on earth could they hope to gain by being so obstinate about this? Is there some legitimate excuse for why they couldn't just do what I asked? I'm seriously asking, because their response made zero sense to me at all...
It's possible, but I honestly doubt it. I've been a long time adblock/noscript user, do regular OS reinstalls, have browsers set to automatically delete cookies and shit on close, run CCleaner nightly before shut down, and install a new piece of software at all maybe once a month, if even that. Not to say those behaviors are an impenetrable shield or anything, but I feel I'm reasonably careful on the net.
The fact that none of the other email addresses were compromised leads me to believe they managed to puzzle out my password, but I honestly don't know how. Either way, the point is moot...all I wanted was for Microsoft to close the fucking account and they just would not. I really don't understand why they couldn't just delete the email address completely. I was the verified owned of the account, I had to give them all the info to even open the ticket in the first place...how hard could it have been? Even if I wasn't hacked and just wanted to close the damn account, what right do they have to tell me "no"? It's my damn email for fuck's sake, I created that account before it was even a Microsoft property...
It's funny, but that was exactly the same thing that convinced me to leave Hotmail once and for all 2 years ago, and I'd had the same Hotmail email address since before Microsoft even bought it back in the late 90's.
The thing that really pissed me off was that, when I contacted Microsoft and told them I got hacked and requested they delete the account, they flat out refused to do so, and told me I'd just have to wait until it was deleted due to inactivity. Because I'd had that email address for so long, I had literally hundreds of contacts that got hit with spam messages (to include former employers and companies that I had job applications on file for, how embarrassing THAT was). I wanted the email address dead so that I didn't have to worry about it happening again in 8 months, but apparently that was just too much to ask. My password was not some ridiculous '123456', either, it was a non-dictionary stream of mixed-case letters with numbers and special characters, so simply changing the password was not a satisfactory course of action in my opinion (and I told them that), but of course, what the hell can I do when they just say "no"? Sue them? I wish I had that kind of time and money. For all I know, they could have hacked the email again and reset the clock, but I made sure to delete every contact, set the inbox to exclusive, and set it to delete junk immediately upon receipt before I abandoned the account, so if the assholes manage to steal it again, it won't be much use to them.
The Xbox Live people were much, much more helpful with migrating my account to Gmail. For the days it took for the Live Mail team to respond to me, I was squared away in minutes with the XBL rep, and we even ended up bullshitting about old school video games for like 25 minutes afterwards.
Funny how much different two arms of the same fucking company can be.
Disc rot, for example.
I know people that fucking think Farmville is the best "game" ever made. I even knew someone that honestly believed Star Wars: Galaxies was the best MMO of all time.
This is why 'best $THING ever!' is only appropriate as a humorous interjection, not to be taken seriously.
Yeah, just like Lily Allen, who said she was giving up music for good because of all those filthy pirates.
Oh...I guess until her acting career didn't pan out, then it's back into the studio! Guess those pirates weren't such a drag after all.
And, just because I love it so fucking much, Dan Bull's response to her 'quitting music'.
Unfortunately, that's a reality that these guys are going to have to face. No amount of DRM or lawsuits or even infomercials has stopped it from happening yet, and likely never will.
DRM only punishes legitimate customers, anyway. It makes the pirated version of a work, be it an eBook, video game, whatever, a better product than the legitimate one. A pirated eBook works on any device that can read the file format. No stupid account tied to a particular store tied to a particular piece of hardware tied to a credit card number required.
I mean, you know it's bad when people are starting to buy legit products and still download pirate copies so they don't have to deal with the bullshit. I actually know people that do that, particularly with PC games.
The war on piracy is just as effective as the war on drugs or the war on terrorism. Something like 70% of people here in the states think that there is nothing wrong with sharing media between family and friends, according to a poll I read during the SOPA debacle. The general public is not on their side in this fight.
Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.
So don't put anything sensitive on there. I mean, Jesus, why is this such a big deal? It's Google. They scrape data to serve ads. We all know that. Nothing new here. So why are we having the same fucking arguments again and again and again as concerns privacy and Google?
If you don't want anyone to know something, you don't tell anyone. If you don't want someone to possibly get access to your data one day, then don't put your fucking data in a place where that could possibly happen, like ever. Your soopersecretfiles don't belong on a cloud storage site, obviously. They don't even belong on a computer with an internet connection at all, if they're that sensitive.
Good God, the lack of common sense, it's mind-boggling.
Naturally I wouldn't trust them with anything too sensitive and use AdBlock.
Holy shit, someone sensible, I just may have a heart attack.
It's a free, voluntary service for fuck's sake. Nobody is being forced to use it, and certainly nobody is being forced to use it for sensitive content. I plan on using mine to share media with friends and family so I don't need to carry a physical flash drive around. If Google wants to rip off the MP3's I already ripped off on The Pirate Bay, c'est la vie.
AdBlock and NoScript take care of everything else I'm concerned about. The sky isn't falling.
Not everyone wants to run a local executable from a company that has demonstrated a lot of interest in prying into your privacy
Not everyone is planning on using it for shit that actually matters. For me, it's nothing but a virtual flash drive to share media without carrying a physical one around (and probably lose/forget somewhere). 5 GBs is more than enough to share photos, music, and video clips.
I totally get the privacy concerns people have, but let's not pretend that every fucking piece of data people generate has some use to Google. If they want to scrape my cookie recipes looking for something to monetize, I couldn't give less of a shit.
I guess it's just not the sort of thing I can understand being worked up over. If someone is worried Google might look at their shit, they shouldn't upload their shit to Google Drive. If they don't want it on their computer, they don't have to install it. There are plenty of paid options out there that treat your cloud storage like a bank vault. Go with one of them.
Even Korea, though, ended in a stalemate. There was no victory there; we pretty much just put tens of thousands of people in the ground and accomplished jack squat. We're still dealing with NK's bullshit today.
Well, unless you count the fact that the DMZ has become a nature reserve of sorts, due to the fact that humans will get their face shot off if they step foot inside it. Humanity's loss is natures gain, I suppose...
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but around these parts most people didn't believe that any one particular nation was behind the attacks and that a large-scale mobilization of an invasion force was pointless, especially in Afghanistan, the USSR's Vietnam. Later, when Bush went into Iraq, there was a significant number of people here that were against the invasion from day one (I was one of them). I admit, though, that this is a very liberal area (Madison, WI), so it may not necessarily be the norm, but it was a far cry from the historical response to Pearl Harbor and WWII. In my opinion, if they'd even tried to introduce something like the rationing they did for WWII there would have been an uproar, which leads me to believe that support was not nearly as widespread as that at all.
From what my brother tells me, where he was stationed (Camp LeJeune, NC), the civilians were decidedly more gung-ho for the war, which isn't surprising in a town that pretty much exists solely due to the USMC base and depends on it completely for it's economy. However, the Marines themselves were (privately) much more reserved about things. There were people champing at the bit to get over to Iraq and start shooting people, as there is in any war, I'm sure, but they were the exception, not the rule. Most people just wanted to get their fucking job done and get home alive. There were few that truly believe they were "saving the world" or "fighting terrorists" or "making the world safe for democracy"...most of them didn't feel they belonged in Iraq at all, and this was in the beginning, while being fed a steady diet of propaganda, before body-bags started piling up and opposition to the war back home reached fever pitch. My brother jokingly refers to it as "the effect of the Generation-Y Marine", and apparently, it's something that our military has actually been examining. As he says, "How can you tell a Gen-Y marine? Because they always ask 'Why?' when given an order." Not something that the higher-ups were used to, especially in the USMC...or so he tells me.
I suppose the propaganda was much more effective in those days when there were only a handful of avenues of information available to people, and the opposition groups to WWII have probably become footnotes of history, but I've yet to hear any vets of any wars since WWII tell me how proud they were of their service like my grandparents did. Half a century later and there was still none of the cynicism in their attitudes regarding it that you hear from our service members coming back from overseas today. They honestly felt they made a positive difference in the world and that the lives laid down towards achieving that goal were worth it. I doubt there are many that would say the same thing about anything they've done in the Middle East over the last 10+ years.
Ew. You can keep 'er.
Nelly Furtado, on the other hand...
And Kylie Minogue, too.