If I provide such information, on good faith, to a company (who issues a privacy policy detailing how they disseminate and secure my information)
I'd like to familiarize you with a part of the facebook privacy policy relevant to the claims you are making:
You post User Content (as defined in the Facebook Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.
Translation: "we don't really secure your information."
if someone tells me they don't know where (X) went, how can they tell me that entity (Y) doesn't have it?
Well it's incredibly difficult to prove the negative statement. The burden of proof would ordinarily fall upon you to prove that Y does have it before accusing X of having passed it to them, and that's assuming that Z didn't breach a contract with X while passing the information to Y.
Basically the lesson is, if you don't want the information public, don't post it on the internet.
no joke at all. Working from my estimate of 10 million Canadian Facebook users (which would be about 1 in 3 Canadians, an awfully generous ratio) you're looking at about a half a percent of Facebook's advertising revenues. if only 1 in 1000 of them call the privacy office that's still 10,000 calls: A volume I would wager the CPC isn't equipped for. if the number of users is significantly lower than that, it's a rounding error on Facebook's balance sheet.
But the point would be that Facebook would no longer be conducting its business within Canada, and therefore not subject to Canadian law. Canada probably has roughly 10 million Facebook users, or about half a percent of the Facebook usership. Would the half a percent in ad revenue really be worth the IT salaries in coming up with a way to delete user data from multiple server backups and working analysis copies and the lawyer salaries to verify that satisfies the Canadian law?
Here's an example: raiding a county office and seizing a computer of which you are neither the sole owner nor the sole user is a crime, even if you are the county sheriff. Unless in doing so they were dutifully executing a warrant or court order to do so, or had demonstrable probable cause to believe that a crime was in progress on this particular site, this action constitutes committing a crime. So, you can be "tough on crime" all you want, but when you start to make your own rules in the process, you become the criminal. If you don't face the consequences with the very same zeal you enforce upon others, you become a hypocrite.
Did we read the same article? I can't find where they say this.
It's written in marketroid speak so you might have missed it, but since I used to work in marketing I'm semi-fluent. I've bolded the relevant stuff.
Where consumers have returned machines, Finch said, it wasn't because of technical problems but because they'd bought a low-priced machine expecting Windows and opened it to find a different interface. Consumers had responded to the low price, he said - the Mini 10v retails for $299 online.
"Now we are trying to be a little more explicit in our advertising," Finch said.
"We are not seeing any technical reasons for why they are returning Linux machines so...we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux. We've been quite pleased with the stability and technical soundness of the Linux machines."
You're absolutely right about customers having to seek it out. Heck right there in the article they basically say that when they subtract the people who are returning the netbooks because it isn't windows, then the returns are a non-issue.
Which is why I think it's such a shame that you go on to invalidate your otherwise perfectly reasonable point by perpetuating a worn-out, well-debunked meme.
At my local supercenter I wrote down brands and looked them up and was looking at barely 20% "supported", if you call doing a CLI voodoo dance for hours and barely getting half functionality support.
Since you don't bother to state what kind of devices you're talking about, I'll simply relate my experience. My mother's a 57-year-old computer illiterate. I put ubuntu on a machine for her to try out. Once in a while (maybe twice a year) she has to call me to ask what program she needs to do X. Her multi-function printer: worked out of the box, including scanning. Her ipod: worked out of the box. Her $5.00 keychain digital pictureframe: worked out of the plasticwrap. Her DSLR? works out of the box. Her HD video recorder: works out of the box. I haven't seen one single device touch her computer that failed to function on the first try, without her ever doing any "cli voodoo dance". She never does any research about whether stuff works with linux, she just goes and buys stuff and uses it. And she's getting a nice supply of new coasters from all the worthless driver discs that come with these products, that I've comfortably told her she can just ignore from here on out.
When I first got my driver's license in 1992, my driver's license was my social security number, as that was the policy in the state I lived at the time, however they changed it to a random string shortly after that. I have moved between states a few times and each time I get a different driver's license number. Not everyone gets professional certification, or does military service. A startlingly small percentage of us have passports (<30%). No other number really stays with you for life in the USA. Because it stays with you for life, and is used by the IRS as your taxpayer identification number, it has been adapted as a means of tracking medical records and doing credit checks.
What is probably the worst possible use for it is that many companies and agencies use the last four digits as authentication. For instance if I called my phone carrier or credit card company to make a change on my account, I would need only my account number which is mailed to me every month in a clearly marked envelope, and the last four digits of my SSN to "prove" I was me.
Ironically, our national resistance to being tracked has led directly to there being only one primary government-issued number that is used for tracking us.
Your company can't compete with a Chinese one, because we don't allow you to poison us and fill our air, water, and land with toxins
You've obviously never seen any US coal power plants, steel mills, soap factories, or any mining operations of any kind. Go take a look at West Virginia sometime.
You can't compete with an Indian who pays only 20K for a Master's degree, yet thanks to H1-B and "free trade" you are supposed to pay off your 100K in student loans and survive on the same wages he does.
Well, according to my UK Clients the Indian programmers they subcontract to raised their rates to be competitive with US salaries, not the other way around. They're more concerned with exchange rates than the wage differential these days. Maybe they're an exception.
But also, what does it say about you that you paid $100k for a master's degree? Before you signed off on these loans did you figure out what kind of salary you'd have to earn to pay it off? American Education is as badly in need of an overhaul as our medical system (if not more so) if the US is to have any chance to compete in the global marketplace.
...will simply move to places like India and China, where they can pay a pittance and pollute all they want.
moving a large facility isn't cheap and requires good capital flow. Most businesses, even large ones, don't really have this option right now. Meanwhile in the developing nations like India and China, taxes and the cost of doing business continue to rise as larger portions of the population become more affluent. You keep prattling on about H1-B's and Indian competition, but really, outsourcing never worked out as well as business had hoped it would and really hasn't become the problem that everyone forecast. Need I point out that China's and India's economies are suffering about as much as the US.
India is building their own Aerospace and defense industries now
That's been happening since the 70's, and India has primarily been a customer of Chinese and Soviest/CIS defense manufacturers, until the 90's when the evil advocate of free trade known as the Clinton administration started selling them dated fighter jets. The Indians were going to do this anyway and it has nothing to do with free trade.
Anyone who goes into IT now is simply a fool. They are a fool because they will never be able to compete against the Indian and the Chinese, yet thanks to "free trade" they will be expected to, and to live on their wages. Free trade is a lie.
You forgot to finish with "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" ala southpark. Free trade, also known as globalization, is about the only thing keeping the US afloat in the current economic situation. The guys who pushed it weren't trying to sell out to foreign nationals... they are businessmen who understood that the US was in the position to benefit from this, and ultimately it has. Wages for foreign countries have gone up. Tax rates have gone up. Environmental controls have improved almost everywhere.
The incoming mail being insecure was not my point, but there's no way to satisfy HIPAA's storage security standards without those mails being kept in an encrypted format since they're on a third party service that the provider has access to.
Under HIPAA you can't just "delete" what you can't secure. You're obligated to maintain records ofcertain types of communications for specified periods.
you do make a valid point about google not being all that different from other ISP's except for one thing: google expressly requires you to give them consent to read your mail at the time of account creation.
pgp is fine for a small practice to use between say the receptionist and the doctor. the problem with using pgp to obtain your confidentiality with respect to HIPAA is that emails sent from outside sources (e.g. patients) are subject to HIPAA as well, and unless you can convince all their customers to use pgp, that'll never work.
My advice for the original asker is to take a firm stand with your clients. If there is any way that they can pin the liability on you for recommending use of google apps or other online services they will when the lawyers come knocking. I suggest you strongly recommend against it, in writing, and keep that recommendation on file.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Oh but let me take it a step further...
You change one css[sic] rule and all the logical kinds of content it applies to all change. [sic]this facilitiates[sic] accessibility and comprehension of a documents[sic] logical layout by the reader. [sic]presumably the latter desiderata is the real goal, not pretty looking documents.
The real goal of whom? Designers want freedom to make the design as pretty as they want. Programmers want easily parsed markup. Those with disabilities and developers of enabling technologies want accessibility. Browser developers want an edge in the market place. Standards writers want to please everyone.
These are all real goals and they all compete against each other to some degree. You're completely oversimplifying the variety of problems that CSS addresses.
[sic]given that, there is a large benefit to users if web pages look a lot alike.
Similarly, there is a large benefit to the wearers of clothing if all clothing looks alike. They have less burden to choose matching garments. Let's all don our Mao jackets and live happily ever after. You're entitled to your opinion. You can turn off styles in your browser and see all of your web content in a more-or-less similar format. But I am entitled to mine as well. And I like the wide variety of attractive site designs that CSS has allowed to become the norm.
like blink, if you include this as an easy to use feature it will get abused to death and in aggregate crapify the web.
Yeah, because I see that blink tag being used ALL OVER THE WEB these days. No instead what we have right now is designers either using images to achieve their desired font effects, or hacktastic solutions like sifr. THAT doesn't crapify the web at all.
IANAL, but if they are enforceable (and I don't know that this has ever been tested in a court, so they may very well not be, certainly many provisions of many existing EULA's are not enforceable) then it would explicitly because they are a form of contract.
EULAs contain breach clauses, just like contracts. They specify the obligations of two parties, just like contracts do. They represent an agreement to abide by certain terms, just like a contract. I think that your distinction between the words "contract" and "agreement" is entirely academic insofar as the law is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
If I provide such information, on good faith, to a company (who issues a privacy policy detailing how they disseminate and secure my information)
I'd like to familiarize you with a part of the facebook privacy policy relevant to the claims you are making:
Translation: "we don't really secure your information."
if someone tells me they don't know where (X) went, how can they tell me that entity (Y) doesn't have it?
Well it's incredibly difficult to prove the negative statement. The burden of proof would ordinarily fall upon you to prove that Y does have it before accusing X of having passed it to them, and that's assuming that Z didn't breach a contract with X while passing the information to Y.
Basically the lesson is, if you don't want the information public, don't post it on the internet.
they should also block the data collection division of the US Government...AT&T
Fixed that for ya.
no joke at all. Working from my estimate of 10 million Canadian Facebook users (which would be about 1 in 3 Canadians, an awfully generous ratio) you're looking at about a half a percent of Facebook's advertising revenues. if only 1 in 1000 of them call the privacy office that's still 10,000 calls: A volume I would wager the CPC isn't equipped for. if the number of users is significantly lower than that, it's a rounding error on Facebook's balance sheet.
But the point would be that Facebook would no longer be conducting its business within Canada, and therefore not subject to Canadian law. Canada probably has roughly 10 million Facebook users, or about half a percent of the Facebook usership. Would the half a percent in ad revenue really be worth the IT salaries in coming up with a way to delete user data from multiple server backups and working analysis copies and the lawyer salaries to verify that satisfies the Canadian law?
block all canadian access to facebook. put an explanation of why with the contact person from the canadian privacy comission. problem solved.
Here's an example: raiding a county office and seizing a computer of which you are neither the sole owner nor the sole user is a crime, even if you are the county sheriff. Unless in doing so they were dutifully executing a warrant or court order to do so, or had demonstrable probable cause to believe that a crime was in progress on this particular site, this action constitutes committing a crime. So, you can be "tough on crime" all you want, but when you start to make your own rules in the process, you become the criminal. If you don't face the consequences with the very same zeal you enforce upon others, you become a hypocrite.
Did we read the same article? I can't find where they say this.
It's written in marketroid speak so you might have missed it, but since I used to work in marketing I'm semi-fluent. I've bolded the relevant stuff.
Where consumers have returned machines, Finch said, it wasn't because of technical problems but because they'd bought a low-priced machine expecting Windows and opened it to find a different interface. Consumers had responded to the low price, he said - the Mini 10v retails for $299 online. "Now we are trying to be a little more explicit in our advertising," Finch said. "We are not seeing any technical reasons for why they are returning Linux machines so...we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux. We've been quite pleased with the stability and technical soundness of the Linux machines."
You're absolutely right about customers having to seek it out. Heck right there in the article they basically say that when they subtract the people who are returning the netbooks because it isn't windows, then the returns are a non-issue.
Which is why I think it's such a shame that you go on to invalidate your otherwise perfectly reasonable point by perpetuating a worn-out, well-debunked meme.
At my local supercenter I wrote down brands and looked them up and was looking at barely 20% "supported", if you call doing a CLI voodoo dance for hours and barely getting half functionality support.
Since you don't bother to state what kind of devices you're talking about, I'll simply relate my experience. My mother's a 57-year-old computer illiterate. I put ubuntu on a machine for her to try out. Once in a while (maybe twice a year) she has to call me to ask what program she needs to do X. Her multi-function printer: worked out of the box, including scanning. Her ipod: worked out of the box. Her $5.00 keychain digital pictureframe: worked out of the plasticwrap. Her DSLR? works out of the box. Her HD video recorder: works out of the box. I haven't seen one single device touch her computer that failed to function on the first try, without her ever doing any "cli voodoo dance". She never does any research about whether stuff works with linux, she just goes and buys stuff and uses it. And she's getting a nice supply of new coasters from all the worthless driver discs that come with these products, that I've comfortably told her she can just ignore from here on out.
So is that like a uh... Cleaveland Steamer?
I believe we're calling this one the "Redmond Steamer."
When I first got my driver's license in 1992, my driver's license was my social security number, as that was the policy in the state I lived at the time, however they changed it to a random string shortly after that. I have moved between states a few times and each time I get a different driver's license number. Not everyone gets professional certification, or does military service. A startlingly small percentage of us have passports (<30%). No other number really stays with you for life in the USA. Because it stays with you for life, and is used by the IRS as your taxpayer identification number, it has been adapted as a means of tracking medical records and doing credit checks.
What is probably the worst possible use for it is that many companies and agencies use the last four digits as authentication. For instance if I called my phone carrier or credit card company to make a change on my account, I would need only my account number which is mailed to me every month in a clearly marked envelope, and the last four digits of my SSN to "prove" I was me.
Ironically, our national resistance to being tracked has led directly to there being only one primary government-issued number that is used for tracking us.
new language code added: en_TX
Finally spellcheck will quit flagging "Y'all"
Your company can't compete with a Chinese one, because we don't allow you to poison us and fill our air, water, and land with toxins
You've obviously never seen any US coal power plants, steel mills, soap factories, or any mining operations of any kind. Go take a look at West Virginia sometime.
You can't compete with an Indian who pays only 20K for a Master's degree, yet thanks to H1-B and "free trade" you are supposed to pay off your 100K in student loans and survive on the same wages he does.
Well, according to my UK Clients the Indian programmers they subcontract to raised their rates to be competitive with US salaries, not the other way around. They're more concerned with exchange rates than the wage differential these days. Maybe they're an exception.
But also, what does it say about you that you paid $100k for a master's degree? Before you signed off on these loans did you figure out what kind of salary you'd have to earn to pay it off? American Education is as badly in need of an overhaul as our medical system (if not more so) if the US is to have any chance to compete in the global marketplace.
...will simply move to places like India and China, where they can pay a pittance and pollute all they want.
moving a large facility isn't cheap and requires good capital flow. Most businesses, even large ones, don't really have this option right now. Meanwhile in the developing nations like India and China, taxes and the cost of doing business continue to rise as larger portions of the population become more affluent. You keep prattling on about H1-B's and Indian competition, but really, outsourcing never worked out as well as business had hoped it would and really hasn't become the problem that everyone forecast. Need I point out that China's and India's economies are suffering about as much as the US.
India is building their own Aerospace and defense industries now
That's been happening since the 70's, and India has primarily been a customer of Chinese and Soviest/CIS defense manufacturers, until the 90's when the evil advocate of free trade known as the Clinton administration started selling them dated fighter jets. The Indians were going to do this anyway and it has nothing to do with free trade.
Anyone who goes into IT now is simply a fool. They are a fool because they will never be able to compete against the Indian and the Chinese, yet thanks to "free trade" they will be expected to, and to live on their wages. Free trade is a lie.
You forgot to finish with "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" ala southpark. Free trade, also known as globalization, is about the only thing keeping the US afloat in the current economic situation. The guys who pushed it weren't trying to sell out to foreign nationals... they are businessmen who understood that the US was in the position to benefit from this, and ultimately it has. Wages for foreign countries have gone up. Tax rates have gone up. Environmental controls have improved almost everywhere.
neglect due to interest in sports
s/sports/Counterstrike/
The incoming mail being insecure was not my point, but there's no way to satisfy HIPAA's storage security standards without those mails being kept in an encrypted format since they're on a third party service that the provider has access to.
Under HIPAA you can't just "delete" what you can't secure. You're obligated to maintain records ofcertain types of communications for specified periods.
you do make a valid point about google not being all that different from other ISP's except for one thing: google expressly requires you to give them consent to read your mail at the time of account creation.
how it must be stored.
exactly.
pgp is fine for a small practice to use between say the receptionist and the doctor. the problem with using pgp to obtain your confidentiality with respect to HIPAA is that emails sent from outside sources (e.g. patients) are subject to HIPAA as well, and unless you can convince all their customers to use pgp, that'll never work.
My advice for the original asker is to take a firm stand with your clients. If there is any way that they can pin the liability on you for recommending use of google apps or other online services they will when the lawyers come knocking. I suggest you strongly recommend against it, in writing, and keep that recommendation on file.
sorry to comment on my own post, but by "pretty well" i mean "pretty well like it does on windows" which is to say, not all that well at all.
meh, ie7 works pretty well in Wine.
So the typical PC user is unaware of FTP _and_ delusional?
you seem surprised by this information.
firefox runs ads on tv?
You change one css[sic] rule and all the logical kinds of content it applies to all change. [sic]this facilitiates[sic] accessibility and comprehension of a documents[sic] logical layout by the reader. [sic]presumably the latter desiderata is the real goal, not pretty looking documents.
The real goal of whom? Designers want freedom to make the design as pretty as they want. Programmers want easily parsed markup. Those with disabilities and developers of enabling technologies want accessibility. Browser developers want an edge in the market place. Standards writers want to please everyone.
These are all real goals and they all compete against each other to some degree. You're completely oversimplifying the variety of problems that CSS addresses.
[sic]given that, there is a large benefit to users if web pages look a lot alike.
Similarly, there is a large benefit to the wearers of clothing if all clothing looks alike. They have less burden to choose matching garments. Let's all don our Mao jackets and live happily ever after. You're entitled to your opinion. You can turn off styles in your browser and see all of your web content in a more-or-less similar format. But I am entitled to mine as well. And I like the wide variety of attractive site designs that CSS has allowed to become the norm.
like blink, if you include this as an easy to use feature it will get abused to death and in aggregate crapify the web.
Yeah, because I see that blink tag being used ALL OVER THE WEB these days. No instead what we have right now is designers either using images to achieve their desired font effects, or hacktastic solutions like sifr. THAT doesn't crapify the web at all.
Use of uninitialized value at line 1.
IANAL, but if they are enforceable (and I don't know that this has ever been tested in a court, so they may very well not be, certainly many provisions of many existing EULA's are not enforceable) then it would explicitly because they are a form of contract.
EULAs contain breach clauses, just like contracts. They specify the obligations of two parties, just like contracts do. They represent an agreement to abide by certain terms, just like a contract. I think that your distinction between the words "contract" and "agreement" is entirely academic insofar as the law is concerned.
I think it's fair to say that the only reason it's on slashdot is because it's a patent troll... not because anyone actually thinks it's a neat idea.