I train brazillian Jui Jitsu. I wanted to wear a fitness tracker to figure out how much work I do in a session because they are very intense, the warm-ups are what most fitness places call a 'work-out'. You can wear them in the warm up however the trouble with them is they get torn off when you fight and they *can't* track the amount of work I am doing. They also injure training partners. I've considered wearing them around my shoulder or ankle however I'm not sure you can do that with them. It also give opponents a grip point that you can't release yourself from, so they are a tactical disadvantage.
FWIW my brother says similar things about the Apple Watch for simple activities like running, cycling and gym. He is an exercise nut and owns both an Apple Watch and a more specific heart-rate tracking device (I think a Garmin?), and from his testing the Garmin seems way more accurate in terms of its readings.
I can't remember how he tested it but I think there were gaps in the Apple Watch coverage or something. He could be wearing it wrong, but it also seems quite possible to me that its use as a fitness tracker is probably more of a side benefit rather than a major feature. (He is an Apple fanboy so is loathe to admit any shortcomings in his devices so it's possibly even worse than he suggests:)
On the plus side it might finally lead to home routers getting some more interesting IP accounting features. That is one thing that has always annoyed me ever since I stopped having a Linux gateway - the home routers typically have no useful feedback as to what device is responsible for traffic.
Even a simple counter table would be incredibly useful, but I don't really see any reason why it would be hard to have good real-time graphs showing the current and total data usage from each IP on the network.
One interesting challenge though - what happens if you have an IoT device that is thoroughly pwned and keeps changing IP addresses (and/or MAC addresses!) specifically to make identifying it internally even more complicated?!
Many technologists think that running a business is kind of easy - like it's just a matter of having a good idea, banging out a bit of code, and then bam - you're Zuck or Gates.
The business of technology is, I think, a very interesting part of the entire process as well. There's a few interesting comments already in this article (e.g., about supply chain financing etc) which many people won't know anything about.
I'm sure there are many engineers out there that would love to do their own startup - you only have to look at failed Kickstarters to see that a lot of them never get off the ground and in many cases it's because they failed to understand some of the business aspects of it. Building a business around it is challenging almost no matter what you're doing.
So I think this is an interesting topic (I've already learned a few things from the comments, which is my main reason for returning to Slashdot on a daily basis)!
I don't know anyone who likes autoplay video/audio, which is why the marketers love it so much. Fuck them all, poke their eye out and fuck them in the skull.
I've watched lots of non-nerd/technical people use things like Facebook and have often asked them why they have auto-play video enabled (in Facebook it is an option).
From observing their behaviour before I ask them it is clear that autoplaying video for them is a feature - in most cases they scroll down, see the video play, watch the video for at least a few seconds, and then either finish it or move on. The impact of the autoplay is negligible to them; it's just something that happens in the app. None of them care about performance impact, privacy concerns, bandwidth wasting, etc.
I have to say I don't have any problems with auto-playing video - Facebook is the only site I regularly use where that might be a problem and they've thoughtfully provided an option for me to disable it. I don't have Flash installed any more so it's rare that I come across a site with an autoplaying video. But it would irritate me if I did and I'd be looking at ways to block it:)
All good points! I guess when I said 'software in general' I really meant 'desktop software', not really web-based stuff. I certainly prefer regular updates in web-based stuff so completely agree.
I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general). Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software (... lo and behold I think that's what we see with Firefox more and more, rather than the introduction of great new features).
I understand the motivation though - it's nice to have targets to keep everyone working for those little milestones, and have a date attached to it so things can be roadmapped and planned and all that.
I don't think it's at all a big deal for a date to slip on a particular version - especially as we're getting into actual serious-change Firefox territory with this release. The Electrolysis stuff is the first major advancement (... that I've cared about) for something like 20 versions so I'm keen to make sure it's stable.
As an anecdote, the current version of Firefox is the first one that I've EVER noticed it feeling sluggish and like it is using too much memory. I know Firefox has a weird reputation has a memory hog but I have personally NEVER noticed this despite it being my sole browser for years. As of right now it's using 1.9GB whereas before this I don't recall it getting significantly above the low 1GB range (FWIW I have Electrolosys disabled by config).
I don't really care that much about the memory usage but it certainly feels a little more sluggish than usual, which I do care about. So I'm very happy for them to take their time with the v49 release and make sure it's all ship-shape before it lands.
I'm a relative newbie to Excel but the first thing I learned was never to trust any of the cells where any calculations are performed.
As my spreadsheets got more and more complex I quickly realised small errors in one worksheet could manifest themselves in really ugly - but very subtle - ways. One simple-looking calculation on one worksheet could blow out an entire model if it there was even a small typo.
I suspect many people using Excel haven't learned this lesson yet. I was lucky that I noticed it myself before learning the hard way.
My solution was to have entirely separate worksheets where I would basically apply rough/simple TDD principles - have some known quantities and results in any complex calculation sections and make sure they were clearly visible at all time. That way as the spreadsheet evolves it can help you catch small errors before they ruin their day.
I'm sure pro Excel people have many more useful tricks.
Oracle, if you want to be total dicks to google but get tech people on side so we start giving a shit about you, here's an idea: build us a nice open source browser with no telemetry that blocks ads. Base it on Chromium. Make it fast and lightweight and strip out anything that might annoy privacy advocates (like syncing) and make it an optional extension.
Short of building a better search engine it's the only thing I could imagine making me try one of your products again.
At first I was all like, so the security expert can tell me that some of these password meters rate things like "p@ssword" as secure when they're obviously not, but they're not/quite/ expert enough to come up with a better tool that can more accurately gauge password strength?!@
Then I read the article; lo and behold, the author actually points out an open source tool called zxcvbn by Dropbox that is actually good at it (or at least, doesn't suck on the harsh battery of tests that these products were subject to (basically just running five passwords through six different meters).
Too bad the computers will NEVER be able to reliably make the kinds of judgment calls that humans can and the entire AI borg system is going to come crashing down sooner or later, so we really won't have to worry about the anti-humanist ilk ever really doing much of anything to worry about.
Yeh cool, but also computers will NEVER be able to make the kinds of terrible judgement calls that many humans make when, for example, behind the wheel of a car.
A computer isn't going to have 6 beers and then decide it's OK to drive. They're not going to drive at twice the speed limit at 4am because while tired because they want to get home faster. They're not going to have casual lapses in attention while reaching for a coffee or checking out a cute girl on the side of the road.
I don't like driving, I don't like being driven - I just don't like being in cars. 99% of driving is a sheer grind - a risky grind in which the casual inattention of others could result in my messy death.
I personally think there'll be MORE of a human element with computer-driven cars. I'd love to take a road trip with my friends where we can all have a beer and play cards or something.
According to their PR people that is apparently what they did.
This timeline of events suggests that the second DDOS (or "a significant increase in traffic") occurred at 11:46am local time.
At 11:50am local time they blocked all international traffic. This somehow lead to a "short system outage" (which I assume means the whole thing collapsed).
At 4:58pm there was another increase in traffic, "automatically defended by network fire walls". One must assume then that this was all local traffic if we assume that all international traffic was blocked - so either local DDOS impact, or, maybe, new demand from legitimate users.
At 7:30pm though is where things get interesting. There's another "significant" denial of service. This coincides with a lot of legitimate traffic as we enter Australian peak Internet hours. (Again, we can wonder if the DoS was actually just legitimate users smashing their application, but there's no data to decide one way or the other.)
But the fascinating part is that this incident was "significant" because their "geo-blocking service fell over". This apparently then caused a router failure.
First of all, what?! Secondly, from this description it sounds like they were using a server-side geoip mechanism to block the international traffic that was responsible for the DDOS. This will obviously not help in cases where the sheer volume of DDOS traffic is overwhelming the network (which, in Australia, is most of them).
So the question is: was their DDOS mitigation plan limited to simply blocking the DDOS on the server side? Did they not have a contingency to contact their upstream network providers and block entire international routes (which would have cut the impact of most DDOSs off at the knees)?
Sadly most of this information (I think) came from a non-technical press conference, so there's not a lot of hard technical information available yet.
I hope that the ABS will make a lot of their information public - not so that us nerds criticise this whole train wreck (though that will be fun too), but so everyone can learn from the mistakes that were made and we can build better infrastructure.
Getting kids to museums is hard enough but I feel like making them look at old technology (when the smartphone they're inevitably carrying in their pocket probably has more computing power than all of them combined) is a pretty special challenge.
On the other hand if you could tie it into video games at least they'd be able to do something interesting and entertaining while they're looking at all these old crusty machines. The evolution of video games, from Pong/Space Invaders to World of Warcraft/Call of Duty might be an interesting enough tale to tell visually and interactively to grab someone's attention.
China's 1 billion potential customers is hard for companies to pass up. Exporting to China is very difficult because they will price you out of the market. Your option is to give up 50% of control or stay home.
What happens with pure software/Internet companies though? I would have imagined they could exist quite happily without ever setting foot on Chinese soil. Will your service just get firewalled off if it's too successful and there are too many Chinese customers sending money overseas?
There's one change I've noticed - the awesomebar dropdown has changed. I think it's the "Searching for something already in your bookmarks or open tabs? We added super smart icons to let you know" referred to in the official release notes.
The icons look different and the layout of the content is slightly different. Here's a shot of the previous version and the new version.
Classic Theme Restorer -> Location bar (3) -> Alternative appearance seems to restore the previous layout but it seems to still have a new font.
You can enable e10s by going to about:config and setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. Restart your browser and then visit about:support and look up "Multiprocess Windows" on that page to see if it's enabled. (It might still be disabled if you have one or more add-ons that don't support e10s - if only it would tell you which)
Yeh it still shows as disabled with add-ons. I haven't tried with add-ons disabled (it'd kind of defeat the purpose of using Firefox for me:)
You can check if e10s is available by going to Options -> General -> "Enable multi-process Firefox". I think what TFA means is that it's off by default (unless you don't use addons) until Firefox 49, but can somebody confirm that?
I definitely do/not/ have that option available.
I can see a few things in about:config and about:support relating to it; it may be possible to get it going by mucking around with options but it's certainly not at the point to justify the headline.
I was kind of excited by this so updated immediately instead of my usual process of waiting a couple days.
While it was updating I did another unsual thing - clicked through to the article - where I read the following:
e10s rollout will take place in two phases, first in Firefox 48, and it will finish in Firefox 49, set for release on September 13, 2016.
Firefox with multi-process support will first reach 1 percent of the users who don't have any add-ons installed in their browser, and in ten days' time, Mozilla will activate e10s for 50 percent of the same users.
Full e10s support for Firefox instances using extensions or running on older versions of Windows will be available in the fall, during the second rollout phase scheduled for Firefox 49.
So, at a glance (and from what I can see from my now-updated install), multi-process is not/really/ included in this release except in certain cases like users who don't have any add-ons.
How has noone suggested Classic Theme Restorer for Firefox! This is what allows you to restore the pre-Australis theme that (imho) marked one of the more serious nails in the coffin for Firefox.
I also use: - FireGestures, for mouse gestures (how people work without right-click-scroll-up/down to go to the top and bottom of pages is beyond me). - FoxyProxy, so I can use different proxies for specific URLs, mostly allowing me to test geoip stuff but also coincidentally allowing me to avoid geographical restrictions. - Flashblock, although I've just realised I can remove this as I've uninstalled Flash months ago so it is kind of redundant. - Greasemonkey, for a few sites that I've written custom JavaScript handles for. - QuickJava, an indispensable little toolbar that lives in the status bar allowing you to quickly toggle on/off JavaScript, Java, Silverlight (if you them installed), images, CSS, etc. - Modify Headers, for development so you can easily inspect & modify HTTP headers. - Tamper Data, as above.
Video performs staggeringly better than most other mediums in terms of ad revenue and various other bullshit metrics like 'engagement'.
The vast majority of users seem to prefer video when it comes to consuming their content.
It seems likely that there's a higher correlation between users who prefer video over (say) reading, and users who actually buy things off Internet advertising.
The article doesn't seem to say it, but it looks like Apple and Facebook probably just replied to standard (presumably well-formed) requests from law enforcement to hand over information about a suspect in a criminal copyright case.
Regardless of how you feel about criminal copyright as a thing (and if this bloke was making $31m in your months it's hard to think of him as a brave fighter for copyright reform:), if this is what happened then at least I feel ok about it. He wasn't caught in a massive dragnet that invaded the piracy of millions; it was a targeted search done lawfully with due process.
There might be more info in the full complaint but it's a bit much reading for me so I'll make do with this somewhat inflammatory headline and my uninformed opinion!
Everything you say is true - but I would argue that what is important are the actual results. If the number of lives saved by the current implementation of the Autopilot system is greater than the number of deaths it causes, then surely we're better off with it - even if some of the deaths are the result of boneheaded behaviour by clueless inattentive drivers who are mistakenly assuming it is driving the car for them.
At the moment there are only a few high-profile stories from both sides of the fence (like this one and the previous story about the dude that was killed in the truck collision). So I think it's far too early to tell. If you believe some of the stats (accidents per km/driven) it is kind of encouraging.
So while I agree with you I think it's hard to state confidently that it's a bad idea yet (though it certainly seems like one) until we have a lot more data!
Slashdot Mirror
Fwiw, I run latest Firefox and get the same error with Twitter videos. If you don't have Flash installed it just doesn't seem to work at all.
I train brazillian Jui Jitsu. I wanted to wear a fitness tracker to figure out how much work I do in a session because they are very intense, the warm-ups are what most fitness places call a 'work-out'. You can wear them in the warm up however the trouble with them is they get torn off when you fight and they *can't* track the amount of work I am doing. They also injure training partners. I've considered wearing them around my shoulder or ankle however I'm not sure you can do that with them. It also give opponents a grip point that you can't release yourself from, so they are a tactical disadvantage.
FWIW my brother says similar things about the Apple Watch for simple activities like running, cycling and gym. He is an exercise nut and owns both an Apple Watch and a more specific heart-rate tracking device (I think a Garmin?), and from his testing the Garmin seems way more accurate in terms of its readings.
I can't remember how he tested it but I think there were gaps in the Apple Watch coverage or something. He could be wearing it wrong, but it also seems quite possible to me that its use as a fitness tracker is probably more of a side benefit rather than a major feature. (He is an Apple fanboy so is loathe to admit any shortcomings in his devices so it's possibly even worse than he suggests :)
On the plus side it might finally lead to home routers getting some more interesting IP accounting features. That is one thing that has always annoyed me ever since I stopped having a Linux gateway - the home routers typically have no useful feedback as to what device is responsible for traffic.
Even a simple counter table would be incredibly useful, but I don't really see any reason why it would be hard to have good real-time graphs showing the current and total data usage from each IP on the network.
One interesting challenge though - what happens if you have an IoT device that is thoroughly pwned and keeps changing IP addresses (and/or MAC addresses!) specifically to make identifying it internally even more complicated?!
Many technologists think that running a business is kind of easy - like it's just a matter of having a good idea, banging out a bit of code, and then bam - you're Zuck or Gates.
The business of technology is, I think, a very interesting part of the entire process as well. There's a few interesting comments already in this article (e.g., about supply chain financing etc) which many people won't know anything about.
I'm sure there are many engineers out there that would love to do their own startup - you only have to look at failed Kickstarters to see that a lot of them never get off the ground and in many cases it's because they failed to understand some of the business aspects of it. Building a business around it is challenging almost no matter what you're doing.
So I think this is an interesting topic (I've already learned a few things from the comments, which is my main reason for returning to Slashdot on a daily basis)!
I don't know anyone who likes autoplay video/audio, which is why the marketers love it so much. Fuck them all, poke their eye out and fuck them in the skull.
I've watched lots of non-nerd/technical people use things like Facebook and have often asked them why they have auto-play video enabled (in Facebook it is an option).
From observing their behaviour before I ask them it is clear that autoplaying video for them is a feature - in most cases they scroll down, see the video play, watch the video for at least a few seconds, and then either finish it or move on. The impact of the autoplay is negligible to them; it's just something that happens in the app. None of them care about performance impact, privacy concerns, bandwidth wasting, etc.
I have to say I don't have any problems with auto-playing video - Facebook is the only site I regularly use where that might be a problem and they've thoughtfully provided an option for me to disable it. I don't have Flash installed any more so it's rare that I come across a site with an autoplaying video. But it would irritate me if I did and I'd be looking at ways to block it :)
All good points! I guess when I said 'software in general' I really meant 'desktop software', not really web-based stuff. I certainly prefer regular updates in web-based stuff so completely agree.
I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general). Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software (... lo and behold I think that's what we see with Firefox more and more, rather than the introduction of great new features).
I understand the motivation though - it's nice to have targets to keep everyone working for those little milestones, and have a date attached to it so things can be roadmapped and planned and all that.
I don't think it's at all a big deal for a date to slip on a particular version - especially as we're getting into actual serious-change Firefox territory with this release. The Electrolysis stuff is the first major advancement (... that I've cared about) for something like 20 versions so I'm keen to make sure it's stable.
As an anecdote, the current version of Firefox is the first one that I've EVER noticed it feeling sluggish and like it is using too much memory. I know Firefox has a weird reputation has a memory hog but I have personally NEVER noticed this despite it being my sole browser for years. As of right now it's using 1.9GB whereas before this I don't recall it getting significantly above the low 1GB range (FWIW I have Electrolosys disabled by config).
I don't really care that much about the memory usage but it certainly feels a little more sluggish than usual, which I do care about. So I'm very happy for them to take their time with the v49 release and make sure it's all ship-shape before it lands.
I'm a relative newbie to Excel but the first thing I learned was never to trust any of the cells where any calculations are performed.
As my spreadsheets got more and more complex I quickly realised small errors in one worksheet could manifest themselves in really ugly - but very subtle - ways. One simple-looking calculation on one worksheet could blow out an entire model if it there was even a small typo.
I suspect many people using Excel haven't learned this lesson yet. I was lucky that I noticed it myself before learning the hard way.
My solution was to have entirely separate worksheets where I would basically apply rough/simple TDD principles - have some known quantities and results in any complex calculation sections and make sure they were clearly visible at all time. That way as the spreadsheet evolves it can help you catch small errors before they ruin their day.
I'm sure pro Excel people have many more useful tricks.
Oracle, if you want to be total dicks to google but get tech people on side so we start giving a shit about you, here's an idea: build us a nice open source browser with no telemetry that blocks ads. Base it on Chromium. Make it fast and lightweight and strip out anything that might annoy privacy advocates (like syncing) and make it an optional extension.
Short of building a better search engine it's the only thing I could imagine making me try one of your products again.
At first I was all like, so the security expert can tell me that some of these password meters rate things like "p@ssword" as secure when they're obviously not, but they're not /quite/ expert enough to come up with a better tool that can more accurately gauge password strength?!@
Then I read the article; lo and behold, the author actually points out an open source tool called zxcvbn by Dropbox that is actually good at it (or at least, doesn't suck on the harsh battery of tests that these products were subject to (basically just running five passwords through six different meters).
tldr: use zxcvbn
Too bad the computers will NEVER be able to reliably make the kinds of judgment calls that humans can and the entire AI borg system is going to come crashing down sooner or later, so we really won't have to worry about the anti-humanist ilk ever really doing much of anything to worry about.
Yeh cool, but also computers will NEVER be able to make the kinds of terrible judgement calls that many humans make when, for example, behind the wheel of a car.
A computer isn't going to have 6 beers and then decide it's OK to drive. They're not going to drive at twice the speed limit at 4am because while tired because they want to get home faster. They're not going to have casual lapses in attention while reaching for a coffee or checking out a cute girl on the side of the road.
I don't like driving, I don't like being driven - I just don't like being in cars. 99% of driving is a sheer grind - a risky grind in which the casual inattention of others could result in my messy death.
I personally think there'll be MORE of a human element with computer-driven cars. I'd love to take a road trip with my friends where we can all have a beer and play cards or something.
According to their PR people that is apparently what they did.
This timeline of events suggests that the second DDOS (or "a significant increase in traffic") occurred at 11:46am local time.
At 11:50am local time they blocked all international traffic. This somehow lead to a "short system outage" (which I assume means the whole thing collapsed).
At 4:58pm there was another increase in traffic, "automatically defended by network fire walls". One must assume then that this was all local traffic if we assume that all international traffic was blocked - so either local DDOS impact, or, maybe, new demand from legitimate users.
At 7:30pm though is where things get interesting. There's another "significant" denial of service. This coincides with a lot of legitimate traffic as we enter Australian peak Internet hours. (Again, we can wonder if the DoS was actually just legitimate users smashing their application, but there's no data to decide one way or the other.)
But the fascinating part is that this incident was "significant" because their "geo-blocking service fell over". This apparently then caused a router failure.
First of all, what?! Secondly, from this description it sounds like they were using a server-side geoip mechanism to block the international traffic that was responsible for the DDOS. This will obviously not help in cases where the sheer volume of DDOS traffic is overwhelming the network (which, in Australia, is most of them).
So the question is: was their DDOS mitigation plan limited to simply blocking the DDOS on the server side? Did they not have a contingency to contact their upstream network providers and block entire international routes (which would have cut the impact of most DDOSs off at the knees)?
Sadly most of this information (I think) came from a non-technical press conference, so there's not a lot of hard technical information available yet.
I hope that the ABS will make a lot of their information public - not so that us nerds criticise this whole train wreck (though that will be fun too), but so everyone can learn from the mistakes that were made and we can build better infrastructure.
Getting kids to museums is hard enough but I feel like making them look at old technology (when the smartphone they're inevitably carrying in their pocket probably has more computing power than all of them combined) is a pretty special challenge.
On the other hand if you could tie it into video games at least they'd be able to do something interesting and entertaining while they're looking at all these old crusty machines. The evolution of video games, from Pong/Space Invaders to World of Warcraft/Call of Duty might be an interesting enough tale to tell visually and interactively to grab someone's attention.
Wikipedia stats are probably more representative: https://analytics.wikimedia.or...
Firefox is a bit further down and, looking at the graphs, still decreasing. It's not as dire as GP indicates but it looks a little grim.
Here's the inevitable bug report - which has since been dismissed and closed by the developers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
China's 1 billion potential customers is hard for companies to pass up. Exporting to China is very difficult because they will price you out of the market. Your option is to give up 50% of control or stay home.
What happens with pure software/Internet companies though? I would have imagined they could exist quite happily without ever setting foot on Chinese soil. Will your service just get firewalled off if it's too successful and there are too many Chinese customers sending money overseas?
There's one change I've noticed - the awesomebar dropdown has changed. I think it's the "Searching for something already in your bookmarks or open tabs? We added super smart icons to let you know" referred to in the official release notes.
The icons look different and the layout of the content is slightly different. Here's a shot of the previous version and the new version.
Classic Theme Restorer -> Location bar (3) -> Alternative appearance seems to restore the previous layout but it seems to still have a new font.
Fun times.
You can enable e10s by going to about:config and setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. Restart your browser and then visit about:support and look up "Multiprocess Windows" on that page to see if it's enabled. (It might still be disabled if you have one or more add-ons that don't support e10s - if only it would tell you which)
Yeh it still shows as disabled with add-ons. I haven't tried with add-ons disabled (it'd kind of defeat the purpose of using Firefox for me :)
You can check if e10s is available by going to Options -> General -> "Enable multi-process Firefox". I think what TFA means is that it's off by default (unless you don't use addons) until Firefox 49, but can somebody confirm that?
I definitely do /not/ have that option available.
I can see a few things in about:config and about:support relating to it; it may be possible to get it going by mucking around with options but it's certainly not at the point to justify the headline.
I was kind of excited by this so updated immediately instead of my usual process of waiting a couple days.
While it was updating I did another unsual thing - clicked through to the article - where I read the following:
How has noone suggested Classic Theme Restorer for Firefox! This is what allows you to restore the pre-Australis theme that (imho) marked one of the more serious nails in the coffin for Firefox.
I also use:
- FireGestures, for mouse gestures (how people work without right-click-scroll-up/down to go to the top and bottom of pages is beyond me).
- FoxyProxy, so I can use different proxies for specific URLs, mostly allowing me to test geoip stuff but also coincidentally allowing me to avoid geographical restrictions.
- Flashblock, although I've just realised I can remove this as I've uninstalled Flash months ago so it is kind of redundant.
- Greasemonkey, for a few sites that I've written custom JavaScript handles for.
- QuickJava, an indispensable little toolbar that lives in the status bar allowing you to quickly toggle on/off JavaScript, Java, Silverlight (if you them installed), images, CSS, etc.
- Modify Headers, for development so you can easily inspect & modify HTTP headers.
- Tamper Data, as above.
Video performs staggeringly better than most other mediums in terms of ad revenue and various other bullshit metrics like 'engagement'.
The vast majority of users seem to prefer video when it comes to consuming their content.
It seems likely that there's a higher correlation between users who prefer video over (say) reading, and users who actually buy things off Internet advertising.
I too think e-cigarettes are an annoying and asinine way for people to keep doing something they know they shouldn't.
If it means less cigarette butts on the street I'm all for it.
The article doesn't seem to say it, but it looks like Apple and Facebook probably just replied to standard (presumably well-formed) requests from law enforcement to hand over information about a suspect in a criminal copyright case.
Regardless of how you feel about criminal copyright as a thing (and if this bloke was making $31m in your months it's hard to think of him as a brave fighter for copyright reform :), if this is what happened then at least I feel ok about it. He wasn't caught in a massive dragnet that invaded the piracy of millions; it was a targeted search done lawfully with due process.
There might be more info in the full complaint but it's a bit much reading for me so I'll make do with this somewhat inflammatory headline and my uninformed opinion!
Everything you say is true - but I would argue that what is important are the actual results. If the number of lives saved by the current implementation of the Autopilot system is greater than the number of deaths it causes, then surely we're better off with it - even if some of the deaths are the result of boneheaded behaviour by clueless inattentive drivers who are mistakenly assuming it is driving the car for them.
At the moment there are only a few high-profile stories from both sides of the fence (like this one and the previous story about the dude that was killed in the truck collision). So I think it's far too early to tell. If you believe some of the stats (accidents per km/driven) it is kind of encouraging.
So while I agree with you I think it's hard to state confidently that it's a bad idea yet (though it certainly seems like one) until we have a lot more data!