As for his network, it may just mean that he doesn't spout the usual cargo cult rules of thumb.
Again, I think the way the government handles these types of things is naive and unprofessional, and personally I think these types of lawsuits should allow punitive damages for false claims that are so high one or two of them can put the paintiff out of business (*and* the law firm that pursued it, since they are just as guilty). I also believe the guy's story, I was just pointing out that it's in no way an airtight alibi, since blind people can "experience" porn in different ways (and in his case he can clearly see something, even if it's more like a scrambled analog Playboy channel form the 80's) If this case is pursued, it's the same argument a lawyer could make...
But CLEARLY those security rules of thumb are there for a reason - this is not the first time someone has been accused of piracy or something worse like child pornography, and as a security expert he has undoubtedly seen these cases. If his reason for not securing his network was that he doesn't like to follow "cargo cult rules of thumb", that's even worse than just making a mistake, because it was an intentional lack of judgement in security matters that burned him.
But anyway, from the article it's already clear it has nothing to do with rules of thumb or evaluation of risk, he already admitted it was a mistake of oversight - an embarrassing one, but one I'm sure he won't make again...
I don't get why Google feels the need to come up with G+ and compete with Facebook. Stick to fscking search, stick to what you're best at. I don't understand this Microsoft mentality of "Oh, we didn't have this first and make money with it? Lets do one of our own! And fire the people in charge of marketing and precognition. They should have known social networking would become such a huge hit."
The problem is that Facebook is basically becoming a walled garden service for many Internet users now. Message/mail service, chat, blogging, location, games, photo albums, business info, etc - there are a lot of people who use it almost exclusively. And that walled garden experience means Facebook has 100% control over the ads people see.
Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. Everything they do eventually goes back to serving ads to people as efficiently and accurately as possible; it makes up almost all of their revenue. Search is the largest traffic draw for that, but Gmail, Google Maps, Android apps/store, and everything else they do serve the same goal. If Google lets Facebook take over the majority of Internet users' time online, it doesn't matter what services they offer, no one will see them or the ads they serve.
If he can read text on a computer with that magnifier, I think he can make out female anatomy. And that notwithstanding, you think blind people can't listen to porn?
Not saying he did it, but his disability is definitely not a particularly strong alibi. And wow, his excuse that he never even thought to secure his home network doesn't help either his case or his credibility in *network security*!
Because they are a nuclear power with a large fundamentalist population ruled by a military oligarchy. So the US gives that oligarchy shitloads of money to both bribe them for support and try to keep them in power to prevent another Iran.
Of course, the US gave lots of money and weapons to the Iranian government before the revolution there, and in the end all that did was make the new regime both heavily armed and even more pissed off...
Well, Pakistan does have an "accept several hundred billion dollars a year from the US" deal. If China's making them a better offer, then Pakistan's actions make sense.
You put that in quotations as if it was a quoted fact... but several hundred billion dollars a year? The US yearly defense budget is a bit over $600B, Pakistan doesn't get half of that. The real number is $1-2B. Still a lot, but off by a couple orders of magnitude there;)
Though to your point, the US just withheld $800M of that yearly aid last month after the latest concerns about Pakistan's military allegiances. Looks like that might backfire if they just get money from China instead.
He didn't say they are the same, just that they DID in fact mention net profit, and argued in detail how FCF was a better metric (which of course is debatable, but many do agree with that claim).
The real problem with the article is not that claim, though, but the fact that they listed completely wrong free cash flow numbers for some of the companies in their chart. Even thinking Barclays could have $177B of free cash flow in a year is absurd, and makes me question the rest of the author's analysis. That number was their TOTAL cash on hand as of this year. Their free cash flow was closer to $26B. Not bad, but off by 7x. Doh!
Doesn't help for DNS NXDOMAIN handling issues, though. Helps a bit for tracking and privacy, but they can still track the sites you go to and your IP. Will definitely help with ad replacement.
Unfortunately all it really does is try to make it easier to use sites' existing HTTPS support, and so is pretty limited right now. Calling it "HTTPS Everywhere" was a pretty huge exaggeration. Still better than nothing, though...
Ad swapping likewise doesn't hurt me and benefits my ISP, so the traffic manipulation is why it's bad and that's it. I filter ads anyway. It's #4 to me.
This does hurt the user, eventually. If the sites you use rely on ad revenue to stay in business, and your ISP replaces their ads with their own to steal their revenue stream, those sites lose money even though they served you their content, and eventually may go out of business because of it. Unless you prefer ads for male enhancement pills to the content you were originally trying to view. You could even argue it's illegal and/or violating the TOS of the original website for modifying and hosting their copyrighted content...
Also, Improper DNS NXDOMAIN handling is the basis for Affiliate Program Pumping, just a more insidious version that basically steals a cut of revenue from a retailer without your or their permission or knowledge. It's a superset, so how can it be less of an issue?
Actually, I just looked again, and it's under 3% now.
But in either case your analogy doesn't make sense. It's more like if 1 out of 30 customers at your restaurant walked in without a shirt on, and you told them to go put one on and come back.
And also, your understanding of profit margin is off, as well. If I sell 1 widget for $100 and make 4% profit margin, I make $4. If I sell 2, I make $8. The number of customers doesn't matter on the MARGIN, it's still 4%. Either way, you made a profit, and are not "in the red". You can add marketing costs, NRE, etc, to that, but without those numbers it's irrelevant to your point, particularly with digital distribution where the NRE quickly becomes secondary to the content licensing costs, which is the point of this story.
And corporate users most definitely do NOT matter to a huge number of businesses, especially entertainment content providers. What the hell does a Fortune 500 company care if their employees can't read a Kindle book or watch a Vudu movie while they are at work? And what the hell do those content providers care if those Fortune 500 companies don't want to upgrade a browser when they won't allow access to their services by policy anyway?
Sure, but overtaking (from the trivial version that seemed to be described) is basically: "go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way - turn!"
Because the only organization willing to spend $500k on a high-maintenance, battery sucking exoskeleton that lets one man do the work of two is the US military...
More than that, automated driving on an expressway (especially encountering only 67 cars in 3 1/2 hours!) is practically supported in cars that are already in production. Lexus has a reliable lane departure alert that could pretty easily be hooked up to the steering system, and a bunch of manufacturers have collision avoidance systems that activate brakes, as well as adaptive cruise control, etc...
I have read the backstory, have you? This is a direct excerpt from Gizmodo's own story about it. Emphasis is Gizmodo's own commentary on it...
Here's how it went down, allegedly, from the perspective of the Apple reps who got the call:
I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one. When the guy called us he gave us a vague description and couldn't provide pics, so like I mentioned previously, we thought it was a china knockoff the guy found. We wouldn't have any idea what to do with it and that's what sucks about working for apple, we're given just enough info to try and help people but not enough info to do anything if someone calls like this.
If the guy could have provided pictures it would have been sent to our engineers and then I'm sure we'd have gotten somewhere from there, but because we had so little to go on we pushed it off as bogus.
And seriously, what else could have happened? There is no way—not a chance—that a middle-level customer service rep would have known anything about the next iPhone. Put yourself in his theoretical shoes:
Hello, thanks for calling AppleCare
Hello. I think I have some kind of iPhone prototype, or something!
What?
Yeah, it's kinda square, and it doesn't work. I found it in a bar.
Ok! Thanks for calling.
He knew the name, address, and contact info of the individual who lost it, but called *AppleCare Support*? That's like finding someone's wallet with their driver's license and credit cards inside, and calling up the company that made the wallet. All they had to do was contact the guy (Gray Powell) himself, and he would have obviously bent over backwards trying to get it back. But no one never tried that. Curious.
Tremendous? I think not. Latest stats show IE6 usage is now under 4%. Not wasting resources on a small and declining platform is excellent business sense. Even Google has stopped supporting it.
So, if I stole your phone and called up some random Apple tech support who told me they didn't want it, I can get off scott free? Cool!
This guy didn't "find" the phone sitting on Apple's front step. He found it in a bar (and even admitted he saw the guy who left it behind) and all he *really* knew was, oh, the exact name and contact information of the guy who left it. Taking it apart and guessing that it was a prototype, then calling Apple directly seems incriminating, not exculpatory, for both the "finder" and Gizmodo.
Before the seller sold it to Gizmodo, he called Apple and explained he had one of their prototype phones. He did this multiple times. At first they told him that could not be the case, then they took his information and just never got back to him.
At that point, it's abandoned property.
That's absurd. 1) why would he think it was *Apple* property unless he knew it was a valuable prototype phone? It was lost by a guy in a bar - a guy who's name and contact info he already knew. If someone found your iPhone phone and really wanted to return it to you, would they call Apple?? 2) in an even less impressive display of token ass-covering he called a random customer support number of one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. He probably told some random outsourced support tech he had an Apple phone and wanted to return it, and they of course had no clue what he was talking about.
Once he sold it, Gizmodo also attempted to contact Apple, explaining that all they needed to do is to acknowledge that the phone was indeed theirs (which would be great for them, because it would confirm it was a legit prototype).
Again, what did this really have to do with Apple unless they knowingly bought a stolen prototype? They also had the chance to return it to the guy who lost it, to the police, or to the place it was found, but they knew what they bought and so decided to extort Apple for a story...
If the "finder" or Gizmodo had any interest in being a Samaritan vs pure selfish profit or promotion, this should have been NO different from any other person losing their phone. Trying to pretend all parties were just "trying to do the right thing" is either totally naive or intentionally distorting what happened...
The point of talking about what is and isn't legal when you "find" something in California is that knowing purchasing stolen property is also a crime. I'm not accusing them of stealing the phone, I'm pointing out that they incriminated themselves by stating on their website that they bought the phone from a guy who had "attempted to return it to Apple".
Exactly. Which in fact goes back to my original comment about *intent*. Was their intent to buy it just so that they could be good Samaritans and return it to Apple? No, that was their excuse. Their intent was to do whatever they needed to do to get an exclusive scoop on an unreleased Apple product, clearly resulting in a lot of traffic and revenue to their site. They knowingly bought stolen property with the intent to profit from their actions. Sounds like at least a half-decent case to me.
And actually, equally incriminating (to the seller and buyer) as well as surprising that no one mentions: why did both parties assume *Apple* was the owner, unless they knew it was a prototype? Regardless of who *manufactured* the phone, from the point of view of both of these parties, the person who lost it (and who's contact info was IN THE PHONE) was the owner. If they had given it to the restaurant where it was lost, the police, or the guy who lost it rather than calling some random Apple support number to "pretend" to return it or trying to extort a scoop, no one would have questioned anyone's actions in the matter...
They bought it for $10,000 after the "seller" explained to them he thought it was a lost prototype iPhone. Both parties even knew who owned it from the phone's info; selling/buying someone else's property seems like dealing in stolen property to me. And then to make it worse, they disassembled it and broke it while trying to put it back together.
If they didn't think it was really a lost prototype from Apple, why would they have done any of those things? Intent is an important consideration in legal matters like this, and their actions clearly showed their intent...
The entire modern computer industry is not much more than 50 years old. If human civilization has somehow figured out a way to survive 2000 years, I'm pretty sure none of us can even begin to imagine what computers will be capable of doing. Actually, I'm pretty sure we can't accurately imagine what they will be capable of in even 100 years.
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Yep. They should have the match refereed by Barbara Streisand.
As for his network, it may just mean that he doesn't spout the usual cargo cult rules of thumb.
Again, I think the way the government handles these types of things is naive and unprofessional, and personally I think these types of lawsuits should allow punitive damages for false claims that are so high one or two of them can put the paintiff out of business (*and* the law firm that pursued it, since they are just as guilty). I also believe the guy's story, I was just pointing out that it's in no way an airtight alibi, since blind people can "experience" porn in different ways (and in his case he can clearly see something, even if it's more like a scrambled analog Playboy channel form the 80's) If this case is pursued, it's the same argument a lawyer could make...
But CLEARLY those security rules of thumb are there for a reason - this is not the first time someone has been accused of piracy or something worse like child pornography, and as a security expert he has undoubtedly seen these cases. If his reason for not securing his network was that he doesn't like to follow "cargo cult rules of thumb", that's even worse than just making a mistake, because it was an intentional lack of judgement in security matters that burned him.
But anyway, from the article it's already clear it has nothing to do with rules of thumb or evaluation of risk, he already admitted it was a mistake of oversight - an embarrassing one, but one I'm sure he won't make again...
I don't get why Google feels the need to come up with G+ and compete with Facebook. Stick to fscking search, stick to what you're best at. I don't understand this Microsoft mentality of "Oh, we didn't have this first and make money with it? Lets do one of our own! And fire the people in charge of marketing and precognition. They should have known social networking would become such a huge hit."
The problem is that Facebook is basically becoming a walled garden service for many Internet users now. Message/mail service, chat, blogging, location, games, photo albums, business info, etc - there are a lot of people who use it almost exclusively. And that walled garden experience means Facebook has 100% control over the ads people see.
Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. Everything they do eventually goes back to serving ads to people as efficiently and accurately as possible; it makes up almost all of their revenue. Search is the largest traffic draw for that, but Gmail, Google Maps, Android apps/store, and everything else they do serve the same goal. If Google lets Facebook take over the majority of Internet users' time online, it doesn't matter what services they offer, no one will see them or the ads they serve.
Actually, this invite-only beta already has over 25 million users. 5% of Facebook's user base in a month by invitation only isn't too shabby.
Hopefully they would have done that the first time the *blind* guy parked his car in that spot...
If he can read text on a computer with that magnifier, I think he can make out female anatomy. And that notwithstanding, you think blind people can't listen to porn?
Not saying he did it, but his disability is definitely not a particularly strong alibi. And wow, his excuse that he never even thought to secure his home network doesn't help either his case or his credibility in *network security*!
A standing militia of lawyers can and will pose more of an obstetrical to the U.S. Navy
Personally, I wouldn't want to see a bunch of lawyers or the US Navy delivering any children...
Because they are a nuclear power with a large fundamentalist population ruled by a military oligarchy. So the US gives that oligarchy shitloads of money to both bribe them for support and try to keep them in power to prevent another Iran.
Of course, the US gave lots of money and weapons to the Iranian government before the revolution there, and in the end all that did was make the new regime both heavily armed and even more pissed off...
Well, Pakistan does have an "accept several hundred billion dollars a year from the US" deal. If China's making them a better offer, then Pakistan's actions make sense.
You put that in quotations as if it was a quoted fact... but several hundred billion dollars a year? The US yearly defense budget is a bit over $600B, Pakistan doesn't get half of that. The real number is $1-2B. Still a lot, but off by a couple orders of magnitude there ;)
Though to your point, the US just withheld $800M of that yearly aid last month after the latest concerns about Pakistan's military allegiances. Looks like that might backfire if they just get money from China instead.
He didn't say they are the same, just that they DID in fact mention net profit, and argued in detail how FCF was a better metric (which of course is debatable, but many do agree with that claim).
The real problem with the article is not that claim, though, but the fact that they listed completely wrong free cash flow numbers for some of the companies in their chart. Even thinking Barclays could have $177B of free cash flow in a year is absurd, and makes me question the rest of the author's analysis. That number was their TOTAL cash on hand as of this year. Their free cash flow was closer to $26B. Not bad, but off by 7x. Doh!
Doesn't help for DNS NXDOMAIN handling issues, though. Helps a bit for tracking and privacy, but they can still track the sites you go to and your IP. Will definitely help with ad replacement.
Unfortunately all it really does is try to make it easier to use sites' existing HTTPS support, and so is pretty limited right now. Calling it "HTTPS Everywhere" was a pretty huge exaggeration. Still better than nothing, though...
Ad swapping likewise doesn't hurt me and benefits my ISP, so the traffic manipulation is why it's bad and that's it. I filter ads anyway. It's #4 to me.
This does hurt the user, eventually. If the sites you use rely on ad revenue to stay in business, and your ISP replaces their ads with their own to steal their revenue stream, those sites lose money even though they served you their content, and eventually may go out of business because of it. Unless you prefer ads for male enhancement pills to the content you were originally trying to view. You could even argue it's illegal and/or violating the TOS of the original website for modifying and hosting their copyrighted content...
Also, Improper DNS NXDOMAIN handling is the basis for Affiliate Program Pumping, just a more insidious version that basically steals a cut of revenue from a retailer without your or their permission or knowledge. It's a superset, so how can it be less of an issue?
Actually, I just looked again, and it's under 3% now.
But in either case your analogy doesn't make sense. It's more like if 1 out of 30 customers at your restaurant walked in without a shirt on, and you told them to go put one on and come back.
And also, your understanding of profit margin is off, as well. If I sell 1 widget for $100 and make 4% profit margin, I make $4. If I sell 2, I make $8. The number of customers doesn't matter on the MARGIN, it's still 4%. Either way, you made a profit, and are not "in the red". You can add marketing costs, NRE, etc, to that, but without those numbers it's irrelevant to your point, particularly with digital distribution where the NRE quickly becomes secondary to the content licensing costs, which is the point of this story.
And corporate users most definitely do NOT matter to a huge number of businesses, especially entertainment content providers. What the hell does a Fortune 500 company care if their employees can't read a Kindle book or watch a Vudu movie while they are at work? And what the hell do those content providers care if those Fortune 500 companies don't want to upgrade a browser when they won't allow access to their services by policy anyway?
Sure, but overtaking (from the trivial version that seemed to be described) is basically: "go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way - turn!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHZJNQ5Y4A
Because the only organization willing to spend $500k on a high-maintenance, battery sucking exoskeleton that lets one man do the work of two is the US military...
More than that, automated driving on an expressway (especially encountering only 67 cars in 3 1/2 hours!) is practically supported in cars that are already in production. Lexus has a reliable lane departure alert that could pretty easily be hooked up to the steering system, and a bunch of manufacturers have collision avoidance systems that activate brakes, as well as adaptive cruise control, etc...
Sure, that's why companies that make clunky inventory systems and such still support IE6, and those who do almost everything else don't bother.
And if you think that IE6 and IE7 are remotely similar in capability, there's no way you have ever actually tried to support both of them ;)
I have read the backstory, have you? This is a direct excerpt from Gizmodo's own story about it. Emphasis is Gizmodo's own commentary on it...
Here's how it went down, allegedly, from the perspective of the Apple reps who got the call:
I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one. When the guy called us he gave us a vague description and couldn't provide pics, so like I mentioned previously, we thought it was a china knockoff the guy found. We wouldn't have any idea what to do with it and that's what sucks about working for apple, we're given just enough info to try and help people but not enough info to do anything if someone calls like this.
If the guy could have provided pictures it would have been sent to our engineers and then I'm sure we'd have gotten somewhere from there, but because we had so little to go on we pushed it off as bogus.
And seriously, what else could have happened? There is no way—not a chance—that a middle-level customer service rep would have known anything about the next iPhone. Put yourself in his theoretical shoes:
Hello, thanks for calling AppleCare
Hello. I think I have some kind of iPhone prototype, or something!
What?
Yeah, it's kinda square, and it doesn't work. I found it in a bar.
Ok! Thanks for calling.
He knew the name, address, and contact info of the individual who lost it, but called *AppleCare Support*? That's like finding someone's wallet with their driver's license and credit cards inside, and calling up the company that made the wallet. All they had to do was contact the guy (Gray Powell) himself, and he would have obviously bent over backwards trying to get it back. But no one never tried that. Curious.
Yep. Vudu's streaming movie web app is also HTML5 on the iPad, and it does a hell of a lot more with HTML5 features than an eBook reader...
Tremendous? I think not. Latest stats show IE6 usage is now under 4%. Not wasting resources on a small and declining platform is excellent business sense. Even Google has stopped supporting it.
So, if I stole your phone and called up some random Apple tech support who told me they didn't want it, I can get off scott free? Cool!
This guy didn't "find" the phone sitting on Apple's front step. He found it in a bar (and even admitted he saw the guy who left it behind) and all he *really* knew was, oh, the exact name and contact information of the guy who left it. Taking it apart and guessing that it was a prototype, then calling Apple directly seems incriminating, not exculpatory, for both the "finder" and Gizmodo.
Before the seller sold it to Gizmodo, he called Apple and explained he had one of their prototype phones. He did this multiple times. At first they told him that could not be the case, then they took his information and just never got back to him.
At that point, it's abandoned property.
That's absurd. 1) why would he think it was *Apple* property unless he knew it was a valuable prototype phone? It was lost by a guy in a bar - a guy who's name and contact info he already knew. If someone found your iPhone phone and really wanted to return it to you, would they call Apple?? 2) in an even less impressive display of token ass-covering he called a random customer support number of one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. He probably told some random outsourced support tech he had an Apple phone and wanted to return it, and they of course had no clue what he was talking about.
Once he sold it, Gizmodo also attempted to contact Apple, explaining that all they needed to do is to acknowledge that the phone was indeed theirs (which would be great for them, because it would confirm it was a legit prototype).
Again, what did this really have to do with Apple unless they knowingly bought a stolen prototype? They also had the chance to return it to the guy who lost it, to the police, or to the place it was found, but they knew what they bought and so decided to extort Apple for a story...
If the "finder" or Gizmodo had any interest in being a Samaritan vs pure selfish profit or promotion, this should have been NO different from any other person losing their phone. Trying to pretend all parties were just "trying to do the right thing" is either totally naive or intentionally distorting what happened...
The point of talking about what is and isn't legal when you "find" something in California is that knowing purchasing stolen property is also a crime. I'm not accusing them of stealing the phone, I'm pointing out that they incriminated themselves by stating on their website that they bought the phone from a guy who had "attempted to return it to Apple".
Exactly. Which in fact goes back to my original comment about *intent*. Was their intent to buy it just so that they could be good Samaritans and return it to Apple? No, that was their excuse. Their intent was to do whatever they needed to do to get an exclusive scoop on an unreleased Apple product, clearly resulting in a lot of traffic and revenue to their site. They knowingly bought stolen property with the intent to profit from their actions. Sounds like at least a half-decent case to me.
And actually, equally incriminating (to the seller and buyer) as well as surprising that no one mentions: why did both parties assume *Apple* was the owner, unless they knew it was a prototype? Regardless of who *manufactured* the phone, from the point of view of both of these parties, the person who lost it (and who's contact info was IN THE PHONE) was the owner. If they had given it to the restaurant where it was lost, the police, or the guy who lost it rather than calling some random Apple support number to "pretend" to return it or trying to extort a scoop, no one would have questioned anyone's actions in the matter...
They bought it for $10,000 after the "seller" explained to them he thought it was a lost prototype iPhone. Both parties even knew who owned it from the phone's info; selling/buying someone else's property seems like dealing in stolen property to me. And then to make it worse, they disassembled it and broke it while trying to put it back together.
If they didn't think it was really a lost prototype from Apple, why would they have done any of those things? Intent is an important consideration in legal matters like this, and their actions clearly showed their intent...
The entire modern computer industry is not much more than 50 years old. If human civilization has somehow figured out a way to survive 2000 years, I'm pretty sure none of us can even begin to imagine what computers will be capable of doing. Actually, I'm pretty sure we can't accurately imagine what they will be capable of in even 100 years.