This is the beginning of the permanent end of all privacy.
Suppose this doesn't get built; will that help you? Not for long. Consider a (near) future in which wireless webcams cost, say, a dollar, and Internet-accessible disk storage for a year of images, another dollar. Now even children, let alone police, are going to stick cameras absolutely everywhere. Add some recognition software (license plates, faces, whatever you like to track) and index the heck out of it. Now anyone on earth can name anyone else on earth and see a complete, photographic log of nearly everywhere they've gone during the past couple of years.
Unless technological trends show a surprising change, this WILL happen. Even if England's insane government doesn't do it, it it will still happen.
Want to be more scared? Fast forward 20 more years, to when those cameras cost one cent and are the size of a grain of sand. Buy a thousand and scatter them all around someone's home, maybe tossing them in the window or tracking them in on your shoes.
Do I really want cameras everywhere, watching everything? No. Do I know a way to stop it? No, but we sure as heck out to slow it down until we figure out how to limit and control it.
I'm not even going to respond to the inflammatory word "threaten". But I do want to point out that asking people not to include a feature in their product -- one that you may find actively harmful or disruptive to your own customers or yourself -- is different from asking people not to publish documentation.
Nice paranoid fantasy. But I used to work for a very large software company, in a fairly high-up position, and honestly I cannot think of one case where I heard of something like this happening. In my experience most companies want all OTHER companies to publish all their specs, but tend to be conservative about publishing their own specs unless there is a business benefit in doing so (e.g. if you are trying to create an industry standard, get people with lots of customers to support your product, or write an RFC).
People more important than their machines? Duh.
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Who'd have thought that people's behavior, and what they want to do, is ultimately more important than whether you buy them a nifty technology? Um, just about everyone....
Hey follow technoids, can we use consistent units please? Normally Gb means "gigabit" and GB means "gigabyte". I didn't make it up, but it is a helpful distinction when abbreviating.
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This is the beginning of the permanent end of all privacy.
Suppose this doesn't get built; will that help you? Not for long. Consider a (near) future in which wireless webcams cost, say, a dollar, and Internet-accessible disk storage for a year of images, another dollar. Now even children, let alone police, are going to stick cameras absolutely everywhere. Add some recognition software (license plates, faces, whatever you like to track) and index the heck out of it. Now anyone on earth can name anyone else on earth and see a complete, photographic log of nearly everywhere they've gone during the past couple of years.
Unless technological trends show a surprising change, this WILL happen. Even if England's insane government doesn't do it, it it will still happen.
Want to be more scared? Fast forward 20 more years, to when those cameras cost one cent and are the size of a grain of sand. Buy a thousand and scatter them all around someone's home, maybe tossing them in the window or tracking them in on your shoes.
Do I really want cameras everywhere, watching everything? No. Do I know a way to stop it? No, but we sure as heck out to slow it down until we figure out how to limit and control it.
I'm not even going to respond to the inflammatory word "threaten". But I do want to point out that asking people not to include a feature in their product -- one that you may find actively harmful or disruptive to your own customers or yourself -- is different from asking people not to publish documentation.
Nice paranoid fantasy. But I used to work for a very large software company, in a fairly high-up position, and honestly I cannot think of one case where I heard of something like this happening. In my experience most companies want all OTHER companies to publish all their specs, but tend to be conservative about publishing their own specs unless there is a business benefit in doing so (e.g. if you are trying to create an industry standard, get people with lots of customers to support your product, or write an RFC).
Who'd have thought that people's behavior, and what they want to do, is ultimately more important than whether you buy them a nifty technology? Um, just about everyone....
Hey follow technoids, can we use consistent units please? Normally Gb means "gigabit" and GB means "gigabyte". I didn't make it up, but it is a helpful distinction when abbreviating.