Wanna make sure your data doesn't get collected? Unplug from the network while using it, and do a factory reset each time you want to connect to the WWW. Want to develop something on it? Do exactly the same sans the factory reset - they will never have access to source code. How exactly are they supposed to use some app that wasn't uploaded to their servers? I see nowhere you're forced to provide source or even binaries. They might be able to use it legally, but how they acquire it is a whole 'nother story, a story that probably has lawsuit vectors all around it in favor of the developer (i.e. you, not Occulus). And by the way, I doubt the companies that have Occulus-compatible apps and games available right now abode to the same "can use for free" type of terms. They surely have paid licenses with very specific royalties involved, so I'm guessing if you don't publish in their platform and abide to further ToS's, you're golden. But that's the real difficulty, can you develop outside their ecosystem like you can with Kinect?
If an analyst is overwhelmed with data by querying any single person's name, I imagine it won't be difficult to charge anybody with anything at all just because "DATA". Talk about abuse of power and authoritarian regimes - pick a person, pick a crime, pick circumstantial evidence from the big bad pool of "content", as Snowden puts it, and there you have it: reasonable suspicion à la carte.
Can't help but guess the reason why they lose 'most of the time' is precisely because they don't need to be painted to the public as criminals - if a business is induced by the state to incur in practices most of its client-base would condemn, but these practices are done under cover of darkness, there's really no reason (other than an ethical one) to even attempt to fight such demands. And pragmatically, why would you spend money to defend your customers' rights when they were the same customers who elected officials that in turn stripped away those rights... (I'm being ironic - we all know law is ever changing and only through continuous scrutiny, even in lower courts such as the Apple case, can the people be defended from abuse of something that was initially considered fair).
I'm just happy with the fact I mentioned 3 of the things they addressed on my comment back then: a request for transparency, the separation of adblock and sensible ads technologically and economically, and the fact they now publicly assume they want to make money out of the free tool they provide, in the controlled space they get from its usage. Like, you know, Google didn't do for the longest time about their collection of data.
Glad to see my comment here hit a nerve and probably had some influence on this. Transparency is clearly the way to go, with the clarity that the company wants a monetizing strategy. We all want to make money, so it only makes sense to admit it and explain why and how, especially when you provide services that affect stuff so broad such as consumer rights.
Wow. That is some serious sniffing around. No wonder Gates has no quarry with the FBI demands on Apple... Great article mate. I'll definitely be waiting for the next chapter on your antics with them.
Best thing is they're probably gonna be served directly from Microsoft servers, making it impossible to block through host blacklisting without losing anything actually useful, like security patches. But oh, well, the setting does exist. The wider problem here is the amount of people who they will reach out of the fact they simply aren't savvy enough to disable them, much like most Google opt outs. Either that or the setting itself filled with WARNING screens saying how much they lose disabling it, pretty much mitigating the soul count turning that crap off out of fear. It's mesmerizing the lenght companies will go instilling the notion that ads are good for all of us. Get a fukin clue
I'm really appreciating the depth of your commentaries (I'm guessing you're the other AC that posted before on my comment), so I advise you to create an account, even if disposable one, just so I know who I am replying with. Otherwise I might think your commentaries are some sort of really-damn-good algorithm for replying to highly rated comments on/. On the other hand, your speech does look the part of someone who doesn't want to create accounts for posting comments, so there's that:P
I was just stating my assumption of what this "expansion" might really mean. I, for one, think the right to be forgotten is something that, like in real life, will never enter full effect as the actual "users" of the right will still pop up in other databases or even popular knowledge that they are what they want to be forgotten about. And my generic opinion about half-measures - they are cumbersome, useless, and ultimately trivial. And this is coming from a European citizen that has had mild cases of wanting something written off the social web/tv etc.
It's a lot to commit in a country where their popularity and brand won't be as "heard" as in lax media censorship-bound locations. Then again, it's a market where having 10% share is enough to break-even that billion, real easy, as soon as the ride-share thingie gains full traction (pun intended).
Sounds to me there will still be one company or 2 left for the DoD to request services to (for billions of dollars of course). Then they'll just force every US company to us that encryption instead of foreign tech for most stuff that needs to go to/from a citizen-bound device. Seems to be somebody is gonna get very rich, and everyone will be very secure from everyone else but the government itself.
The right itself should only apply to EU citizens, per my understanding. So this should mean people from non-EU countries should still not be able to get "forgotten" approval. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).
If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.
Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.
And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.
Amazing legal jurisdiction insight. I actually read this on a Guardian article, and I'm appalled they had no mention on this whatsoever. News papers today.
Netflix has client apps in any platform that the content is accessed through. You can't simply access Netflix without those, so they're also "entry points", just not at the transport level. If Netflix wised up (which I hope they don't), they may very well enforce regional lockout through a lot of (usually hard to change) system parameters that broadcast a specific device is in a specific country or restricted region (PAL, NTSC anyone?). They just have to look them up and filter there. When I say hard to change, I'm of course referring to consumer electronics OS's (i.e. NOT PCs but PS3/4, STBs, Smart TVs, Mobile Phones or even routers...). Of course there would still be workarounds, but using a VPN is becoming a much easier "workaround" than, say, flash US firmware for a EU TV model/SetTopBox... you know the drill. Getting a VPN configured on a router is not nearly as hard and risky than flashing your TV, nor does it have a on/off switch for that flashing either like you can disable a VPN on demand.
I guess whatever device we're talking about here has had limited scope until this wearable/beacon/smart bubble started. We effectively have known that specific devices (think: a clock, a fridge, an AC unit) did and still do very specific things, and until now we see them doing those things clearly, not transparently, because they are usually one-task devices. So what point was there really in open-sourcing that stuff or requiring any form of software-bound compliance? Not much really.
Now that we're getting super smart watches that are basically computers, with a lot more IO into and from our immediate lives, we need to start caring what they run and who they share with, but to me this is just the smartwatch getting closer to the router in effective "influence" on our privacy, security, and other GPL-centered concerns. Whatever has been said about software for computers, that started applying to servers, routers, set-top-boxes at some point, can now apply to all "hardware", because, well, that hardware runs and does what a generic-purpose personal computer runs and does. And then some, if you add all those sensors, it gets access to a lot more stuff than those Spring Break pictures you're embarrassed about. Richard Stallman needs not say one thing
Off-topic: why is this article's tone sound like RMS is no longer alive or active?
You can't ask for currency to have perks that you like to have in open source software and hardware (or any intelectual property for that matter). Currency is a special case of ownership, usually "supported" by governments, or on the larger scale, supported by levels of trust between governments (or groups of governments) that use specific currencies, or even levels of trust between organizations whose value is tied to a given currency.
When you ask for "support" and decentralized at the same time, you're implying that decentralized currency is broken from the start, because ensuring intended behavior (i.e. "supporting") is _centralizing_ control: I am not, in any way, biased to the use of golden standard, but the golden standard was THE best possible "support" a currency should ever have - 1 dollar would always have the exact same value in gold, because even though "new" gold might stop flowing eventually, the only 3 things the dollar user could be certain of, at medium to long term (long term being 2 to 3 human lifespans), were (1.) that gold becomes gradually harder to mine/find, yet (2.) not hard enough that it fluctuates faster than you can buy it back in actual physical gold, at a reasonable rate, before becoming completely broke, and finally (3.) that the entire world should never apply rule 2. all at once (i.e., society would prevent itself from mass gold-runs) because the reppercussions of doing so are obviously harmful to the correct function of society as it's known.
The reason bitcoin has come this far is because it effectively emulates 1. and 2. to quasi-perfection in a digital perspective, and further expands 3. by having a built in limiter to such mass in-dollar runs (network/bank/transfer latency, immediate loss of privacy, logarithmic devaluation). When you ask for support because there's this single instance mathematical loophole where everybody will be able to acquire 2 bitcoins at the cost of 1, is much the same as saying money doesn't make sense because it can be faked with a 0.001% success rate - i.e. it has no effect whatsoever if supervised closely by the end user himself, thus is a non-issue.
Recipe: How to add a full fledged, previously tested feature to a new platform without creating false expectation like guaranteeing support for all cases of such feature.
Seems pretty fair to me. Microsoft just dumps features and markets them without the least relevant release notes, such as supported titles, and then we need to resort to the ends of the internet for seeing what we should rush snipe on eBay that will most likely Not Work (tm).
There are a series of ubiquitous problems in the medication scene, thus prescription or not, they're always be controversial: having ads for ANY drug directly targeting the consumer is a bad idea and it raises (some) costs and induces in (some) trivial treatments - that's health care for you in a nutshell, nothing just works, and that's why we have doctors to steer decision, but not to take it for us. For sure one thinks people should ask doctors and pharmacists what's good for what they have, not a TV commercial, and prescription is just a formalization for prone-to-danger drugs.
The real problem is that limiting the scope of awareness to health professionals (by not marketing to consumers) is also known to cause alarming disparities: Big Pharma abuses "lobbying" all kinds of professionals into their products not by conscience but by introducing benefits to promoters - paid vacation, luxurious conferences and product presentations in fancy hotels with all paid up, commissions for regional sale success, or even direct influence in professional development. They all play a part in Big Pharma's marketing strategy for any drug, a lot more than direct consumer influence.
I'd rather they make supervision measures of these problems stricter than just taking action on consumer-centric marketing. A good example for something people need awareness about is LASIK: most doctors won't prescribe it, it's not good for the spectacles industry and for insurers to pay up, but most people would have reduced quality of life if it wasn't their own initiative to request for LASIK operations.
You want process in software development, you start with industry standard, and that's still Scrum. Unless your project only has 10x programmers (who will get a sprint's worth of features done in a day no matter what). For those types, the better process will always be no process at all. That's the magic behind the genius: nobody understands it, it Just Works. And so does Scrum for the rest of the world.
Maybe they want to show off - "hey US of A, this is how you do stealth right without spending millions on a proprietary coating that just doesn't work (TM)". Or maybe it's just bait-and-switch - publishing some theory backed science lacking non-obvious vulnerabilities, inducing the user to actually put something that can be easily detectable on their planes. Seems a lot cheaper than developing specialized detection technology, and even if it has no effect, it probably cost them almost 0 to try.
Slashdot Mirror
Wanna make sure your data doesn't get collected? Unplug from the network while using it, and do a factory reset each time you want to connect to the WWW. Want to develop something on it? Do exactly the same sans the factory reset - they will never have access to source code. How exactly are they supposed to use some app that wasn't uploaded to their servers? I see nowhere you're forced to provide source or even binaries. They might be able to use it legally, but how they acquire it is a whole 'nother story, a story that probably has lawsuit vectors all around it in favor of the developer (i.e. you, not Occulus). And by the way, I doubt the companies that have Occulus-compatible apps and games available right now abode to the same "can use for free" type of terms. They surely have paid licenses with very specific royalties involved, so I'm guessing if you don't publish in their platform and abide to further ToS's, you're golden. But that's the real difficulty, can you develop outside their ecosystem like you can with Kinect?
If an analyst is overwhelmed with data by querying any single person's name, I imagine it won't be difficult to charge anybody with anything at all just because "DATA". Talk about abuse of power and authoritarian regimes - pick a person, pick a crime, pick circumstantial evidence from the big bad pool of "content", as Snowden puts it, and there you have it: reasonable suspicion à la carte.
Can't help but guess the reason why they lose 'most of the time' is precisely because they don't need to be painted to the public as criminals - if a business is induced by the state to incur in practices most of its client-base would condemn, but these practices are done under cover of darkness, there's really no reason (other than an ethical one) to even attempt to fight such demands. And pragmatically, why would you spend money to defend your customers' rights when they were the same customers who elected officials that in turn stripped away those rights... (I'm being ironic - we all know law is ever changing and only through continuous scrutiny, even in lower courts such as the Apple case, can the people be defended from abuse of something that was initially considered fair).
I'm just happy with the fact I mentioned 3 of the things they addressed on my comment back then: a request for transparency, the separation of adblock and sensible ads technologically and economically, and the fact they now publicly assume they want to make money out of the free tool they provide, in the controlled space they get from its usage. Like, you know, Google didn't do for the longest time about their collection of data.
Glad to see my comment here hit a nerve and probably had some influence on this. Transparency is clearly the way to go, with the clarity that the company wants a monetizing strategy. We all want to make money, so it only makes sense to admit it and explain why and how, especially when you provide services that affect stuff so broad such as consumer rights.
Wow. That is some serious sniffing around. No wonder Gates has no quarry with the FBI demands on Apple... Great article mate. I'll definitely be waiting for the next chapter on your antics with them.
Best thing is they're probably gonna be served directly from Microsoft servers, making it impossible to block through host blacklisting without losing anything actually useful, like security patches. But oh, well, the setting does exist. The wider problem here is the amount of people who they will reach out of the fact they simply aren't savvy enough to disable them, much like most Google opt outs. Either that or the setting itself filled with WARNING screens saying how much they lose disabling it, pretty much mitigating the soul count turning that crap off out of fear. It's mesmerizing the lenght companies will go instilling the notion that ads are good for all of us. Get a fukin clue
Beautiful words.
I'm really appreciating the depth of your commentaries (I'm guessing you're the other AC that posted before on my comment), so I advise you to create an account, even if disposable one, just so I know who I am replying with. Otherwise I might think your commentaries are some sort of really-damn-good algorithm for replying to highly rated comments on /. On the other hand, your speech does look the part of someone who doesn't want to create accounts for posting comments, so there's that :P
I was just stating my assumption of what this "expansion" might really mean. I, for one, think the right to be forgotten is something that, like in real life, will never enter full effect as the actual "users" of the right will still pop up in other databases or even popular knowledge that they are what they want to be forgotten about. And my generic opinion about half-measures - they are cumbersome, useless, and ultimately trivial. And this is coming from a European citizen that has had mild cases of wanting something written off the social web/tv etc.
It's a lot to commit in a country where their popularity and brand won't be as "heard" as in lax media censorship-bound locations. Then again, it's a market where having 10% share is enough to break-even that billion, real easy, as soon as the ride-share thingie gains full traction (pun intended).
This is particularly thrilling to hear right after a binge watch of Battlestar Galactica (TRS)'s season 1-2. NO NETWORKING ALLOWED!
Sounds to me there will still be one company or 2 left for the DoD to request services to (for billions of dollars of course). Then they'll just force every US company to us that encryption instead of foreign tech for most stuff that needs to go to/from a citizen-bound device. Seems to be somebody is gonna get very rich, and everyone will be very secure from everyone else but the government itself.
The right itself should only apply to EU citizens, per my understanding. So this should mean people from non-EU countries should still not be able to get "forgotten" approval. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).
If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.
Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.
And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.
Amazing legal jurisdiction insight. I actually read this on a Guardian article, and I'm appalled they had no mention on this whatsoever. News papers today.
Netflix has client apps in any platform that the content is accessed through. You can't simply access Netflix without those, so they're also "entry points", just not at the transport level. If Netflix wised up (which I hope they don't), they may very well enforce regional lockout through a lot of (usually hard to change) system parameters that broadcast a specific device is in a specific country or restricted region (PAL, NTSC anyone?). They just have to look them up and filter there. When I say hard to change, I'm of course referring to consumer electronics OS's (i.e. NOT PCs but PS3/4, STBs, Smart TVs, Mobile Phones or even routers...). Of course there would still be workarounds, but using a VPN is becoming a much easier "workaround" than, say, flash US firmware for a EU TV model/SetTopBox... you know the drill. Getting a VPN configured on a router is not nearly as hard and risky than flashing your TV, nor does it have a on/off switch for that flashing either like you can disable a VPN on demand.
I bet the guys at the big china great firewall dev team are laughing their arses off.
I just made the exact same remark in my comment :D
I guess whatever device we're talking about here has had limited scope until this wearable/beacon/smart bubble started. We effectively have known that specific devices (think: a clock, a fridge, an AC unit) did and still do very specific things, and until now we see them doing those things clearly, not transparently, because they are usually one-task devices. So what point was there really in open-sourcing that stuff or requiring any form of software-bound compliance? Not much really.
Now that we're getting super smart watches that are basically computers, with a lot more IO into and from our immediate lives, we need to start caring what they run and who they share with, but to me this is just the smartwatch getting closer to the router in effective "influence" on our privacy, security, and other GPL-centered concerns. Whatever has been said about software for computers, that started applying to servers, routers, set-top-boxes at some point, can now apply to all "hardware", because, well, that hardware runs and does what a generic-purpose personal computer runs and does. And then some, if you add all those sensors, it gets access to a lot more stuff than those Spring Break pictures you're embarrassed about. Richard Stallman needs not say one thing
Off-topic: why is this article's tone sound like RMS is no longer alive or active?
You can't ask for currency to have perks that you like to have in open source software and hardware (or any intelectual property for that matter). Currency is a special case of ownership, usually "supported" by governments, or on the larger scale, supported by levels of trust between governments (or groups of governments) that use specific currencies, or even levels of trust between organizations whose value is tied to a given currency.
When you ask for "support" and decentralized at the same time, you're implying that decentralized currency is broken from the start, because ensuring intended behavior (i.e. "supporting") is _centralizing_ control: I am not, in any way, biased to the use of golden standard, but the golden standard was THE best possible "support" a currency should ever have - 1 dollar would always have the exact same value in gold, because even though "new" gold might stop flowing eventually, the only 3 things the dollar user could be certain of, at medium to long term (long term being 2 to 3 human lifespans), were (1.) that gold becomes gradually harder to mine/find, yet (2.) not hard enough that it fluctuates faster than you can buy it back in actual physical gold, at a reasonable rate, before becoming completely broke, and finally (3.) that the entire world should never apply rule 2. all at once (i.e., society would prevent itself from mass gold-runs) because the reppercussions of doing so are obviously harmful to the correct function of society as it's known.
The reason bitcoin has come this far is because it effectively emulates 1. and 2. to quasi-perfection in a digital perspective, and further expands 3. by having a built in limiter to such mass in-dollar runs (network/bank/transfer latency, immediate loss of privacy, logarithmic devaluation). When you ask for support because there's this single instance mathematical loophole where everybody will be able to acquire 2 bitcoins at the cost of 1, is much the same as saying money doesn't make sense because it can be faked with a 0.001% success rate - i.e. it has no effect whatsoever if supervised closely by the end user himself, thus is a non-issue.
Recipe: How to add a full fledged, previously tested feature to a new platform without creating false expectation like guaranteeing support for all cases of such feature.
Seems pretty fair to me. Microsoft just dumps features and markets them without the least relevant release notes, such as supported titles, and then we need to resort to the ends of the internet for seeing what we should rush snipe on eBay that will most likely Not Work (tm).
There are a series of ubiquitous problems in the medication scene, thus prescription or not, they're always be controversial: having ads for ANY drug directly targeting the consumer is a bad idea and it raises (some) costs and induces in (some) trivial treatments - that's health care for you in a nutshell, nothing just works, and that's why we have doctors to steer decision, but not to take it for us. For sure one thinks people should ask doctors and pharmacists what's good for what they have, not a TV commercial, and prescription is just a formalization for prone-to-danger drugs.
The real problem is that limiting the scope of awareness to health professionals (by not marketing to consumers) is also known to cause alarming disparities: Big Pharma abuses "lobbying" all kinds of professionals into their products not by conscience but by introducing benefits to promoters - paid vacation, luxurious conferences and product presentations in fancy hotels with all paid up, commissions for regional sale success, or even direct influence in professional development. They all play a part in Big Pharma's marketing strategy for any drug, a lot more than direct consumer influence.
I'd rather they make supervision measures of these problems stricter than just taking action on consumer-centric marketing. A good example for something people need awareness about is LASIK: most doctors won't prescribe it, it's not good for the spectacles industry and for insurers to pay up, but most people would have reduced quality of life if it wasn't their own initiative to request for LASIK operations.
Read my title. Says it all.
You want process in software development, you start with industry standard, and that's still Scrum. Unless your project only has 10x programmers (who will get a sprint's worth of features done in a day no matter what). For those types, the better process will always be no process at all. That's the magic behind the genius: nobody understands it, it Just Works. And so does Scrum for the rest of the world.
Maybe they want to show off - "hey US of A, this is how you do stealth right without spending millions on a proprietary coating that just doesn't work (TM)". Or maybe it's just bait-and-switch - publishing some theory backed science lacking non-obvious vulnerabilities, inducing the user to actually put something that can be easily detectable on their planes. Seems a lot cheaper than developing specialized detection technology, and even if it has no effect, it probably cost them almost 0 to try.