I was handed the role of pseudo project manager to make sure the developer stayed on course with the project's due date.
...
Needless to say I want to ask for more money, as well as more resources (as well as a better title that fits my roles), but what is the best way to go about this?
You have been in the role of PM, so you got to have enough people skill by now, why don't you "just" go ahead and really ask your boss for more money? Of course, I understand it is more than "just" go and ask, you need to be prepared, that's where the 2nd part comes in: always keep an eye out for another job.
Without keeping an eye on the job market, you wouldn't know how much you can get from another job. "Keeping an eye out" doesn't mean you apply for any job that looks like a match, but you need to know what people pay for someone doing what you have been/are doing now.
Equipped with knowledge of the market, you can honestly and confidently approach your boss and say "I have been doing role X for the past Y months and it seems I will continue to do so in the near future. I think it would be best if my job title and compensation would be adjusted accordingly. I understand that in the market, role X usually pays around $XXX-XXX. It would be acceptable to me if my pay is adjusted to similar levels."
If your boss say no, accept gracefully and end the meeting, no need to argue. DON'T play any tricks or sabotage your work. Do your job as you always had, that's what being "professional" is about. BUT actively seek another job immediately, and make no fuss about it. When you found another job that pays what you want, jump ship ASAP without regrets. Don't waste time with your current boss even if he offers to pay more now, he has just proven to you that he won't be giving you any raise unless you leave, you wouldn't want to do that again in 2-3 years' time.
What if you are unable to find another job that pays what you want? That means you really are asking too much. Either reduce what you have asking for, or accept your current job with the understanding you are not underpaid.
Whatever outcome, you will have no need to resent your situation anymore. That will be good.
Trying imagining if RIAA did this instead of Google. They sent out trucks worldwide, silently capturing/recording unencrypted wifi data and correlate with GPS coordinates, for 3 full years.
Go ahead and read all the posts in defense of Google, replace "Google" with "RIAA" and see what you think about it. Now you understand how powerful Google's PR is for polishing such an image that so many people will forgive whatever wrong they did.
Note to self: find out which company did Google's PR, be careful of any other company using the same PR firm.
Just because you can't see it and you can't hear it in no way means that it is private. It's like the RIAA driving around in a car with the windows down blasting tunes and suing anyone within earshot... The only thing a user with a non-encrypted wi-fi access point should have a reasonable assumption of is the lack of security.
So you are fine if RIAA hires someone to wiretap on your internet connection and record everything you sent? After all, it is your fault for not encrypting your wired traffic.
You are ok if RIAA also wiretap your phone too? Since you don't encrypt your voice, you should assume lack of security there also. (Don't give me wiretapping laws here, as you have no problem ignoring EU privacy laws in your argument).
Did you use an encrypted cell phone? If no, then you are ok if RIAA capture your cellphone conversations too?
See? It works both ways. I am sure if this whole debacle was done by RIAA, the whole/. would be screaming bloody murder by now.
I got admit that Google's Reality Distortion Field is on par with Jobs'.
It has been repeatedly reported and posted here on/. that the whole thing was exposed because of an audit German authorities did to check if Google complied with their privacy laws. Yet there are no end of posters who still thinks that Google come clean by themselves.
In case that still didn't get through:
Google was caught by German authorities in an audit then they finally admitted they stored the wifi data.
Try repeat this until it gets through Google's RDF.
They got caught with their hand inside the cookie jar, anyone more mature than a 3 year old will know that more lying in that situation will not be a good idea.
It s obvious (to me) that the point is future iPhone displays will improve on the aspects other than resolution, ie they may have higher contrast, faster refresh rate, more color depth (if that is even meaningful), but will likely NOT be higher resolution.
That is important cuz, if really true, iPhone devs don't have to worry about more res changes for iPhone 5, 6, 7, etc.
Other poster had made an excellent analogy to CD quality audio. After CD uses 22KHz sampling, you don't see subsequent audio standards trying to keep on increasing the sampling rate. Rather, the race becomes smaller file size and better quality.
There isn't anything inherently illegal about what they did, unfortunately.
WRONG. EU has it own, different from the US, privacy laws. It is precisely because what Google did is illegal in EU that the German authorities is involved.
To all who advocate deleting the data, repeat after me:
The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.
Repeat this until it finally occurs to you that destroying evidence when you know it will likely wind up in court is a very bad idea. . Judges usually don't like defendents who destroy incriminating evidence, especially after the authorities already knew of it's existence and has asked for it to be turned over.
If I sneaked into your home and copied your diary, then put the copy in a safe. Then when the police found this out and asked for me to give the keys to them, the correct response is NOT to burn everything in the safe to "protect your privacy".
Compare with Android - Google doesn't audit the code at all, but the programs do run in a Java VM which will prevent the program from doing operations it doesn't have permissions for. Permissions required for the program are displayed on installation.
This is exactly what I mean, treating the Android phone as a general purpose PC.
You expect Joe grandma will understand what "permission" she should "grant" to a newly installed app? Would she even understand what it means? Much less what implication for each permission, or combination of permissions means? How about you company's receptionist? You think she will understand that?
Did I ever said the Android is less secure than the iPhone? Arguing about which one is more secure is missing the point, or is a strawman that detracts from the point.
The point is if you want your users to treat the Android as a general purpose PC (ie know enough to avoid installing trojans), then you don't understand what most* people want from a smartphone. The last thing I want from my phone is the cost of ownership of a general purpose PC.
*"most" as evident from the huge sales numbers of iPhone.
You missed the point. General users don't care about what advance users cannot do. If you want a phone that you can install whatever you want, don't buy the iPhone.
Secondly, whether by genius, pure luck, reality distortion field, crazy app store policy or whatever, Apple has successfully created the iPhone as a platform that can consistently delivery the intended appliance-like user experience.
In contrast, it doesn't matter that you can write 2 papers or win every Slashdot argument that the Android is, in theory, just secure as the iPhone. When users cannot buy from the app store because his country is not supported, when users can only install pirated app because of that (and thus opening the opportunity for trojans), and when apps his friend told him about is invsible because of different OS version, it erodes the user's experience.
Added on that, you got developers who thinks a user installing a trojan is his own fault, implying the user is responsible for learning to use the phone as a general purpose PC, then the phone failed to behave as an appliance, it lost its value for users look for an appliance.
I am an Android developer--- and this article is fail. If a user just installs whatever app--- giving it whatever permissions to their phone.. how is this any different from a stupid user installing an app on their PC/MAC that has a trojan built in?
And that's exactly why you and many/.ers cannot see the value proposition of the iPhone. For you, the Andriod phone is just a smaller PC, a general purpose computer, so if a user don't know enough not to install trojans, that's the users problem.
But to the users, the phone is an appliance, that is used daily and contain lots of private information. The last thing I want is for it to crash or got trojan leaking my data. If the cost of that is I have to subject to Apple's arbitrary rules, cannot run flash, may miss out a few "cool" apps, and may not use the hardware to the fullest possibility, then so be it. I would still be using a 2G dumb phone if none of the phones in the market can give me that value.
Similarly, I gladly accept the restrictions on my PS3 in exchange for eliminating most kinds of cheating (aimbots, etc) in online multiplayer games.
As a user, I don't care if I am not using the hardware to the fullest possibility, what I care is what kind of value proposition the product is giving me.
Big problem with this logic, the peeping tom could just as easily make duplicates of the photos.And having the police confiscate them means nothing because of it and the police have no way of knowing if he did.
So on the point of privacy, does it matter either way if the peeping tom have hidden a copy somewhere? How can any 3rd party be sure the copy destroyed is the only copy?
However, for the prosecution POV, how do you propose the DA to present the case to the judge if they don't even have a copy of the pictures? "Your honor, we are sure the peeping tom has broken the law, but for the subject's privacy, we decide to delete all the evidence immediately. However, we did get a confession out from the suspect, so that was just as good!" Good luck in finding a judge who will buy that.
And there is a big difference between someone actually owning up to their mistakes and one who hides it.
Owning up my a$$. Google was caught by German authorities while going through the audit process to show they didn't broken Germany laws. If not for that audit, we would probably be still in the dark about this, and Google would still be happily collecting and analyzing those data.
Law enforcement has no LEGAL need for this information. And if they wanted to make sure the information they collected was truly accidental, they would be looking at the equipment and not the data to begin with. The ONLY uses the government has for this information is not legal in nature.
You must be an expert in EU privacy laws to reach this stunning conclusion when all the authorities involved are still only at the investigation phase trying to find out exactly the extent of law violation (if any) Google has committed, and what the next step should be.
Your simplistic view of how court system works notwithstanding, the normal course the things is to PRESERVE the evidence of such cases while investigation is going on.
Hasn't google already conceded said data exists and was accidently collected? If they've already publically admitted it exists, keeping it around only worsens and extends any possible privacy violations.
Wow. Just, wow.
Has it ever occurred to you that when someone (even Google) broke the law, it may come one day when it will go before a court, and the judge would possibly like to see the evidence from the prosecution before giving a guilty verdict? And the judge would possibly also like to see the extent of the violation when he consider the penalty for the guilty party?
Is it that hard a concept to understand? The data is EVIDENCE in this case, you don't go about destroying evidence in the normal course of things.
The proper response for Google is NOT to delete the data, but to immediately freeze those data by putting them in a safe and forbids all employee access to it, until the time comes when the authorities either press charge, or drop the charges. If the charges are dropped, THEN Google should go ahead to delete the data.
So what's the point of the order to keep it, then? If this data is so unimportant and un-sensitive, then who cares anyway?
How about as evidence to proof Google violated the law in court?
Isn't that the whole analogy with corp spy about, and the purpose as evidence part was explicitly spelled out in the post as well.
Really, this is quite a unique experience for me! To see, first hand, where otherwise technically competent people suddenly unable to understand simple things (i.e. illegally collected data is evidence) when it contradicts with their beliefs (Government==bad, and Google can do no wrong).
Let's consider this scenario: I'm diagnosing some problem with my wireless network, setting my radio to promiscuous mode and recording the results. I happen to record a few minutes' worth of traffic from the access point of you, my next door neighbor.
See if your analogy still make sense if you add the following:
1. You have been recording for the past 3 years' data from my access point, instead of a few minutes, and you have been processing those data for the whole time instead of just letting them sit there. Kind of hard to say you are not aware of those data are there for the whole time, huh?
2. For the sake of argument, there are relevant laws in your country that exactly prohibits such recording. (you may consider, as example, covertly recording telephone conversations in countries that requires consent from both parties)
3. Turning yourself in means sending what you recorded to the relevant authorities, != every 3 letter agencies you can imagine.
Still unconvinced? Consider another analogy:
A peeking tom living nearby has been secretly taking pictures of your daughter for the past 3 years. And (for the sake of argument) there are local laws that forbids exactly this kind of tracking/following/photo-taking activity. Now you find this out, but you have no idea what kind of pictures have been taken, you confronted the peeping tom and he promised to delete all the pictures.
Do you prefer to:
a) To protect your daughter's privacy, let the peeping tom delete all the pictures, trust him that he will actually do it.
b) To protect your daughter's privacy, call the police, knowing that they will need to take the pictures as evidence to prosecute the peeping tom?
You are arguing for (a), that may be the right answer for you, but don't judge others arguing for (b) as "wrong".
except that the wifi data is a drop in the bucket compared to the camera data... When they are collecting 10-100GB of image data, the variance in JPEG compression size of that data is probably more than all the WIFI data that they might have collected.
Are we to believe that the same processing steps are used to process both the camera data AND the wifi data, that they would not be separated (with appropriate markers correlating them) and processed by different processes? Isn't that common sense given that camera data (i.e. pictures) and wifi packets are wholly different type data and require different processing?
And are we to believe that everybody up and down the stream processing the wifi data won't notice the extra bulk of data coming in?
Come on, guys! This is/.! We are supposed to be technically competent people here! If you are going to make excuses, at least make some technically sound ones!
So in government-land, the way to fix the problem of data accidentally collected is to order that said data be KEPT, instead of immediately deleted??
If you caught a corporate spy trying to leave your company premise with a USB drive containing "accidentally collected" company data, do you also immediately wipe out the USB drive? No, you would have KEPT the drive to use as evidence and for further investigation to proof exactly what had happened and how the data got there.
That is just plain common sense.
The Google fanboys in/. are really amazing, you guys(*) would even advocate destroying evidence when Google broke the law!
(* - there are many other posts saying the data should be immediately deleted, even before any investigation is made)
The difference here is that they actually intercepted data by mistake.
Do you work for Google and personally know everyone involved in collecting the data? If not, it is quite a big leap of faith to make that assertion.
If you use Kismet (probably the best wireless sniffing tool for Linux), you can set it to not save data packets, only beacon packets (which really have all the data that Google needs), but by default, it saves everything, including any data packets it sees (encrypted or unencrypted).
And are we also to believe that nobody noticed how fast the disks are filling up (geez, wouldn't you think they made an estimate on how much disk they need before the project started?), and everybody up and down the data processing chain did NOT notice the extra bulk of data when they analyze them? ("Gee! I expected only 200M per day, but I run through 2G of data for the day but still only got 200M worth of results? Wouldn't we speed up the process if we collect less junk? Let's see what's the junk data are...")
It might be easy to swallow if it happened in the government or the people involved are minimum wage joe sixpacks. This happening in a company that specializes in mining and correlating huge amounts of data, which is also famously for hiring only the brightest, smartest and creative employees, it take a lot of faith to believe this can be an "accident".
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon
Blaming the messenger is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is what the topic is about -- most people won't accept information that contradict their existing beliefs.
If what you say contradict with some people's belief, most of those people won't understand what you said no matter how good a job you did at communicating clearly with them. In short, people don't understand sometime often because they have a vested interest in NOT understanding it.
High tech equipment? Where have you been the past few years? Most new video cameras nowadays record in 1080p HD already, and when I watch youtube, I select 1080p when possible.
There is also a big difference between doing something a few times in discrete cases, or doing it wholesale automatically.
Most people won't object to individual police seeing their license plate on the street, but many will object to city-wide automatic cameras identifying and recording license plates into a big database.
Some people (but not me) won't be much bothered by someone possibly recording their conversations as you have done, but most will object to companies wholesale recording all phone conversations to/from their phones. Similarly, most people would find it offensive if you told them you also kept a voice recorder on, so anything they told you would be recorded, all the time.
Most people won't be bothered if Google recorded a few wifi packets near their office, but many will find it an invasion of privacy for Google to run a car around the city and wholesale recording wifi packets they received.
That is exactly what the EU privacy laws is intended to prevent, and Google did exactly broke that law. Saying that people should encrypt their wifi is just blaming the victim, no different that saying that girls caught in upskirt cameras should have worn pants if they don't want people peeking under.
Why didn't they just do this in the first place? Why muck about with wholly unproven methods? They should have sealed this thing up weeks ago. They greed and attempts to keep the well usable are a fucking disgrace.
Who modded this insightful?!?!
Have you ever tried to fix a downed server, which if you just reboot it just go down again? So after trying 4-5 different approaches, you finally found the cause the fixed it. So, now your boss asks you, "Why didn't you do what works in the first place? Why muck about with unproven methods? We could have the server up and running hours ago!"
False. Nobody's doing that, and if they are it doesn't hurt Apple.
Wrong, it would hurt Apple if most iPad was sold to people putting them in ebay.
Apple spend $$$ to coordinate ad campaigns to make people go and buy iPads. If most iPad were bought by people who resell them in ebay, it makes most people unable to buy them, and that effectively wasted Apple's ad $$$. Some people may buy from ebay, some may wait, but some may decide to buy something else instead. That means less sales for Apple.
Also, people wanting the iPad cannot get one means that they also don't get to brag or show-off the iPad to friends, and that means less word-of-mouth spreading for Apple, and also less sales.
I don't know who modded you troll, but you are 100% correct. In Canada (I'm sure USA is exactly the same), if you are standing on public property (or property you own or have been given permission to be on) then you can take any damn photograph you want.
Including taking underskirt photos of girls walking pass? Or snapping pictures of girls' washrooms/changing room through a partly opened window from the public street, even though you might need to use a rod to prop the camera 10ft high from the ground?
Are there really so many posters in/. who cannot understand what "decency" means? It doesn't mean "anything you can get away with", or "anything that other people didn't use technical means to prevent you from doing".
A girl wearing a skirt instead of pants doesn't mean it is ok to peek underneath. An unencrypted network doesn't mean the owner is ok with Google reading the data, much less recording and storing it permanently. That's what "privacy" is about.
Slashdot Mirror
I was handed the role of pseudo project manager to make sure the developer stayed on course with the project's due date.
...
Needless to say I want to ask for more money, as well as more resources (as well as a better title that fits my roles), but what is the best way to go about this?
You have been in the role of PM, so you got to have enough people skill by now, why don't you "just" go ahead and really ask your boss for more money? Of course, I understand it is more than "just" go and ask, you need to be prepared, that's where the 2nd part comes in: always keep an eye out for another job.
Without keeping an eye on the job market, you wouldn't know how much you can get from another job. "Keeping an eye out" doesn't mean you apply for any job that looks like a match, but you need to know what people pay for someone doing what you have been/are doing now.
Equipped with knowledge of the market, you can honestly and confidently approach your boss and say "I have been doing role X for the past Y months and it seems I will continue to do so in the near future. I think it would be best if my job title and compensation would be adjusted accordingly. I understand that in the market, role X usually pays around $XXX-XXX. It would be acceptable to me if my pay is adjusted to similar levels."
If your boss say no, accept gracefully and end the meeting, no need to argue. DON'T play any tricks or sabotage your work. Do your job as you always had, that's what being "professional" is about. BUT actively seek another job immediately, and make no fuss about it. When you found another job that pays what you want, jump ship ASAP without regrets. Don't waste time with your current boss even if he offers to pay more now, he has just proven to you that he won't be giving you any raise unless you leave, you wouldn't want to do that again in 2-3 years' time.
What if you are unable to find another job that pays what you want? That means you really are asking too much. Either reduce what you have asking for, or accept your current job with the understanding you are not underpaid.
Whatever outcome, you will have no need to resent your situation anymore. That will be good.
Trying imagining if RIAA did this instead of Google. They sent out trucks worldwide, silently capturing/recording unencrypted wifi data and correlate with GPS coordinates, for 3 full years.
Go ahead and read all the posts in defense of Google, replace "Google" with "RIAA" and see what you think about it. Now you understand how powerful Google's PR is for polishing such an image that so many people will forgive whatever wrong they did.
Note to self: find out which company did Google's PR, be careful of any other company using the same PR firm.
Just because you can't see it and you can't hear it in no way means that it is private.
It's like the RIAA driving around in a car with the windows down blasting tunes and suing anyone within earshot...
The only thing a user with a non-encrypted wi-fi access point should have a reasonable assumption of is the lack of security.
So you are fine if RIAA hires someone to wiretap on your internet connection and record everything you sent? After all, it is your fault for not encrypting your wired traffic.
You are ok if RIAA also wiretap your phone too? Since you don't encrypt your voice, you should assume lack of security there also. (Don't give me wiretapping laws here, as you have no problem ignoring EU privacy laws in your argument).
Did you use an encrypted cell phone? If no, then you are ok if RIAA capture your cellphone conversations too?
See? It works both ways. I am sure if this whole debacle was done by RIAA, the whole /. would be screaming bloody murder by now.
I got admit that Google's Reality Distortion Field is on par with Jobs'.
It has been repeatedly reported and posted here on /. that the whole thing was exposed because of an audit German authorities did to check if Google complied with their privacy laws. Yet there are no end of posters who still thinks that Google come clean by themselves.
In case that still didn't get through:
Google was caught by German authorities in an audit then they finally admitted they stored the wifi data.
Try repeat this until it gets through Google's RDF.
They got caught with their hand inside the cookie jar, anyone more mature than a 3 year old will know that more lying in that situation will not be a good idea.
And corporations actually breaking the law should be allowed to go free? You have quite a weird sense of justice.
It s obvious (to me) that the point is future iPhone displays will improve on the aspects other than resolution, ie they may have higher contrast, faster refresh rate, more color depth (if that is even meaningful), but will likely NOT be higher resolution.
That is important cuz, if really true, iPhone devs don't have to worry about more res changes for iPhone 5, 6, 7, etc.
Other poster had made an excellent analogy to CD quality audio. After CD uses 22KHz sampling, you don't see subsequent audio standards trying to keep on increasing the sampling rate. Rather, the race becomes smaller file size and better quality.
There isn't anything inherently illegal about what they did, unfortunately.
WRONG. EU has it own, different from the US, privacy laws. It is precisely because what Google did is illegal in EU that the German authorities is involved.
To all who advocate deleting the data, repeat after me:
The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.
Repeat this until it finally occurs to you that destroying evidence when you know it will likely wind up in court is a very bad idea. . Judges usually don't like defendents who destroy incriminating evidence, especially after the authorities already knew of it's existence and has asked for it to be turned over.
If I sneaked into your home and copied your diary, then put the copy in a safe. Then when the police found this out and asked for me to give the keys to them, the correct response is NOT to burn everything in the safe to "protect your privacy".
Compare with Android - Google doesn't audit the code at all, but the programs do run in a Java VM which will prevent the program from doing operations it doesn't have permissions for. Permissions required for the program are displayed on installation.
This is exactly what I mean, treating the Android phone as a general purpose PC.
You expect Joe grandma will understand what "permission" she should "grant" to a newly installed app? Would she even understand what it means? Much less what implication for each permission, or combination of permissions means? How about you company's receptionist? You think she will understand that?
Did I ever said the Android is less secure than the iPhone? Arguing about which one is more secure is missing the point, or is a strawman that detracts from the point.
The point is if you want your users to treat the Android as a general purpose PC (ie know enough to avoid installing trojans), then you don't understand what most* people want from a smartphone. The last thing I want from my phone is the cost of ownership of a general purpose PC.
*"most" as evident from the huge sales numbers of iPhone.
You missed the point. General users don't care about what advance users cannot do. If you want a phone that you can install whatever you want, don't buy the iPhone.
Secondly, whether by genius, pure luck, reality distortion field, crazy app store policy or whatever, Apple has successfully created the iPhone as a platform that can consistently delivery the intended appliance-like user experience.
In contrast, it doesn't matter that you can write 2 papers or win every Slashdot argument that the Android is, in theory, just secure as the iPhone. When users cannot buy from the app store because his country is not supported, when users can only install pirated app because of that (and thus opening the opportunity for trojans), and when apps his friend told him about is invsible because of different OS version, it erodes the user's experience.
Added on that, you got developers who thinks a user installing a trojan is his own fault, implying the user is responsible for learning to use the phone as a general purpose PC, then the phone failed to behave as an appliance, it lost its value for users look for an appliance.
I am an Android developer--- and this article is fail. If a user just installs whatever app--- giving it whatever permissions to their phone.. how is this any different from a stupid user installing an app on their PC/MAC that has a trojan built in?
And that's exactly why you and many /.ers cannot see the value proposition of the iPhone. For you, the Andriod phone is just a
smaller PC, a general purpose computer, so if a user don't know enough not to install trojans, that's the users problem.
But to the users, the phone is an appliance, that is used daily and contain lots of private information. The last thing I want is for it to crash or got trojan leaking my data. If the cost of that is I have to subject to Apple's arbitrary rules, cannot run flash, may miss out a few "cool" apps, and may not use the hardware to the fullest possibility, then so be it. I would still be using a 2G dumb phone if none of the phones in the market can give me that value.
Similarly, I gladly accept the restrictions on my PS3 in exchange for eliminating most kinds of cheating (aimbots, etc) in online multiplayer games.
As a user, I don't care if I am not using the hardware to the fullest possibility, what I care is what kind of value proposition the product is giving me.
Big problem with this logic, the peeping tom could just as easily make duplicates of the photos.And having the police confiscate them means nothing because of it and the police have no way of knowing if he did.
So on the point of privacy, does it matter either way if the peeping tom have hidden a copy somewhere? How can any 3rd party be sure the copy destroyed is the only copy?
However, for the prosecution POV, how do you propose the DA to present the case to the judge if they don't even have a copy of the pictures? "Your honor, we are sure the peeping tom has broken the law, but for the subject's privacy, we decide to delete all the evidence immediately. However, we did get a confession out from the suspect, so that was just as good!" Good luck in finding a judge who will buy that.
And there is a big difference between someone actually owning up to their mistakes and one who hides it.
Owning up my a$$. Google was caught by German authorities while going through the audit process to show they didn't broken Germany laws. If not for that audit, we would probably be still in the dark about this, and Google would still be happily collecting and analyzing those data.
Law enforcement has no LEGAL need for this information. And if they wanted to make sure the information they collected was truly accidental, they would be looking at the equipment and not the data to begin with.
The ONLY uses the government has for this information is not legal in nature.
You must be an expert in EU privacy laws to reach this stunning conclusion when all the authorities involved are still only at the investigation phase trying to find out exactly the extent of law violation (if any) Google has committed, and what the next step should be.
Your simplistic view of how court system works notwithstanding, the normal course the things is to PRESERVE the evidence of such cases while investigation is going on.
Hasn't google already conceded said data exists and was accidently collected? If they've already publically admitted it exists, keeping it around only worsens and extends any possible privacy violations.
Wow. Just, wow.
Has it ever occurred to you that when someone (even Google) broke the law, it may come one day when it will go before a court, and the judge would possibly like to see the evidence from the prosecution before giving a guilty verdict? And the judge would possibly also like to see the extent of the violation when he consider the penalty for the guilty party?
Is it that hard a concept to understand? The data is EVIDENCE in this case, you don't go about destroying evidence in the normal course of things.
The proper response for Google is NOT to delete the data, but to immediately freeze those data by putting them in a safe and forbids all employee access to it, until the time comes when the authorities either press charge, or drop the charges. If the charges are dropped, THEN Google should go ahead to delete the data.
So what's the point of the order to keep it, then? If this data is so unimportant and un-sensitive, then who cares anyway?
How about as evidence to proof Google violated the law in court?
Isn't that the whole analogy with corp spy about, and the purpose as evidence part was explicitly spelled out in the post as well.
Really, this is quite a unique experience for me! To see, first hand, where otherwise technically competent people suddenly unable to understand simple things (i.e. illegally collected data is evidence) when it contradicts with their beliefs (Government==bad, and Google can do no wrong).
Let's consider this scenario: I'm diagnosing some problem with my wireless network, setting my radio to promiscuous mode and recording the results. I happen to record a few minutes' worth of traffic from the access point of you, my next door neighbor.
See if your analogy still make sense if you add the following:
1. You have been recording for the past 3 years' data from my access point, instead of a few minutes, and you have been processing those data for the whole time instead of just letting them sit there. Kind of hard to say you are not aware of those data are there for the whole time, huh?
2. For the sake of argument, there are relevant laws in your country that exactly prohibits such recording. (you may consider, as example, covertly recording telephone conversations in countries that requires consent from both parties)
3. Turning yourself in means sending what you recorded to the relevant authorities, != every 3 letter agencies you can imagine.
Still unconvinced? Consider another analogy:
A peeking tom living nearby has been secretly taking pictures of your daughter for the past 3 years. And (for the sake of argument) there are local laws that forbids exactly this kind of tracking/following/photo-taking activity. Now you find this out, but you have no idea what kind of pictures have been taken, you confronted the peeping tom and he promised to delete all the pictures.
Do you prefer to:
a) To protect your daughter's privacy, let the peeping tom delete all the pictures, trust him that he will actually do it.
b) To protect your daughter's privacy, call the police, knowing that they will need to take the pictures as evidence to prosecute the peeping tom?
You are arguing for (a), that may be the right answer for you, but don't judge others arguing for (b) as "wrong".
except that the wifi data is a drop in the bucket compared to the camera data... When they are collecting 10-100GB of image data, the variance in JPEG compression size of that data is probably more than all the WIFI data that they might have collected.
Are we to believe that the same processing steps are used to process both the camera data AND the wifi data, that they would not be separated (with appropriate markers correlating them) and processed by different processes? Isn't that common sense given that camera data (i.e. pictures) and wifi packets are wholly different type data and require different processing?
And are we to believe that everybody up and down the stream processing the wifi data won't notice the extra bulk of data coming in?
Come on, guys! This is /.! We are supposed to be technically competent people here! If you are going to make excuses, at least make some technically sound ones!
So in government-land, the way to fix the problem of data accidentally collected is to order that said data be KEPT, instead of immediately deleted??
If you caught a corporate spy trying to leave your company premise with a USB drive containing "accidentally collected" company data, do you also immediately wipe out the USB drive? No, you would have KEPT the drive to use as evidence and for further investigation to proof exactly what had happened and how the data got there.
That is just plain common sense.
The Google fanboys in /. are really amazing, you guys(*) would even advocate destroying evidence when Google broke the law!
(* - there are many other posts saying the data should be immediately deleted, even before any investigation is made)
The difference here is that they actually intercepted data by mistake.
Do you work for Google and personally know everyone involved in collecting the data? If not, it is quite a big leap of faith to make that assertion.
If you use Kismet (probably the best wireless sniffing tool for Linux), you can set it to not save data packets, only beacon packets (which really have all the data that Google needs), but by default, it saves everything, including any data packets it sees (encrypted or unencrypted).
And are we also to believe that nobody noticed how fast the disks are filling up (geez, wouldn't you think they made an estimate on how much disk they need before the project started?), and everybody up and down the data processing chain did NOT notice the extra bulk of data when they analyze them? ("Gee! I expected only 200M per day, but I run through 2G of data for the day but still only got 200M worth of results? Wouldn't we speed up the process if we collect less junk? Let's see what's the junk data are...")
It might be easy to swallow if it happened in the government or the people involved are minimum wage joe sixpacks. This happening in a company that specializes in mining and correlating huge amounts of data, which is also famously for hiring only the brightest, smartest and creative employees, it take a lot of faith to believe this can be an "accident".
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon
Blaming the messenger is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is what the topic is about -- most people won't accept information that contradict their existing beliefs.
If what you say contradict with some people's belief, most of those people won't understand what you said no matter how good a job you did at communicating clearly with them. In short, people don't understand sometime often because they have a vested interest in NOT understanding it.
High tech equipment? Where have you been the past few years? Most new video cameras nowadays record in 1080p HD already, and when I watch youtube, I select 1080p when possible.
There is also a big difference between doing something a few times in discrete cases, or doing it wholesale automatically.
Most people won't object to individual police seeing their license plate on the street, but many will object to city-wide automatic cameras identifying and recording license plates into a big database.
Some people (but not me) won't be much bothered by someone possibly recording their conversations as you have done, but most will object to companies wholesale recording all phone conversations to/from their phones. Similarly, most people would find it offensive if you told them you also kept a voice recorder on, so anything they told you would be recorded, all the time.
Most people won't be bothered if Google recorded a few wifi packets near their office, but many will find it an invasion of privacy for Google to run a car around the city and wholesale recording wifi packets they received.
That is exactly what the EU privacy laws is intended to prevent, and Google did exactly broke that law. Saying that people should encrypt their wifi is just blaming the victim, no different that saying that girls caught in upskirt cameras should have worn pants if they don't want people peeking under.
Why didn't they just do this in the first place? Why muck about with wholly unproven methods? They should have sealed this thing up weeks ago. They greed and attempts to keep the well usable are a fucking disgrace.
Who modded this insightful?!?!
Have you ever tried to fix a downed server, which if you just reboot it just go down again? So after trying 4-5 different approaches, you finally found the cause the fixed it. So, now your boss asks you, "Why didn't you do what works in the first place? Why muck about with unproven methods? We could have the server up and running hours ago!"
Yeah, such insightful question.
False. Nobody's doing that, and if they are it doesn't hurt Apple.
Wrong, it would hurt Apple if most iPad was sold to people putting them in ebay.
Apple spend $$$ to coordinate ad campaigns to make people go and buy iPads. If most iPad were bought by people who resell them in ebay, it makes most people unable to buy them, and that effectively wasted Apple's ad $$$. Some people may buy from ebay, some may wait, but some may decide to buy something else instead. That means less sales for Apple.
Also, people wanting the iPad cannot get one means that they also don't get to brag or show-off the iPad to friends, and that means less word-of-mouth spreading for Apple, and also less sales.
I don't know who modded you troll, but you are 100% correct. In Canada (I'm sure USA is exactly the same), if you are standing on public property (or property you own or have been given permission to be on) then you can take any damn photograph you want.
Including taking underskirt photos of girls walking pass? Or snapping pictures of girls' washrooms/changing room through a partly opened window from the public street, even though you might need to use a rod to prop the camera 10ft high from the ground?
Are there really so many posters in /. who cannot understand what "decency" means? It doesn't mean "anything you can get away with", or "anything that other people didn't use technical means to prevent you from doing".
A girl wearing a skirt instead of pants doesn't mean it is ok to peek underneath. An unencrypted network doesn't mean the owner is ok with Google reading the data, much less recording and storing it permanently. That's what "privacy" is about.