Once again, would it be fair to exploit your lack of knowledge?
The bigger problem here is that not everyone knows enough about locking their stuff down and they never will. It is an unreasonable expectation.
No - it's not an unreasonable expectation. They may be surprised by how public they've been all along. I understand the feelings of shock and anger that can entail. But at the end of the day, the unreasonable expectation was that anything these people were doing in the clear on an unencrypted network was private.
At any given moment, your guard may be down even if most of the time it is not. Is it then okay to exploit you when your guard is down for any reason at all? This is the basic question at the core of this issue. "Is it okay to prey upon the ignorance of the masses?"
The very same systems I mentioned that Google spiders also contain controls that keep a certain amount of content private within said communities. If Google started running exploits against un-patched software to allow their bots to spider this content, you might have a point. But that isn't the case with my sites. Google's bots are only accessing what I have allowed anyone to access.
Now - if Google manages to index a personal file from one of those sites, it's my own fault. I can be embarrassed about it. And if I were less understanding of the technology, I might even feel upset and angry at Google. But I doubt anyone would claim that Google has exploited my lack of knowledge and placed an unreasonable expectation on me.
Keep in mind that, as far as I've read so far, Google is not indexing data from these wireless networks. They are picking it up as a byproduct of mapping them out. I've done the same countless times while wardriving using Kismet. Usually I just dump the directories. Once in awhile I'll go see what it was I've picked up. The vast majority is unintelligible junk - parts of a TCP session that has no interest. Once I picked up someone in a marina looking up a boat parts supplier web site. Another time, I picked up the credentials for a POP account. If I really wanted to get more data of that sort, I'd be better off coming back to the insecure networks and camping out for awhile. It doesn't sound like this is what Google is doing.
"Unencrypted data" is therefore an open invitation?
I don't know where encryption works in to any of this, but yes. You broadcast unencrypted signals, you shouldn't be upset if someone has the gall to listen in.
And if you REALLY think your position is valid, I can only believe that everything you have is encrypted and that everything you do is hidden and that you are not vulnerable to anything.
My wireless network is encrypted. My personal files are on a system on my own network. None of this is open to the public. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I run some personal sites dedicated to various hobbies / interests. Some of that content is open to the public. It would be silly for me to get upset and claim those files are there just for me and my hobby community and Google's spiders have no business crawling it (which they do). It'd be even more foolish for me to put my personal files there.
I'm sorry - did I say that copyright didn't exist? No. I did. And I tossed in some other intellectual property like trademark as well. And I noted that copying in defiance to these laws was, in fact, illegal.
I mean - nice rant. Don't get me wrong. But you might want to save it up for an appropriate time. This is not that time. Nowhere do I say anyone isn't entitled to reward. I'm not advocating abolishing intellectual property laws. Your rant is moot.
You're taking intellectual property, as evidenced by the copyright present on every game.
Game, set, match.
Well, yes. Game, set, match if we're talking about property. But the niggling little fact here is that you're talking "intellectual property". The term intellectual property is a nice catch-all for a numerous rights (and more to the point, restrictions) defined by law. Your rights to do something (that others are restricted from doing) should not be confused with real property or personal property - which tend to involve physical objects in one form or another. The problem is, "intellectual property" has many proponents who are trying very hard to confuse people and blur the line.
Incidentally, when I make an unauthorized copy of a game, I'm not taking intellectual property. The intellectual property owner still maintains their intellectual property. I have not removed from them their copyright, trademark, etc. They still maintain them. What I've done is make a copy in direct conflict with the laws that restrict me from doing so. That's very much illegal (fair use aside) but it is not theft.
Which is all fine as long as there's property being taken. And that's the problem with "identity theft". What we're really talking about is fraud - it doesn't become theft until bank accounts are accessed, you drive off with your marks' car, etc.
As for linking "identity theft" to "piracy" - they're pretty different animals. The only comparison I'd be comfortable making is calling them both misnomers.;)
I ran a LAN party at a neighborhood community center quite a few years ago without Internet access. We showed up on site with everything needed (and I did have my own wireless if I really, really needed to grab something we forgot). We ran out power, network, two stand-alone game servers, and a stand-alone file server that had all maps, patches, model packs, etc. needed for the games we were going to play. Granted - I would have rather had a link to work with and did kind of miss it. But it went off very well without it. The facility worked out really well for us and the facility managers were surprised at how well the event went over (they didn't know about LAN parties when we first asked them about renting the facility).
I'm sorry to see LAN options go as it seems to me a loss of flexibility - even if it's an option I don't use as much these days.
Okay, I'll bite. If DRM can't last, why is it still common more than 3 decades into the PC era?
DRM hasn't been around for 3 decades. Copy protection schemes have been and as it's been noted, they run through the industry in waves. DRM is related to copy protection but there is much more to it.
So why does the concept keep coming and going? Good question. My entirely uneducated guess is that it's natural to see unauthorized copies as money that didn't end up in your pocket and to try and solve that with technical fixes. But if you watch the industry tackling these fixes, you see constant shifting as each scheme is abandoned for the next one that promises to be much better than the previous one. Some get off that treadmill and do the unthinkable - publish without the latest scheme. In a lot of ways, the game industry is like the rest of the IT industry.
Reply to Google thanking them for policing the internet, but that your application does not violate any laws.
Yup. That's pretty much how the DMCA is supposed to work. Notice is filed with the service provider. Service provider yanks complained-about material and notifies the material's publisher. Material's publisher writes back that they believe they are entitled to publish material. Service provider puts the material back up. Notice filer can then go after the publisher directly if they think there's a case.
Don't tell me that people buy stolen creds and log into them just to take all their e-loot (worth thousands of e-dollars)?
It's about cold, hard cash. The e-loot and e-dollars are worth hard currency; mainly because you can trade e-dollars for it. From a somewhat aged article on the BBC in 2007:
Research by security firm Symantec suggests that the raw value of a WoW account is now higher than a credit card and its associated verification data.
One card can be sold for up to $6 (£3) suggests Symantec, but a WoW account will be worth at least $10. An account that has several high level characters associated with it could be worth far more as the gold and rare items can be sold for real cash.
Corry Doctrow has even turned the concept in to a novel called For The Win (far more fictional than educational - but there are echoes of reality to be found).
According to cannon, Johnny was assassinated before Case came along, so Keanu shouldn't be in it anyway. But that leaves us with an unpalatable Dina Meyer as Molly (or Jane as she was known in the movie). I think I'll lie down now.
I remember reading an interview with Gibson some time ago where he talked about the Johnny Mnemonic movie. He noted that he kept Molly out of the screenplay because that character showed up in multiple novels and he didn't want the studio to have any rights to the character. So no problem. Jane is not Molly. On purpose.
I have no fear of my privacy being violated by Google because I don't see any reason why someone should be particularly interested about me. In Google's eyes I'm just a statistic. My personal data is no more important to anyone than the data about millions of other consumers.
If your information has no value - why is it being stored?
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
At one point, storage was expensive so one had to be somewhat selective in what information is kept; the vast majority was discarded. But we are now getting to a point that storage is so cheap that the threshold of value for any given piece of information is likely low enough to warrent saving anything that can be collected. But collecting information is only part of it. At one point, massive amounts of information would pose it's own problem - how to process it. There was safety in numbers - numerical anonymity. However, we are also at a point where processing power is so cheap that we can effectively chew through massive amounts of information and pull out interesting information that was either recorded or gleaned from patterns in what was recorded. In fact, in many cases, the more information you have to work with, the better. You may not be very interesting to anyone right now. But that doesn't mean you'll never be interesting to anyone ever. At that point, your recorded history will rise above the level of background noise and present itself as part of a valuable service.
You believe you are anonymous as you walk down the crowded street. But that is simply because most of us lack the resources to make use of what you're presenting to the public. A trained professional can determine various things based on your appearance. An informed individual can identify you by your face. A well-placed observer can track your behavior and piece together additional information on those patterns. Your anonymous persona slowly unravels and we have the beginnings of a movie script.
Of course, the physical world is (currently) hard to work with in this context. Yet it is often given this sort of treatment. Look up the US military's concept of Essential Elements of Friendly Information (and bask in the Cold War aura). Meanwhile, the digital world we interact with is created on information systems designed to do these very things with the data that we present to it.
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Become The Hammer.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
And that's all because a very small subset of information was actually classified SECRET. CAMS shouldn't have anything classified on it (and in fact, in SandLand we did CAMS via satalite Intranet). But certain parts and passages of your T.O. did. Along those lines, your DCS had removable drives that were marked SECRET because, via the STU-III, it contained (roughly) the same secrets in your T.O.s. And your DCS never touched a network that didn't come in via that STU-III (although I was able to get ours to telnet out in to the wild internet via a secure connection with a contractor - something I don't expect would happen today).
The fascinating thing about "fragmentation" is that it's a problem we just made up. Apple's Mac line, let alone the Windows world, have more hardware and software diversity in one minute than Android has all year. Yet no one goes around suggesting that "fragmentation will hurt the PC market's long term chances of success."
Actually - that's long been a claim of the Mac faithful. The Wintel world was just too complex due to no control over hardware. Apple's world was a comfortably controlled world of predictable product lines. This is just re-application of the same mindset to a new market.
is it too much to ask for a tablet to run a real operating system?!?! the slate had a chance to rise up, now it's just going to be another oversized under-capable phone a la worthless iPad. fire the CTO that made this decision.
Why? Why do you want a "real" operating system? Why do you need something so full featured? The Apple and the iPad faithful would have you believe that the iPad is taking over general purpose computing. That the "PC" world is fearful of the shift. This is wishful thinking and marketing smoke-and-mirrors.
The reality is that the iPad (and up-and-coming similar products) are streamlined information ("content" if you will) delivery platforms. It's the right interface for specific tasks. It isn't the right interface for all tasks. A full feature OS is not required in this environment and, in fact, likely a complete mis-match for what this interface is good at (not that I wouldn't mind the ability to extend said OS as desired).
Living in a border city, we cross several times a year from Windsor to Detroit (shopping, sporting events, etc) and each and every time we enter the US my ass puckers up. I HATE entering the states even though I have absolutely nothing to hide... it's brutal.
Brutal? What are you subject to? I'm curious to see if your experiences are much different than mine when I fly domestic.
No - not pedantry. You called it something that it wasn't. You didn't say it was LIKE something. You said it WAS something. And then you started to talk about text ads. Now you're making the comparison. Pity you didn't take the time to form a coherent point earlier.
But your data lives in the cloud -- GMail, Flickr, Facebook, etc. have all the content you've generated, and thepiratebay et al. have all the pr0n that was clogging your hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, would it be fair to exploit your lack of knowledge?
The bigger problem here is that not everyone knows enough about locking their stuff down and they never will. It is an unreasonable expectation.
No - it's not an unreasonable expectation. They may be surprised by how public they've been all along. I understand the feelings of shock and anger that can entail. But at the end of the day, the unreasonable expectation was that anything these people were doing in the clear on an unencrypted network was private.
At any given moment, your guard may be down even if most of the time it is not. Is it then okay to exploit you when your guard is down for any reason at all? This is the basic question at the core of this issue. "Is it okay to prey upon the ignorance of the masses?"
The very same systems I mentioned that Google spiders also contain controls that keep a certain amount of content private within said communities. If Google started running exploits against un-patched software to allow their bots to spider this content, you might have a point. But that isn't the case with my sites. Google's bots are only accessing what I have allowed anyone to access.
Now - if Google manages to index a personal file from one of those sites, it's my own fault. I can be embarrassed about it. And if I were less understanding of the technology, I might even feel upset and angry at Google. But I doubt anyone would claim that Google has exploited my lack of knowledge and placed an unreasonable expectation on me.
Keep in mind that, as far as I've read so far, Google is not indexing data from these wireless networks. They are picking it up as a byproduct of mapping them out. I've done the same countless times while wardriving using Kismet. Usually I just dump the directories. Once in awhile I'll go see what it was I've picked up. The vast majority is unintelligible junk - parts of a TCP session that has no interest. Once I picked up someone in a marina looking up a boat parts supplier web site. Another time, I picked up the credentials for a POP account. If I really wanted to get more data of that sort, I'd be better off coming back to the insecure networks and camping out for awhile. It doesn't sound like this is what Google is doing.
"Unencrypted data" is therefore an open invitation?
I don't know where encryption works in to any of this, but yes. You broadcast unencrypted signals, you shouldn't be upset if someone has the gall to listen in.
And if you REALLY think your position is valid, I can only believe that everything you have is encrypted and that everything you do is hidden and that you are not vulnerable to anything.
My wireless network is encrypted. My personal files are on a system on my own network. None of this is open to the public. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I run some personal sites dedicated to various hobbies / interests. Some of that content is open to the public. It would be silly for me to get upset and claim those files are there just for me and my hobby community and Google's spiders have no business crawling it (which they do). It'd be even more foolish for me to put my personal files there.
I'm sorry - did I say that copyright didn't exist? No. I did. And I tossed in some other intellectual property like trademark as well. And I noted that copying in defiance to these laws was, in fact, illegal.
I mean - nice rant. Don't get me wrong. But you might want to save it up for an appropriate time. This is not that time. Nowhere do I say anyone isn't entitled to reward. I'm not advocating abolishing intellectual property laws. Your rant is moot.
You're taking intellectual property, as evidenced by the copyright present on every game.
Game, set, match.
Well, yes. Game, set, match if we're talking about property. But the niggling little fact here is that you're talking "intellectual property". The term intellectual property is a nice catch-all for a numerous rights (and more to the point, restrictions) defined by law. Your rights to do something (that others are restricted from doing) should not be confused with real property or personal property - which tend to involve physical objects in one form or another. The problem is, "intellectual property" has many proponents who are trying very hard to confuse people and blur the line.
Incidentally, when I make an unauthorized copy of a game, I'm not taking intellectual property. The intellectual property owner still maintains their intellectual property. I have not removed from them their copyright, trademark, etc. They still maintain them. What I've done is make a copy in direct conflict with the laws that restrict me from doing so. That's very much illegal (fair use aside) but it is not theft.
Which is all fine as long as there's property being taken. And that's the problem with "identity theft". What we're really talking about is fraud - it doesn't become theft until bank accounts are accessed, you drive off with your marks' car, etc.
As for linking "identity theft" to "piracy" - they're pretty different animals. The only comparison I'd be comfortable making is calling them both misnomers. ;)
I ran a LAN party at a neighborhood community center quite a few years ago without Internet access. We showed up on site with everything needed (and I did have my own wireless if I really, really needed to grab something we forgot). We ran out power, network, two stand-alone game servers, and a stand-alone file server that had all maps, patches, model packs, etc. needed for the games we were going to play. Granted - I would have rather had a link to work with and did kind of miss it. But it went off very well without it. The facility worked out really well for us and the facility managers were surprised at how well the event went over (they didn't know about LAN parties when we first asked them about renting the facility).
I'm sorry to see LAN options go as it seems to me a loss of flexibility - even if it's an option I don't use as much these days.
Fair point. Identity "theft" is just as much a misnomer as "piracy".
Okay, I'll bite. If DRM can't last, why is it still common more than 3 decades into the PC era?
DRM hasn't been around for 3 decades. Copy protection schemes have been and as it's been noted, they run through the industry in waves. DRM is related to copy protection but there is much more to it.
So why does the concept keep coming and going? Good question. My entirely uneducated guess is that it's natural to see unauthorized copies as money that didn't end up in your pocket and to try and solve that with technical fixes. But if you watch the industry tackling these fixes, you see constant shifting as each scheme is abandoned for the next one that promises to be much better than the previous one. Some get off that treadmill and do the unthinkable - publish without the latest scheme. In a lot of ways, the game industry is like the rest of the IT industry.
Reply to Google thanking them for policing the internet, but that your application does not violate any laws.
Yup. That's pretty much how the DMCA is supposed to work. Notice is filed with the service provider. Service provider yanks complained-about material and notifies the material's publisher. Material's publisher writes back that they believe they are entitled to publish material. Service provider puts the material back up. Notice filer can then go after the publisher directly if they think there's a case.
Don't tell me that people buy stolen creds and log into them just to take all their e-loot (worth thousands of e-dollars)?
It's about cold, hard cash. The e-loot and e-dollars are worth hard currency; mainly because you can trade e-dollars for it. From a somewhat aged article on the BBC in 2007:
Corry Doctrow has even turned the concept in to a novel called For The Win (far more fictional than educational - but there are echoes of reality to be found).
Really? Who would that be? It wasn't whoever did the Johnny Mnemonic movie - there was no Molly in that.
According to cannon, Johnny was assassinated before Case came along, so Keanu shouldn't be in it anyway. But that leaves us with an unpalatable Dina Meyer as Molly (or Jane as she was known in the movie). I think I'll lie down now.
I remember reading an interview with Gibson some time ago where he talked about the Johnny Mnemonic movie. He noted that he kept Molly out of the screenplay because that character showed up in multiple novels and he didn't want the studio to have any rights to the character. So no problem. Jane is not Molly. On purpose.
I have no fear of my privacy being violated by Google because I don't see any reason why someone should be particularly interested about me. In Google's eyes I'm just a statistic. My personal data is no more important to anyone than the data about millions of other consumers.
If your information has no value - why is it being stored?
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
At one point, storage was expensive so one had to be somewhat selective in what information is kept; the vast majority was discarded. But we are now getting to a point that storage is so cheap that the threshold of value for any given piece of information is likely low enough to warrent saving anything that can be collected. But collecting information is only part of it. At one point, massive amounts of information would pose it's own problem - how to process it. There was safety in numbers - numerical anonymity. However, we are also at a point where processing power is so cheap that we can effectively chew through massive amounts of information and pull out interesting information that was either recorded or gleaned from patterns in what was recorded. In fact, in many cases, the more information you have to work with, the better. You may not be very interesting to anyone right now. But that doesn't mean you'll never be interesting to anyone ever. At that point, your recorded history will rise above the level of background noise and present itself as part of a valuable service.
You believe you are anonymous as you walk down the crowded street. But that is simply because most of us lack the resources to make use of what you're presenting to the public. A trained professional can determine various things based on your appearance. An informed individual can identify you by your face. A well-placed observer can track your behavior and piece together additional information on those patterns. Your anonymous persona slowly unravels and we have the beginnings of a movie script.
Of course, the physical world is (currently) hard to work with in this context. Yet it is often given this sort of treatment. Look up the US military's concept of Essential Elements of Friendly Information (and bask in the Cold War aura). Meanwhile, the digital world we interact with is created on information systems designed to do these very things with the data that we present to it.
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
Great. Now some *AA is busy working on a study to show how much Google PAC-MAN cost them in sales. Way to go (don't expect to get paid for the idea though).
Become The Hammer.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dull troll.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSloW2coCDQ
And that's all because a very small subset of information was actually classified SECRET. CAMS shouldn't have anything classified on it (and in fact, in SandLand we did CAMS via satalite Intranet). But certain parts and passages of your T.O. did. Along those lines, your DCS had removable drives that were marked SECRET because, via the STU-III, it contained (roughly) the same secrets in your T.O.s. And your DCS never touched a network that didn't come in via that STU-III (although I was able to get ours to telnet out in to the wild internet via a secure connection with a contractor - something I don't expect would happen today).
The fascinating thing about "fragmentation" is that it's a problem we just made up. Apple's Mac line, let alone the Windows world, have more hardware and software diversity in one minute than Android has all year. Yet no one goes around suggesting that "fragmentation will hurt the PC market's long term chances of success."
Actually - that's long been a claim of the Mac faithful. The Wintel world was just too complex due to no control over hardware. Apple's world was a comfortably controlled world of predictable product lines. This is just re-application of the same mindset to a new market.
is it too much to ask for a tablet to run a real operating system?!?! the slate had a chance to rise up, now it's just going to be another oversized under-capable phone a la worthless iPad. fire the CTO that made this decision.
Why? Why do you want a "real" operating system? Why do you need something so full featured? The Apple and the iPad faithful would have you believe that the iPad is taking over general purpose computing. That the "PC" world is fearful of the shift. This is wishful thinking and marketing smoke-and-mirrors.
The reality is that the iPad (and up-and-coming similar products) are streamlined information ("content" if you will) delivery platforms. It's the right interface for specific tasks. It isn't the right interface for all tasks. A full feature OS is not required in this environment and, in fact, likely a complete mis-match for what this interface is good at (not that I wouldn't mind the ability to extend said OS as desired).
Living in a border city, we cross several times a year from Windsor to Detroit (shopping, sporting events, etc) and each and every time we enter the US my ass puckers up. I HATE entering the states even though I have absolutely nothing to hide... it's brutal.
Brutal? What are you subject to? I'm curious to see if your experiences are much different than mine when I fly domestic.
They're not features until they get documented.
Wait... they're easter eggs?
No - not pedantry. You called it something that it wasn't. You didn't say it was LIKE something. You said it WAS something. And then you started to talk about text ads. Now you're making the comparison. Pity you didn't take the time to form a coherent point earlier.
But your data lives in the cloud -- GMail, Flickr, Facebook, etc. have all the content you've generated, and thepiratebay et al. have all the pr0n that was clogging your hard drive.
The cloud is not a truck.
I know of a certain company in Redmond that sold vulnerabilities in bulk packages. They seem to be doing alright.
They didn't sell vulnerabilities. Those were features - added at no additional cost. Loss-leaders, if you will.