They track conduits that could possibly carry large amounts of money from questionable sources
Actually the point of AML is to track all "intermediations of value", to use the American regulators turn of phrase. The communications equivalent would be requiring everyone to present multiple forms of ID to get an internet connection, banning/requiring strict regulation of proxy providers and imprisoning people whose computers were involved in proxying (regardless of whether a crime was committed using the proxied connection). Internet providers would also be expected to pro-actively report any "suspicious activity" according to a vague set of rules and again staff or executives could be imprisoned if they fail to do so. Internet connections with Iran or other countries would be banned. Anything that can potentially be turned into a proxy, like a website language translation or re-compression service, would then be seen as "threats" that needed to be regulated and require proofs of ID to use, etc.
You can imagine that such a regime would not be welcomed by most Slashdotters, but what I've described is exactly how the financial system works in 2012!
He deliberately sought out and "quality checked" pirated material, and then made large sums of money off advertising on his site. In other words he made serious bank from a professional piracy operation - abusing other peoples work for personal profit.
I don't have any sympathy for this guy. It's good that he got sent down. The only WTF in this case, as far as I can see, is that there's no law on the books directly for that kind of thing. Probably there should be.
Please do point me towards shops that are selling accounts for $10 per thousand. I'd very much like to see them. Occams razor says either you're wrong, or these vendors are very well hidden, otherwise all the other shops that sell for 10x that would have no business at all.
It's not just Twitter that has issues with paid-for accounts. Many sites do. You can see prices from one large seller here. I work on Gmail signup abuse (amongst other things) and am quite proud of the price of Gmails on there.
It's only important for investors in Apple or other manufacturers, basically. For everyone else who just uses smartphones, what they care about is apps - how many there are, how likely it is that their favourite app is available on the platform, etc. For all those people the important percentage is market share or install base.
I think people care about Android vs iOS comparisons because market share of an OS translates more or less directly to the size and vitality of the software you can get for those platforms. If it weren't for platform lockin nobody would give a shit about smartphone market share, no more than they care about the market share of dishwasher manufacturers or their brand of car. For Android to win as a platform (continue winning) it doesn't matter if a single model of phone outsells the iPhone, that's irrelevant to the reasons people care about these stats in the first place.
iTunes movie rentals download and then can be watched at any time for 24 hours after you start watching. They don't stream and you can watch them offline if you want. And their library is pretty big (if you're in the right countries).
Western Union is not a dispute mediator. If they were, they wouldn't be the tool of choice for Nigerian scammers would they? They offer rapid international cash transfers with no questions asked, that's pretty much their business model.
You can have low-trust dispute mediation with Bitcoin, by the way. The way it works is you send coins to a 2-of-3 output. The keys are yours, the sellers and a mediators. If you and the seller agree the transaction was good, you both sign a transaction sending the coins to the seller. If there is a dispute the mediators key is used to break the tie. The mediator/escrow agency never has the ability to spend the coins so they aren't a particularly attractive target for hacking. Technical details are on the wiki, along with many other interesting possibilities the Bitcoin protocol makes possible. It isn't fully implemented today (it can be done with command line tools but isn't user friendly), but this will come with time.
The US and Israel are both governments where you can't be elected without being overtly religious. They're also hyper-aggressive and have engaged in acts of war against Iran, which has done.... what, exactly? Which states have crap theocratic governments again?
So, er, the story would be better described as might be a rootkit, except that the given exploit hasn't actually been tested at all? What if something that prevents it from working was missed?
If there's a security bug in what they're doing, they need to fix it. Same as any other software. The given post is hardly evidence of anything though.
Perhaps because people are not "routinely tracked" across London. Most of those CCTV cameras are private, and as was demonstrated by the riots, often capture footage far too low quality to be used for tracking even if they were somehow linked into a kind of super-skynet.
Go take a look at all the arguments in various courts where Apple attempts to convince a judge that Samsungs tablets are too similar to the iPad (obviously, with them switched off - if they were on the differences would be immediately obvious to anyone). Apples arguments boiled down to, they are both rectangular, "look simple" and have big screens on the front.
Whilst it's certainly true that MSR produces a lot of good research, I object to your characterization that MapReduce and Flume were "reverse-engineered" by Yahoo. Do you know what that term means? Implementing a set of ideas described by an academic paper is not reverse engineering. It's just engineering.
Yes, it's exactly for that reason. The fact that the dots appear to wander randomly around the screen is irritating for sure, but is more a transitional period. They appear in the bottom bar if the app is not set to "target" the latest OS version. They appear in the top bar if the app has been ported to use the ICS/Honeycomb UI classes, and irritatingly, they can appear in BOTH places if the app is using a backport of the ActionBar class and has not set their API target version correctly. I've been told that there are some odd issues that can occur when you target the latest SDK, but I don't know if that's really true. Anyway, it's a bit of a mess, but as the backport libraries get improved and people work through the complexities of supporting both ICS+ and Gingerbread the dots will get more consistent with time, either appearing in the bottom bar for older apps that expect a menu button, or typically in the top right for newer apps that use an action bar.
Having said all that, settings/menu buttons and even the back button are pretty inconsistent on iOS too, so it's not like this is an achilles heel or anything.
Firstly, the post-war USA is not much like the current USA. America has shifted radically towards the right over the past decades. Its foreign policy pre-WW2 and post-WW2 are very different. It's quite possible to comment on the USA of today without the implications being back-propagated through history.
Secondly, you seem to assume that the alternative to the USA being the big dog is some other country being the big dog. It could just as easily have been that there was no big dog. You might assume the whole world would have become communist without the USA, but that's a titanically huge assumption more worthy of being explored through fiction than debate.
Did Assange get charged whilst I wasn't looking? I thought they were still at the questioning stage.
Also, no comment on the rest of what you said, but you have no idea what happened between Assange and those two women. It boils down to two people contradicting each other as far as I can tell, which means no conclusions are reachable and very likely means, there is no case.
Slashdot has been like that for years. It's why moderation was first created. Some people just get their lulz by posting garbage and waiting for it to be modded down. Who knows why.
The summary is bogus in another respect - I don't believe the "Made in USA" thing was mentioned at all during I/O. It certainly wasn't in the presentation, that's not accurate, let alone "made a proud effort". It's something that got picked up based on a few frames of the promotional video that showed the insides.
Because Apple don't care about any particular patent or feature. They've demonstrated it clearly, many times. They care about destroying Samsung and others, period, end of story. The Galaxy S3 does in fact, work around many of the more stupid Apple patents. Their lawyers simply come back again and again with either (a) new bogus patents or (b) stupid arguments that the workaround doesn't apply like the "a tap is a zero length slide" garbage. They aren't going to stop, ever, unless they are forced to.
You should check out the support libraries, and ActionBarSherlock. There are backports of the most important ICS APIs so you can still use them. I use an app that feels ICS native but it still runs on older devices.
The issue with the Nexus One is that the OS partition doesn't have enough space to take ICS. So to upgrade requires blowing away everything on the device, including any music and photos stored on it. Of course, if you back up it can work, unless you no longer have enough space to restore the backup after the OS upgrade. But that's not a seamless upgrade by any means. Post-Honeycomb devices use a unified OS/data store partition so the issue does not exist.
Fragmentation has been getting less and less of an issue for Android over time, it's a lot more complex than Apples presentations would have you believe.
The first issue is that a lot of features announced as part of new Android releases are actually new features of the apps, and those apps are often backported to old OS releases and released through the Play store. For instance, basically any feature added to Maps becomes available all the way back to at least Gingerbread, and I think also Froyo. Voice search, upgraded Gmail apps, upgraded YouTube apps, new versions of the Play app etc, all backported. Apple tends to announce new app features as part of new iOS releases, and then remove them from the "upgrade" distributed to old devices. Therefore you can be running a new iOS or an old Android yet have the same or better features!
So what about from a developer perspective? Well, here too the issue is more complicated than it looks. A lot of the new APIs that are "pure software" have also been backported through compatibility libraries. These are drop-in libraries you include with your app download that provide the API on older phones that don't have them natively. The APIs that remain are often hardware oriented and wouldn't be available on older iPhones either.
The final issue is upgrades that aren't. I used to think that OS upgrades on a phone were a no-brainer and if you didn't get them, you got screwed. Since then I've seen a few things that changed my mind. One is that manufacturers including Apple have sometimes (not always) released updates for old devices that can't really keep up and which seriously degrade performance. Typically you can't go back, so that's a problem. The upcoming iOS 6 might be seen as a downgrade on the Maps front as well.
Another is that the Gingerbread to ICS was a huge change in user interface - for the better, I think - but time and time again the software business has learned that some users just don't want big UI changes, period. I'm pretty sure if every Gingerbread device became Jellybean tomorrow, a lot of Slashdot readers would rejoice and a lot of our friends/relatives/etc would hate Android with a passionate fire, just because it's a big change that would take them by surprise. Apple has largely avoided this problem by not making any big UI changes over the iPhones lifetime. You could argue they got it right first time, I guess;)
I sit next to the team that handles bulk account signups at Google. We are quite familiar with sellers like xgcmedia, buyaccs, vebxperts etc. As pointed out by others, Gmail accounts are significantly more expensive than other types of account. The reason is that we are very good at catching bulk attempts and requiring phone verification. This doesn't stop all bulk signup, but it does mean you have to buy a lot of SIM cards and swap them in/out all day, which is a lot of manual effort. Most of these guys are running account sweatshops in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh and just use a lot of manual labour.
The massive price difference means that bulk spam from @gmail.com is not a big problem like it used to be. Small amounts still go out occasionally, but it's rare. I gave a public talk on the topic of account abuse at Google back in April.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the point of AML is to track all "intermediations of value", to use the American regulators turn of phrase. The communications equivalent would be requiring everyone to present multiple forms of ID to get an internet connection, banning/requiring strict regulation of proxy providers and imprisoning people whose computers were involved in proxying (regardless of whether a crime was committed using the proxied connection). Internet providers would also be expected to pro-actively report any "suspicious activity" according to a vague set of rules and again staff or executives could be imprisoned if they fail to do so. Internet connections with Iran or other countries would be banned. Anything that can potentially be turned into a proxy, like a website language translation or re-compression service, would then be seen as "threats" that needed to be regulated and require proofs of ID to use, etc.
You can imagine that such a regime would not be welcomed by most Slashdotters, but what I've described is exactly how the financial system works in 2012!
He deliberately sought out and "quality checked" pirated material, and then made large sums of money off advertising on his site. In other words he made serious bank from a professional piracy operation - abusing other peoples work for personal profit.
I don't have any sympathy for this guy. It's good that he got sent down. The only WTF in this case, as far as I can see, is that there's no law on the books directly for that kind of thing. Probably there should be.
Please do point me towards shops that are selling accounts for $10 per thousand. I'd very much like to see them. Occams razor says either you're wrong, or these vendors are very well hidden, otherwise all the other shops that sell for 10x that would have no business at all.
It's not just Twitter that has issues with paid-for accounts. Many sites do. You can see prices from one large seller here. I work on Gmail signup abuse (amongst other things) and am quite proud of the price of Gmails on there.
It's only important for investors in Apple or other manufacturers, basically. For everyone else who just uses smartphones, what they care about is apps - how many there are, how likely it is that their favourite app is available on the platform, etc. For all those people the important percentage is market share or install base.
I think people care about Android vs iOS comparisons because market share of an OS translates more or less directly to the size and vitality of the software you can get for those platforms. If it weren't for platform lockin nobody would give a shit about smartphone market share, no more than they care about the market share of dishwasher manufacturers or their brand of car. For Android to win as a platform (continue winning) it doesn't matter if a single model of phone outsells the iPhone, that's irrelevant to the reasons people care about these stats in the first place.
iTunes movie rentals download and then can be watched at any time for 24 hours after you start watching. They don't stream and you can watch them offline if you want. And their library is pretty big (if you're in the right countries).
Western Union is not a dispute mediator. If they were, they wouldn't be the tool of choice for Nigerian scammers would they? They offer rapid international cash transfers with no questions asked, that's pretty much their business model.
You can have low-trust dispute mediation with Bitcoin, by the way. The way it works is you send coins to a 2-of-3 output. The keys are yours, the sellers and a mediators. If you and the seller agree the transaction was good, you both sign a transaction sending the coins to the seller. If there is a dispute the mediators key is used to break the tie. The mediator/escrow agency never has the ability to spend the coins so they aren't a particularly attractive target for hacking. Technical details are on the wiki, along with many other interesting possibilities the Bitcoin protocol makes possible. It isn't fully implemented today (it can be done with command line tools but isn't user friendly), but this will come with time.
Well, and other things too.
The US and Israel are both governments where you can't be elected without being overtly religious. They're also hyper-aggressive and have engaged in acts of war against Iran, which has done .... what, exactly? Which states have crap theocratic governments again?
So, er, the story would be better described as might be a rootkit, except that the given exploit hasn't actually been tested at all? What if something that prevents it from working was missed?
If there's a security bug in what they're doing, they need to fix it. Same as any other software. The given post is hardly evidence of anything though.
Perhaps because people are not "routinely tracked" across London. Most of those CCTV cameras are private, and as was demonstrated by the riots, often capture footage far too low quality to be used for tracking even if they were somehow linked into a kind of super-skynet.
Go take a look at all the arguments in various courts where Apple attempts to convince a judge that Samsungs tablets are too similar to the iPad (obviously, with them switched off - if they were on the differences would be immediately obvious to anyone). Apples arguments boiled down to, they are both rectangular, "look simple" and have big screens on the front.
This article has an interesting writeup of what happened, for those who are interested in the details.
Whilst it's certainly true that MSR produces a lot of good research, I object to your characterization that MapReduce and Flume were "reverse-engineered" by Yahoo. Do you know what that term means? Implementing a set of ideas described by an academic paper is not reverse engineering. It's just engineering.
Yes, it's exactly for that reason. The fact that the dots appear to wander randomly around the screen is irritating for sure, but is more a transitional period. They appear in the bottom bar if the app is not set to "target" the latest OS version. They appear in the top bar if the app has been ported to use the ICS/Honeycomb UI classes, and irritatingly, they can appear in BOTH places if the app is using a backport of the ActionBar class and has not set their API target version correctly. I've been told that there are some odd issues that can occur when you target the latest SDK, but I don't know if that's really true. Anyway, it's a bit of a mess, but as the backport libraries get improved and people work through the complexities of supporting both ICS+ and Gingerbread the dots will get more consistent with time, either appearing in the bottom bar for older apps that expect a menu button, or typically in the top right for newer apps that use an action bar.
Having said all that, settings/menu buttons and even the back button are pretty inconsistent on iOS too, so it's not like this is an achilles heel or anything.
That's kind of silly.
Firstly, the post-war USA is not much like the current USA. America has shifted radically towards the right over the past decades. Its foreign policy pre-WW2 and post-WW2 are very different. It's quite possible to comment on the USA of today without the implications being back-propagated through history.
Secondly, you seem to assume that the alternative to the USA being the big dog is some other country being the big dog. It could just as easily have been that there was no big dog. You might assume the whole world would have become communist without the USA, but that's a titanically huge assumption more worthy of being explored through fiction than debate.
Did Assange get charged whilst I wasn't looking? I thought they were still at the questioning stage.
Also, no comment on the rest of what you said, but you have no idea what happened between Assange and those two women. It boils down to two people contradicting each other as far as I can tell, which means no conclusions are reachable and very likely means, there is no case.
Slashdot has been like that for years. It's why moderation was first created. Some people just get their lulz by posting garbage and waiting for it to be modded down. Who knows why.
The summary is bogus in another respect - I don't believe the "Made in USA" thing was mentioned at all during I/O. It certainly wasn't in the presentation, that's not accurate, let alone "made a proud effort". It's something that got picked up based on a few frames of the promotional video that showed the insides.
Because Apple don't care about any particular patent or feature. They've demonstrated it clearly, many times. They care about destroying Samsung and others, period, end of story. The Galaxy S3 does in fact, work around many of the more stupid Apple patents. Their lawyers simply come back again and again with either (a) new bogus patents or (b) stupid arguments that the workaround doesn't apply like the "a tap is a zero length slide" garbage. They aren't going to stop, ever, unless they are forced to.
You should check out the support libraries, and ActionBarSherlock. There are backports of the most important ICS APIs so you can still use them. I use an app that feels ICS native but it still runs on older devices.
The issue with the Nexus One is that the OS partition doesn't have enough space to take ICS. So to upgrade requires blowing away everything on the device, including any music and photos stored on it. Of course, if you back up it can work, unless you no longer have enough space to restore the backup after the OS upgrade. But that's not a seamless upgrade by any means. Post-Honeycomb devices use a unified OS/data store partition so the issue does not exist.
Fragmentation has been getting less and less of an issue for Android over time, it's a lot more complex than Apples presentations would have you believe.
The first issue is that a lot of features announced as part of new Android releases are actually new features of the apps, and those apps are often backported to old OS releases and released through the Play store. For instance, basically any feature added to Maps becomes available all the way back to at least Gingerbread, and I think also Froyo. Voice search, upgraded Gmail apps, upgraded YouTube apps, new versions of the Play app etc, all backported. Apple tends to announce new app features as part of new iOS releases, and then remove them from the "upgrade" distributed to old devices. Therefore you can be running a new iOS or an old Android yet have the same or better features!
So what about from a developer perspective? Well, here too the issue is more complicated than it looks. A lot of the new APIs that are "pure software" have also been backported through compatibility libraries. These are drop-in libraries you include with your app download that provide the API on older phones that don't have them natively. The APIs that remain are often hardware oriented and wouldn't be available on older iPhones either.
The final issue is upgrades that aren't. I used to think that OS upgrades on a phone were a no-brainer and if you didn't get them, you got screwed. Since then I've seen a few things that changed my mind. One is that manufacturers including Apple have sometimes (not always) released updates for old devices that can't really keep up and which seriously degrade performance. Typically you can't go back, so that's a problem. The upcoming iOS 6 might be seen as a downgrade on the Maps front as well.
Another is that the Gingerbread to ICS was a huge change in user interface - for the better, I think - but time and time again the software business has learned that some users just don't want big UI changes, period. I'm pretty sure if every Gingerbread device became Jellybean tomorrow, a lot of Slashdot readers would rejoice and a lot of our friends/relatives/etc would hate Android with a passionate fire, just because it's a big change that would take them by surprise. Apple has largely avoided this problem by not making any big UI changes over the iPhones lifetime. You could argue they got it right first time, I guess ;)
I sit next to the team that handles bulk account signups at Google. We are quite familiar with sellers like xgcmedia, buyaccs, vebxperts etc. As pointed out by others, Gmail accounts are significantly more expensive than other types of account. The reason is that we are very good at catching bulk attempts and requiring phone verification. This doesn't stop all bulk signup, but it does mean you have to buy a lot of SIM cards and swap them in/out all day, which is a lot of manual effort. Most of these guys are running account sweatshops in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh and just use a lot of manual labour.
The massive price difference means that bulk spam from @gmail.com is not a big problem like it used to be. Small amounts still go out occasionally, but it's rare. I gave a public talk on the topic of account abuse at Google back in April.