CyanogenMod is still an open source, clean version of Android. They are also going to offer Cyanogen OS which will include additions, especially from Microsoft. They are doing this on the side to make some money.
TFA doesn't say that. Like you, I also worry that the change could mean an end of Google allowing rooting and boot unlocking but there is no specific indication that I am aware of yet that this will happen. So it's just speculation unless you have another source.
While you are probably right, I have no problem it this as long as Google continues to offer terms of service which allow rooting and replacement of the OS with an alternative such as CyanogenMod. Current Nexus models are among the easiest to set up with CyanogenMod because you don't actually have to crack them to do it. There is also much less risk of bricking the device.
The possibility of people using encryption that can't be cracked by the government has been part of the bargain since the beginning. Thomas Jefferson understood this better than anyone since he was actually one of the foremost cryptographers of his time. His mechanical encryption device, Jefferson disk , (or close derivatives of it) were used by the US military up to WW II.
Indeed, after talking to a lot of people recently about Facebook, I am impressed at how many have an account because of peer pressure. These people mostly say that they don't log on very often and when they do, they just check items about events and never post anything. So the support for Facebook is very broad but also very shallow.
Regarding antitrust laws, I think there have been different attitudes at different times in history. In fact, I think we are building towards a populist movement now which could lead to a round of trust busting like we haven't seen since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. A lot sentiment has been pro-business but that has been changing. I hope that it changes to pro-free market and trust busting supports the free market.
Privacy can be taken back. You may have lost control of your existing data but that doesn't mean you can't protect yourself going forward. Besides, privacy is a complex family of issues and I there are a lot of aspects which aren't dead yet or which could get a lot worse. We have not yet come to a point where people are tracked with facial recognition (and other identifying technologies) everywhere they go in the physical world. We have not yet come to the point where our DNA is analyzed to discover what marketing strategies we are susceptible to. We have also yet to really explore the idea of symmetry of information. That is, the right to know all about the people who know all about you.
Indeed, but keep in mind that the federal government is not the only concern. Government also includes state/provincial, local and foreign. There are also corporate interests, malicious insiders in these companies who may feed data to scammers and ordinary users with access to your feed who may apply some kind of algorithm of their own.
Most of us, who are actually experts in the field, use R for number crunching. Bench scientists, who know enough about bioinformatics to be dangerous, crunch their numbers in Excel.
Yes that's exactly the problem. I am one of a small minority of computational biologists who use PostgreSQL for gene expression profiling, DNA sequencing and related work. PostgreSQL interacts very well with R, the most important tool for analyses in my field. Besides the data conversion issue with Excel, it also introduces the issue of "misaligning" data. You frequently have to put together information from multiple sources, especially public databases, and merge them into one table. A lot of people take these data from different sources sort them in Excel and then cut and paste them together. This is referred to as "aligning data." This is prone to error "misaligning data." The thing is that there is almost always a common value, such as an official gene symbol or an official protein identifier which are primary keys from their source databases. So the better way to do this operation is with a database join. SQL does, in fact, make many processes in bioinformatics both easier to do and more accurate at the same time. By the way, foreign key constraints have saved me from major blunders in data processing on several occasions. Imagine that.
Papers are mostly reviewed by senior researchers, such as the head of research labs, and they seldom have more than a basic working knowledge of bioinformatics. They are not supposed to show the papers under review to anyone because they are sensitive pre-publication materials. That precludes seeking help from their own staff expert on the topic. On top of that, there is frequently a natural language barrier as well as a technical understanding barrier between the senior researcher and the local bioinformatics expert. The result is that these analyses go largely unchallenged. It is actually true, more often than not, that tables and figures from gene expression profiling experiments, for example, are not reproducible using only the information published in the paper. In fact, the methods section related to such analyses frequently don't even make sense. You have to contact the author and talk directly to the person who did the analyses to get the straight story.
That would be peer pressure. The fact that many people feel coerced into having social media (especially Facebook) accounts is the reason which I have stood up to the peer pressure and refused to have an account. I do it to support the right of people to have privacy. Quite the opposite of what people say, you actually have to be a Mister Clean and not someone with something to hide to resist having social media accounts.
Actually, it seems to me that the makeup of this board is geared towards damage control and being able to sue whoever hacks them. One of the big picture items from Edward Snowden's leak is that, not only does the NSA believe that the best defense is a good offense, they believe that many aspects of cyber defense are hopeless. Clinton, of all people, would know this so the DNC may well have concluded that they can't avoid being hacked so they have decided to be ready to clean up when it happens.
Right, this is an item which you pay for. People defending all this invasion of privacy often say that the point is to get things for free. In practice, however, I have found that free things are more likely to respect your privacy. This is especially true of software. Take, for example, Android apps for GPS navigation. Garmin Navigon costs $49 (last I looked) which is expensive for an Android app. It wants access to all kinds of things which don't seem necessary for it's function. They have an excuse for access to the camera. It's to tell you if you are driving in the correct lane. I don't know what their excuse is for needing access to your contacts list. In contrast, the free app, Mapfactor Navigator, only asks for access to the things you would expect and it has a much better privacy policy.
I've said this before but it needs to be said again. The benefits of a thermostat being an Internet of things device as opposed to a LAN-only device is minimal. The main benefit to these smarter thermostats is just that you can configure them from a web page. This is easier than the older ones with a tiny LCD screen and a small number of buttons. The thing is that many devices such as printers and broadband routers have embedded web pages that demonstrate how you can handle configuration web pages internally. There is no need to connect outside your LAN for this. Really, the only thing that an IoT design allows on top of this is the ability to change settings from anywhere without having to set up a method to get into your local network such as a VPN server (many broadband routers today include one), a service like GoToMyPC or SSH tunneling. I really doubt that this ability to change thermostat settings from anywhere in the world is that useful to most people. You loose security and privacy. The real point of the IoT design is to allow the external site to collect data about you. They can probably infer when you are home or away and when you are awake or asleep from the thermostat data. Are those costs really worth the benefits?
I am increasingly using plain old cash or gift cards in person, in physical stores. I am increasingly using Bitcoin and gift cards for online purchases. This is both for security and privacy reasons and there are even reasons besides privacy and security to use gift cards. There are various sites which will sell you gift cards at a discount from their actual value. There is also GL Scrip. They provide a fund raising method for various charities. The idea is that the charity works with them to sell gift cards and receive a percentage of the purchase price. The donation actually comes from the merchant who the gift card is for and they all give different percentages. Since I am associated with one such charity, I regularly write them checks for gift cards for places where I shop regularly. I have been remarkably free from physical junk mail and get less spam email than most people I know. My consistent efforts to protect my privacy both online and off is certainly a major part of that. When I mention privacy concerns to people, the knee jerk reaction is to think that I am worried about the government but really corporations are a significant concern as well. It's not just junk mail. I think that there is also a danger, particularly on the web, of the content you see being biased by what sites know about you. That could include news stories, political messages and even the prices you see for goods.
I think there are two main reasons to agree with Microsoft. In legal terms, there is long established case law that Fourth Amendment protections apply equally to renters as well as property owners. Microsoft is in the same position with respect to on-line assets as a landlord is to physical property. The landlord has to respect the tenant's privacy.
In terms of public expectations, I have discussed the issue of technical privacy concerns with non-technical people on many occasions and they expect the software vendors, on-line providers and other experts to protect them. That includes Microsoft. There is a popular belief among technical people that ordinary people must not care about their privacy because they do nothing to protect it. However, when I have pressed ordinary people to explain why they don't protect their own privacy, it boils down to two things. First, they don't know how to do id and presume any technical measure they take on their own behalf is likely to fail. Also, they presume that the experts have reviewed license agreements and privacy policies and won't let anything too outrageous stand for long. Second, many people are afraid that any (probably ineffective) measure they take to protect their own privacy is only likely to draw attention to them as someone who has something to hide. So, according to what I see, the consensus is that experts should be the ones to protect privacy and these protection measures should apply to everyone by default.
I don't know about Spotify, but Facebook is violating the privacy of people who are not their customers. They build facial recognition profiles of everyone in photos uploaded to Facebook, just in case the non-members might join some day. Their facial recognition database is, of course, far too valuable to just use in-house. I'm sure they plan to sell access to federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign agencies and companies.
I think that, to some extent, this telemetry and ad targeting is a sort of arms race. People only have so much money you can influence them to spend one way or another. Unless we set some limits, it's a race to the bottom to see who is best at invading people's privacy. From the point of view of the marketers, it's not really that they need the absolute best information on the potential customer. They just need better information then competing marketing firms have. Of course, it's important to point out that the sale of information can be for purposes other than targeting ads. I'm sure they will sell to anyone who will pay. This could be someone doing research, state and local law enforcement, foreign intelligence agencies, etc.
Actually, I really prefer things the way they are with the political ads I'm getting being in Spanish. I'm into salsa dancing but I don't actually speak Spanish... well, I know enough to recognize what "los politicos" means but not much more than that.
From TFA, it sounds like the headline here should be more like "Microsoft Acknowledges But Does Not Respond To Allegations That Windows 10 Collects Excessive Personal Data."
One of the traditional advantages of P2P is that it is possible to with no preset limit for the size of messages, including attachments. IIRC, Skype has had that ability in the past. The thing is that I don't know of any centralized client-server system, even cloud based, that has not implemented some limit on the size of messages you can send. In addition to being silent about privacy, this article (at least) does not say anything one way or the other about introducing size limits.
My main machine is a Mac Pro running El Capitan but I don't actually use the El Capitan environment much. I keep it very locked down. I have a virtual machine (actually a clone of my old machine) running Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) which is now dedicated to email, calendar and social networking. The reason is that Apple dropped functionality, involving the interaction of mail and iCal (yes that's iCal, not Calendar), which was important to me and you can't run the old stuff on the new OS. A second VM is dedicated for financial and medical transactions. In other words, on line banking, stock brokerage, IRA accounts and making medical appointments through my providers web site and storing information related to these activities. This one is running Debian 8 and is set up with full disk encyrption within the VM. While shut down, the info is locked up tight and I can continue to use the machine for other purposes. A third VM, also running Debian 8, is for general web surfing where I don't know where I'll end up. I have a Windows XP VM which I rarely use anymore. I thought about upgrading to Win 7 but I just don't tolerate that Microsoft #@&&$%+~ as much as I used to. Maybe Windows 11 will be okay... I have a private cloud calendar server (DAViCal) running on FreeBSD. I mostly just sync devices while connected to my local LAN but another, very locked down, FreeBSD VM serves as an SSH tunneling gateway to my internal network.
I agree that lots of excuses have been used to infringe on civil rights. What I think is different is that terrorism is a more effective excuse to make broader changes for a longer period of time than the other excuses. So that's what I think the OP meant by "complete breakdown" rather than a partial breakdown. I don't think, myself, that it really is a complete breakdown but I do think it's the worst yet, affecting the most people at a time when technology has increased the stakes.
Right, the convention is to end Polish names with "ski" and Russian with 'sky," so Snowdensky would be the Russianized version. Also, interesting that the OP mentioned polonium, which is named after Poland (by Marie Curie who was Polish and who discovered the element). On top of that, Poland would probably be a better place for a Russian equivalent of Snowden to seek asylum. Among other things, it would make the Poles think about the fact that their constitution was written with privacy provisions specifically to prevent a high tech version of the Soviet Union.
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CyanogenMod is still an open source, clean version of Android. They are also going to offer Cyanogen OS which will include additions, especially from Microsoft. They are doing this on the side to make some money.
TFA doesn't say that. Like you, I also worry that the change could mean an end of Google allowing rooting and boot unlocking but there is no specific indication that I am aware of yet that this will happen. So it's just speculation unless you have another source.
While you are probably right, I have no problem it this as long as Google continues to offer terms of service which allow rooting and replacement of the OS with an alternative such as CyanogenMod. Current Nexus models are among the easiest to set up with CyanogenMod because you don't actually have to crack them to do it. There is also much less risk of bricking the device.
The possibility of people using encryption that can't be cracked by the government has been part of the bargain since the beginning. Thomas Jefferson understood this better than anyone since he was actually one of the foremost cryptographers of his time. His mechanical encryption device, Jefferson disk , (or close derivatives of it) were used by the US military up to WW II.
I suppose the Apple car will be kind of like the original iPod - just a steering wheel with one button in the center and no other controls.
Indeed, after talking to a lot of people recently about Facebook, I am impressed at how many have an account because of peer pressure. These people mostly say that they don't log on very often and when they do, they just check items about events and never post anything. So the support for Facebook is very broad but also very shallow.
Regarding antitrust laws, I think there have been different attitudes at different times in history. In fact, I think we are building towards a populist movement now which could lead to a round of trust busting like we haven't seen since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. A lot sentiment has been pro-business but that has been changing. I hope that it changes to pro-free market and trust busting supports the free market.
Privacy can be taken back. You may have lost control of your existing data but that doesn't mean you can't protect yourself going forward. Besides, privacy is a complex family of issues and I there are a lot of aspects which aren't dead yet or which could get a lot worse. We have not yet come to a point where people are tracked with facial recognition (and other identifying technologies) everywhere they go in the physical world. We have not yet come to the point where our DNA is analyzed to discover what marketing strategies we are susceptible to. We have also yet to really explore the idea of symmetry of information. That is, the right to know all about the people who know all about you.
Indeed, but keep in mind that the federal government is not the only concern. Government also includes state/provincial, local and foreign. There are also corporate interests, malicious insiders in these companies who may feed data to scammers and ordinary users with access to your feed who may apply some kind of algorithm of their own.
Most of us, who are actually experts in the field, use R for number crunching. Bench scientists, who know enough about bioinformatics to be dangerous, crunch their numbers in Excel.
Yes that's exactly the problem. I am one of a small minority of computational biologists who use PostgreSQL for gene expression profiling, DNA sequencing and related work. PostgreSQL interacts very well with R, the most important tool for analyses in my field. Besides the data conversion issue with Excel, it also introduces the issue of "misaligning" data. You frequently have to put together information from multiple sources, especially public databases, and merge them into one table. A lot of people take these data from different sources sort them in Excel and then cut and paste them together. This is referred to as "aligning data." This is prone to error "misaligning data." The thing is that there is almost always a common value, such as an official gene symbol or an official protein identifier which are primary keys from their source databases. So the better way to do this operation is with a database join. SQL does, in fact, make many processes in bioinformatics both easier to do and more accurate at the same time. By the way, foreign key constraints have saved me from major blunders in data processing on several occasions. Imagine that.
Papers are mostly reviewed by senior researchers, such as the head of research labs, and they seldom have more than a basic working knowledge of bioinformatics. They are not supposed to show the papers under review to anyone because they are sensitive pre-publication materials. That precludes seeking help from their own staff expert on the topic. On top of that, there is frequently a natural language barrier as well as a technical understanding barrier between the senior researcher and the local bioinformatics expert. The result is that these analyses go largely unchallenged. It is actually true, more often than not, that tables and figures from gene expression profiling experiments, for example, are not reproducible using only the information published in the paper. In fact, the methods section related to such analyses frequently don't even make sense. You have to contact the author and talk directly to the person who did the analyses to get the straight story.
That would be peer pressure. The fact that many people feel coerced into having social media (especially Facebook) accounts is the reason which I have stood up to the peer pressure and refused to have an account. I do it to support the right of people to have privacy. Quite the opposite of what people say, you actually have to be a Mister Clean and not someone with something to hide to resist having social media accounts.
Actually, it seems to me that the makeup of this board is geared towards damage control and being able to sue whoever hacks them. One of the big picture items from Edward Snowden's leak is that, not only does the NSA believe that the best defense is a good offense, they believe that many aspects of cyber defense are hopeless. Clinton, of all people, would know this so the DNC may well have concluded that they can't avoid being hacked so they have decided to be ready to clean up when it happens.
Right, this is an item which you pay for. People defending all this invasion of privacy often say that the point is to get things for free. In practice, however, I have found that free things are more likely to respect your privacy. This is especially true of software. Take, for example, Android apps for GPS navigation. Garmin Navigon costs $49 (last I looked) which is expensive for an Android app. It wants access to all kinds of things which don't seem necessary for it's function. They have an excuse for access to the camera. It's to tell you if you are driving in the correct lane. I don't know what their excuse is for needing access to your contacts list. In contrast, the free app, Mapfactor Navigator, only asks for access to the things you would expect and it has a much better privacy policy.
I've said this before but it needs to be said again. The benefits of a thermostat being an Internet of things device as opposed to a LAN-only device is minimal. The main benefit to these smarter thermostats is just that you can configure them from a web page. This is easier than the older ones with a tiny LCD screen and a small number of buttons. The thing is that many devices such as printers and broadband routers have embedded web pages that demonstrate how you can handle configuration web pages internally. There is no need to connect outside your LAN for this. Really, the only thing that an IoT design allows on top of this is the ability to change settings from anywhere without having to set up a method to get into your local network such as a VPN server (many broadband routers today include one), a service like GoToMyPC or SSH tunneling. I really doubt that this ability to change thermostat settings from anywhere in the world is that useful to most people. You loose security and privacy. The real point of the IoT design is to allow the external site to collect data about you. They can probably infer when you are home or away and when you are awake or asleep from the thermostat data. Are those costs really worth the benefits?
I am increasingly using plain old cash or gift cards in person, in physical stores. I am increasingly using Bitcoin and gift cards for online purchases. This is both for security and privacy reasons and there are even reasons besides privacy and security to use gift cards. There are various sites which will sell you gift cards at a discount from their actual value. There is also GL Scrip. They provide a fund raising method for various charities. The idea is that the charity works with them to sell gift cards and receive a percentage of the purchase price. The donation actually comes from the merchant who the gift card is for and they all give different percentages. Since I am associated with one such charity, I regularly write them checks for gift cards for places where I shop regularly. I have been remarkably free from physical junk mail and get less spam email than most people I know. My consistent efforts to protect my privacy both online and off is certainly a major part of that. When I mention privacy concerns to people, the knee jerk reaction is to think that I am worried about the government but really corporations are a significant concern as well. It's not just junk mail. I think that there is also a danger, particularly on the web, of the content you see being biased by what sites know about you. That could include news stories, political messages and even the prices you see for goods.
I think there are two main reasons to agree with Microsoft. In legal terms, there is long established case law that Fourth Amendment protections apply equally to renters as well as property owners. Microsoft is in the same position with respect to on-line assets as a landlord is to physical property. The landlord has to respect the tenant's privacy.
In terms of public expectations, I have discussed the issue of technical privacy concerns with non-technical people on many occasions and they expect the software vendors, on-line providers and other experts to protect them. That includes Microsoft. There is a popular belief among technical people that ordinary people must not care about their privacy because they do nothing to protect it. However, when I have pressed ordinary people to explain why they don't protect their own privacy, it boils down to two things. First, they don't know how to do id and presume any technical measure they take on their own behalf is likely to fail. Also, they presume that the experts have reviewed license agreements and privacy policies and won't let anything too outrageous stand for long. Second, many people are afraid that any (probably ineffective) measure they take to protect their own privacy is only likely to draw attention to them as someone who has something to hide. So, according to what I see, the consensus is that experts should be the ones to protect privacy and these protection measures should apply to everyone by default.
I don't know about Spotify, but Facebook is violating the privacy of people who are not their customers. They build facial recognition profiles of everyone in photos uploaded to Facebook, just in case the non-members might join some day. Their facial recognition database is, of course, far too valuable to just use in-house. I'm sure they plan to sell access to federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign agencies and companies.
I think that, to some extent, this telemetry and ad targeting is a sort of arms race. People only have so much money you can influence them to spend one way or another. Unless we set some limits, it's a race to the bottom to see who is best at invading people's privacy. From the point of view of the marketers, it's not really that they need the absolute best information on the potential customer. They just need better information then competing marketing firms have. Of course, it's important to point out that the sale of information can be for purposes other than targeting ads. I'm sure they will sell to anyone who will pay. This could be someone doing research, state and local law enforcement, foreign intelligence agencies, etc.
Actually, I really prefer things the way they are with the political ads I'm getting being in Spanish. I'm into salsa dancing but I don't actually speak Spanish... well, I know enough to recognize what "los politicos" means but not much more than that.
From TFA, it sounds like the headline here should be more like "Microsoft Acknowledges But Does Not Respond To Allegations That Windows 10 Collects Excessive Personal Data."
One of the traditional advantages of P2P is that it is possible to with no preset limit for the size of messages, including attachments. IIRC, Skype has had that ability in the past. The thing is that I don't know of any centralized client-server system, even cloud based, that has not implemented some limit on the size of messages you can send. In addition to being silent about privacy, this article (at least) does not say anything one way or the other about introducing size limits.
My main machine is a Mac Pro running El Capitan but I don't actually use the El Capitan environment much. I keep it very locked down. I have a virtual machine (actually a clone of my old machine) running Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) which is now dedicated to email, calendar and social networking. The reason is that Apple dropped functionality, involving the interaction of mail and iCal (yes that's iCal, not Calendar), which was important to me and you can't run the old stuff on the new OS. A second VM is dedicated for financial and medical transactions. In other words, on line banking, stock brokerage, IRA accounts and making medical appointments through my providers web site and storing information related to these activities. This one is running Debian 8 and is set up with full disk encyrption within the VM. While shut down, the info is locked up tight and I can continue to use the machine for other purposes. A third VM, also running Debian 8, is for general web surfing where I don't know where I'll end up. I have a Windows XP VM which I rarely use anymore. I thought about upgrading to Win 7 but I just don't tolerate that Microsoft #@&&$%+~ as much as I used to. Maybe Windows 11 will be okay... I have a private cloud calendar server (DAViCal) running on FreeBSD. I mostly just sync devices while connected to my local LAN but another, very locked down, FreeBSD VM serves as an SSH tunneling gateway to my internal network.
I agree that lots of excuses have been used to infringe on civil rights. What I think is different is that terrorism is a more effective excuse to make broader changes for a longer period of time than the other excuses. So that's what I think the OP meant by "complete breakdown" rather than a partial breakdown. I don't think, myself, that it really is a complete breakdown but I do think it's the worst yet, affecting the most people at a time when technology has increased the stakes.
Right, the convention is to end Polish names with "ski" and Russian with 'sky," so Snowdensky would be the Russianized version. Also, interesting that the OP mentioned polonium, which is named after Poland (by Marie Curie who was Polish and who discovered the element). On top of that, Poland would probably be a better place for a Russian equivalent of Snowden to seek asylum. Among other things, it would make the Poles think about the fact that their constitution was written with privacy provisions specifically to prevent a high tech version of the Soviet Union.