I'm pretty sure you can run GCC on Android. Developing would still be a pretty hellish experience, though, even with a wireless keyboard and a display.
My point was not so much that Street View itself is an issue, but that while recording public things may be unproblematic on a small scale, they may become problematic if technology enables us to do them on a large, ubiquitary scale.
I'm not creeped out by Street View, I think it's pretty cool and -- as with BSSID collection -- the potential for abuse is very low. The outrage was really caused by an only vaguely informed public and fueled by politicians who were happy to finally have someone besides themselves to blame for an alleged privacy issue -- this was at the same time the government decided it wanted to record and retain all communications data (IP addresses, contact between email addresses and telephone numbers, etc.) for two years.
I am creeped out by that, and I am creeped out by stuff like mass scale photographs of people along with automatic face recognition that isn't even opt-in. Or telcos storing vast location and movement profiles for almost the entire population and reselling them or handing them to our "custodians". If Google ever gets control over a network of webcams, I don't want them to tag my name and record or announce my current position to the world without my asking, even if that stuff is probably in the public sphere.
Are you trying to be funny? There was a huge outrage over street view in Germany and you do, in fact, have the ability to opt out of having your house on Street View. I've got a blurred house across from where I live.
Being visible/receivable from the street is one thing, having that data recorded and redistributed on a mass -- almost exhaustive -- scale is something different.
All that said, I don't really get the outrage over recording hash(BSSID) to location mappings. The hash of a BSSID can not be tied to any person (it's very unlikely for the BSSID itself, hash(MAC) would also work), and wifi geolocation is a very useful service. I've tried and it's just really hard to come up with any way to abuse this kind of data. One of the worst things I could come up with is that you can identify a router that has moved, when the location of an existing BSSID changes -- but that gets you what, exactly? I suppose if you've got the address data, you could get a mapping between BSSID and registered full name after a router moves. But that'd be really rare and still not very dangerous information.
That's a good argument to make. On a purely analytical level, I can see two differences between the death toll from automobile accidents and from an environmental factor such as (allegedly, for the sake of argument) cell phones.
First, car accidents are an exceptional scenario, during normal operations of a car, no deaths results from accidents since no accidents occur. On the other hand, cell phone radiation (allegedly, for the sake of argument, etc.) causes harm during normal operations. In this, it is comparable to car-related emissions (e.g. NOx, particle matter) which affect people in urban areas with few ways of avoiding them. I'm not so sure that this difference is all that meaningful, since I guess it's fair to say that in the big, statistical picture, car accidents are part of "normal operations" just as much as emissions are.
Second, individuals have a much deeper control over the risks due to car accidents. You can chose not to drive a car, watch the road carefully, and so on. To be sure, a huge risk remains, certainly much bigger than even the steepest cell phone radiation risks dreamt up by some people. Nevertheless, environmental factors are much harder to control yourself -- short of moving --, due to their ubiquitary nature. I think a fair argument can be made that these kinds of risks outside of individual control warrant particular attention. Again, not so much the cell phone thing, but other kinds of environment factors such as the car emissions.
Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is. As far as I have heard, tiny tiny is zero, as in there has been no observed increase, but I may not be up to date.
I suppose the interesting link is the last one, which goes to a Google spreadsheet with the list of custom "objectionable" words. It bounces ingoing and outgoing mails with a list of vulgar terms (a fairly broad one; "hell"? really?). For outgoing mails, it bounces the mail AND sends a copy of it to the staff.
There is also a list of "concern words" like gun, shoot, knife but also sex, drunk, gay, lesbian (WTF) which get delivered but ALSO copied to the staff address. I assume without notifying the student. I think that's outrageous and it would NEVER fly here in Germany, but I think students and employees in the US have (by law) a lower expectation of privacy when using school or office resources.
I guess the moral is: don't use your school supplied Google account for anything you don't have to. Or better yet, use GPG.
No idea whether it's viable long-term, but I thought it's really interesting. It does way more than GWT does, for example. It's also statically typed, yay.
Here's some example code from the tutorial. This is a chat room. Apart from CSS, this is the entire soure code required to create the chat room server. Yikes. Had to get rid of the comments to appease the spam filter, unfortunately.
type message = {author: string/**The name of the author (arbitrary string)*/
; text: string/**Content entered by the user*/}
I agree. The trend I was referring to was the overall process of movement from usage as a plural towards usage as a mass noun. E.g. newspapers shifting from disallowing singular data towards approving it. But it's a long, slow moving process.
That makes you an expert on biology and perhaps on the usage in a technical context, but overall usage varies widely and I'm pretty sure is tending towards recognizing it as a mass noun. Nitpicking isn't going to buck the trend. (Of course it's fair to point out that "data are..." is a form still widely considered to be correct.)
JLS 8.1.3: "Any local variable, formal method parameter or exception handler parameter used but not declared in an inner class must be declared final. Any local variable, used but not declared in an inner class must be definitely assigned before the body of the inner class."
(source w/ discussion)
Well, volunteers were probably in relatively short supply considering the extreme hazards of the job. But yeah, I'm not sure wtf they were (are) doing dawdling that long into the disaster. Must be a combination of a very broken process, people desperately trying to cover their asses, total lack of preparation for the "impossible" and maybe somewhat of a Japanese thing. That said, hell knows if any of the other developed countries would have fared better.
They had UAVs up and running quickly (in TEPCO time) after the disaster, and (according to TFA) TEPCO has its own fleet of UAV helicopters, though I remember the first pictures were taken using one of those US military planes. Planes and helicopters aren't very useful when you're trying to get inside the building though. Even if you could fly around inside the building, ever try opening a door with a heli-/quadcopter? The iRobot things they use can (clumsily) interact with the world.
Not to mention all the Linux distributions which have had something very similar to an app store for, what, more than a decade? Except that they have much more sane policies regarding inclusion in the "app store" and extending the app store with secondary repositories.
FWIW, he was kicked from the CCC before he (apparently) deleted the files.
While I agree that it'd be a tremendous loss if the No-Fly data is gone, I'm not exactly what WL would have done with it. Certainly, they'd have had their media partners do some research using it. But releasing the list outright and uncensored seems like a horrible idea: while some good might come from that, you'd be further punishing the people on the list, because you know their being on it would be used against them at some point.
You'd need to set up a system that allows people to find out if they're on that list without other people (prospective employers, facebook enemies, twitter creeps) having access to that information. That seems like a fairly difficult thing to accomplish. The best I've come up with is making available a list of hashes of social security ids (or something similarly semi-confidential) on the list. That way, given a ssid (ideally, your own), you could check if it's on the list. But you can't transform it into a list of affected people or even check your neighbour/facebook enemy/twitter idiot unless you happen to know their ssid. But it doesn't stop people who do have your ssid (banks? employers?) from checking you out.
Well, I don't know that it was, but Wikileaks claims so: "We can confirm that the claimed DDB destroyed data included more than 60,000 emails from the NPD"
That said, I've since read a comment on the netzpolitik blog (fourth hand information?) that DDB claims the leaked mails are a different set of 60,000 emails from the NPD... which seems quite a stretch. Of course, it's very possible that the original source (hackers, presumably) re-leaked the mails after Wikileaks didn't/couldn't do anything with them.
This is just the latest in an epic series of back-and-forths between DDB/OpenLeaks and Julian Assange/Wikileaks that has been going on for a year or so, particularly in the German scene/press. The first order of business seems to be: Don't believe everything you read, there has been a lot of misinformation spread by both sides, by other people who are involved and, worse yet, speculation by those that are not. Despite the fact that DDB looks like the bad guy, and I'm virtually certain he will be absolutely crucified here on Slashdot, DDB might just be a tragic figure and it's likely that there are no really good guys involved; Wikileaks and OpenLeaks were caught in a crossfire of Egos.
DDB left/was fired from Wikileaks because he felt the organisation was in some way corrupted/they felt he was a corrupted. Other people left along with him, people that were apparently important to the basic functionality of Wikileaks. DDB subsequently wrote about about Wikileaks and started to talk about an alternative leak sites, OpenLeaks. The book contains fairly serious allegations against Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Purportedly, DDB (or possibly: one of the other people leaving WL) took those files because he did not think they were safe at Wikileaks. Note that the files do not contain any information on the identity of the leakers, Wikileaks simply does not store or even collect this information. They wre removed, not copied, and apparently Wikileaks did not have an extra copy (or the extra copies were all taken or destroyed). They were, of course, encrypted and he (or his allies) may or may not have access to some or all of them. Sidenote: At least one of the datasets he may have destroyed now (60k emails of a German neo-nazi party) made their way to the German media in some way, months ago. That may have been a coincidence, however, the newspaper involved is now a "media partner" of OpenLeaks. End of sidenote. DDB says he never had any intention of looking at or publishing the stolen data himself, and that he intended to return the files to WL, once WL has shown itself to be trustworthy (whatever that means). He also once intended to hand over the files to a trusted third party, people from Germany's Chaos Computer Club. He never followed through with this promise. He was recently thrown out of the CCC, an extraordinary measure, due to this but mostly other events related to a sorta-kinda security audit of OpenLeaks (this alone would require several paragraphs of explanation).
Anyway, DDB had this very sensitive data, which he didn't want to give to WL, and pretty much no one else either. He also had the encryption keys. I think initially he talked about just deleting the encryption keys in order to prove that he has no intention of using the leaks himself. But if you don't trust him, why would you believe he deleted his keys? And now he apparently figured the only course of action left was to "simply" delete the files themselves. I don't quite understand that final bit, either.
I have tried to summarize a very complex situation full of half-truths and unproven allegations to the best of my ability. Note that I have absolutely zero inside information, I know no one involved, this is all public information (though fairly inaccessible to many Slashdot users due to the language barrier).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure you can run GCC on Android. Developing would still be a pretty hellish experience, though, even with a wireless keyboard and a display.
Or maybe the "huh?" are from people who can wear regular fit 501s and still fit stuff in their pockets...
My point was not so much that Street View itself is an issue, but that while recording public things may be unproblematic on a small scale, they may become problematic if technology enables us to do them on a large, ubiquitary scale.
I'm not creeped out by Street View, I think it's pretty cool and -- as with BSSID collection -- the potential for abuse is very low. The outrage was really caused by an only vaguely informed public and fueled by politicians who were happy to finally have someone besides themselves to blame for an alleged privacy issue -- this was at the same time the government decided it wanted to record and retain all communications data (IP addresses, contact between email addresses and telephone numbers, etc.) for two years.
I am creeped out by that, and I am creeped out by stuff like mass scale photographs of people along with automatic face recognition that isn't even opt-in. Or telcos storing vast location and movement profiles for almost the entire population and reselling them or handing them to our "custodians". If Google ever gets control over a network of webcams, I don't want them to tag my name and record or announce my current position to the world without my asking, even if that stuff is probably in the public sphere.
Are you trying to be funny? There was a huge outrage over street view in Germany and you do, in fact, have the ability to opt out of having your house on Street View. I've got a blurred house across from where I live.
Being visible/receivable from the street is one thing, having that data recorded and redistributed on a mass -- almost exhaustive -- scale is something different.
All that said, I don't really get the outrage over recording hash(BSSID) to location mappings. The hash of a BSSID can not be tied to any person (it's very unlikely for the BSSID itself, hash(MAC) would also work), and wifi geolocation is a very useful service. I've tried and it's just really hard to come up with any way to abuse this kind of data. One of the worst things I could come up with is that you can identify a router that has moved, when the location of an existing BSSID changes -- but that gets you what, exactly? I suppose if you've got the address data, you could get a mapping between BSSID and registered full name after a router moves. But that'd be really rare and still not very dangerous information.
That's a good argument to make. On a purely analytical level, I can see two differences between the death toll from automobile accidents and from an environmental factor such as (allegedly, for the sake of argument) cell phones.
First, car accidents are an exceptional scenario, during normal operations of a car, no deaths results from accidents since no accidents occur. On the other hand, cell phone radiation (allegedly, for the sake of argument, etc.) causes harm during normal operations. In this, it is comparable to car-related emissions (e.g. NOx, particle matter) which affect people in urban areas with few ways of avoiding them. I'm not so sure that this difference is all that meaningful, since I guess it's fair to say that in the big, statistical picture, car accidents are part of "normal operations" just as much as emissions are.
Second, individuals have a much deeper control over the risks due to car accidents. You can chose not to drive a car, watch the road carefully, and so on. To be sure, a huge risk remains, certainly much bigger than even the steepest cell phone radiation risks dreamt up by some people. Nevertheless, environmental factors are much harder to control yourself -- short of moving --, due to their ubiquitary nature. I think a fair argument can be made that these kinds of risks outside of individual control warrant particular attention. Again, not so much the cell phone thing, but other kinds of environment factors such as the car emissions.
Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is. As far as I have heard, tiny tiny is zero, as in there has been no observed increase, but I may not be up to date.
Well, it has the name of the lead researcher and the journal. I'm pretty sure this is the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21793784?dopt=Abstract
I use Deja Dup, which sits on top of duplicity. Easy to set up, integrates well with Gnome.
I suppose the interesting link is the last one, which goes to a Google spreadsheet with the list of custom "objectionable" words. It bounces ingoing and outgoing mails with a list of vulgar terms (a fairly broad one; "hell"? really?). For outgoing mails, it bounces the mail AND sends a copy of it to the staff.
There is also a list of "concern words" like gun, shoot, knife but also sex, drunk, gay, lesbian (WTF) which get delivered but ALSO copied to the staff address. I assume without notifying the student. I think that's outrageous and it would NEVER fly here in Germany, but I think students and employees in the US have (by law) a lower expectation of privacy when using school or office resources.
I guess the moral is: don't use your school supplied Google account for anything you don't have to. Or better yet, use GPG.
Sounds like CGI.pm to me!
Huh? How so? It doesn't seem to be at all like CGI.
No idea whether it's viable long-term, but I thought it's really interesting. It does way more than GWT does, for example. It's also statically typed, yay.
Here's some example code from the tutorial. This is a chat room. Apart from CSS, this is the entire soure code required to create the chat room server. Yikes. Had to get rid of the comments to appease the spam filter, unfortunately.
I agree. The trend I was referring to was the overall process of movement from usage as a plural towards usage as a mass noun. E.g. newspapers shifting from disallowing singular data towards approving it. But it's a long, slow moving process.
That makes you an expert on biology and perhaps on the usage in a technical context, but overall usage varies widely and I'm pretty sure is tending towards recognizing it as a mass noun. Nitpicking isn't going to buck the trend. (Of course it's fair to point out that "data are..." is a form still widely considered to be correct.)
That only works for finals.
JLS 8.1.3: "Any local variable, formal method parameter or exception handler parameter used but not declared in an inner class must be declared final. Any local variable, used but not declared in an inner class must be definitely assigned before the body of the inner class."
(source w/ discussion)
Well, volunteers were probably in relatively short supply considering the extreme hazards of the job. But yeah, I'm not sure wtf they were (are) doing dawdling that long into the disaster. Must be a combination of a very broken process, people desperately trying to cover their asses, total lack of preparation for the "impossible" and maybe somewhat of a Japanese thing. That said, hell knows if any of the other developed countries would have fared better.
They had UAVs up and running quickly (in TEPCO time) after the disaster, and (according to TFA) TEPCO has its own fleet of UAV helicopters, though I remember the first pictures were taken using one of those US military planes. Planes and helicopters aren't very useful when you're trying to get inside the building though. Even if you could fly around inside the building, ever try opening a door with a heli-/quadcopter? The iRobot things they use can (clumsily) interact with the world.
Not to mention all the Linux distributions which have had something very similar to an app store for, what, more than a decade? Except that they have much more sane policies regarding inclusion in the "app store" and extending the app store with secondary repositories.
In a somewhat similar vein, in 2010, Google published the look out of the window of the Trans Siberian Railway: http://www.google.ru/intl/ru/landing/transsib/en.html
FWIW, he was kicked from the CCC before he (apparently) deleted the files.
While I agree that it'd be a tremendous loss if the No-Fly data is gone, I'm not exactly what WL would have done with it. Certainly, they'd have had their media partners do some research using it. But releasing the list outright and uncensored seems like a horrible idea: while some good might come from that, you'd be further punishing the people on the list, because you know their being on it would be used against them at some point.
You'd need to set up a system that allows people to find out if they're on that list without other people (prospective employers, facebook enemies, twitter creeps) having access to that information. That seems like a fairly difficult thing to accomplish. The best I've come up with is making available a list of hashes of social security ids (or something similarly semi-confidential) on the list. That way, given a ssid (ideally, your own), you could check if it's on the list. But you can't transform it into a list of affected people or even check your neighbour/facebook enemy/twitter idiot unless you happen to know their ssid. But it doesn't stop people who do have your ssid (banks? employers?) from checking you out.
Next up: Geiger counter.
Well, I don't know that it was, but Wikileaks claims so: "We can confirm that the claimed DDB destroyed data included more than 60,000 emails from the NPD"
That said, I've since read a comment on the netzpolitik blog (fourth hand information?) that DDB claims the leaked mails are a different set of 60,000 emails from the NPD... which seems quite a stretch. Of course, it's very possible that the original source (hackers, presumably) re-leaked the mails after Wikileaks didn't/couldn't do anything with them.
DDB is Daniel Domscheit-Berg. I guess I should have made that explicit. I do consider the summary, which spells out his name, mandatory reading. ;)
Inconceivable, I know.
This is just the latest in an epic series of back-and-forths between DDB/OpenLeaks and Julian Assange/Wikileaks that has been going on for a year or so, particularly in the German scene/press. The first order of business seems to be: Don't believe everything you read, there has been a lot of misinformation spread by both sides, by other people who are involved and, worse yet, speculation by those that are not. Despite the fact that DDB looks like the bad guy, and I'm virtually certain he will be absolutely crucified here on Slashdot, DDB might just be a tragic figure and it's likely that there are no really good guys involved; Wikileaks and OpenLeaks were caught in a crossfire of Egos.
DDB left/was fired from Wikileaks because he felt the organisation was in some way corrupted/they felt he was a corrupted. Other people left along with him, people that were apparently important to the basic functionality of Wikileaks. DDB subsequently wrote about about Wikileaks and started to talk about an alternative leak sites, OpenLeaks. The book contains fairly serious allegations against Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Purportedly, DDB (or possibly: one of the other people leaving WL) took those files because he did not think they were safe at Wikileaks. Note that the files do not contain any information on the identity of the leakers, Wikileaks simply does not store or even collect this information. They wre removed, not copied, and apparently Wikileaks did not have an extra copy (or the extra copies were all taken or destroyed). They were, of course, encrypted and he (or his allies) may or may not have access to some or all of them. Sidenote: At least one of the datasets he may have destroyed now (60k emails of a German neo-nazi party) made their way to the German media in some way, months ago. That may have been a coincidence, however, the newspaper involved is now a "media partner" of OpenLeaks. End of sidenote.
DDB says he never had any intention of looking at or publishing the stolen data himself, and that he intended to return the files to WL, once WL has shown itself to be trustworthy (whatever that means). He also once intended to hand over the files to a trusted third party, people from Germany's Chaos Computer Club. He never followed through with this promise. He was recently thrown out of the CCC, an extraordinary measure, due to this but mostly other events related to a sorta-kinda security audit of OpenLeaks (this alone would require several paragraphs of explanation).
Anyway, DDB had this very sensitive data, which he didn't want to give to WL, and pretty much no one else either. He also had the encryption keys. I think initially he talked about just deleting the encryption keys in order to prove that he has no intention of using the leaks himself. But if you don't trust him, why would you believe he deleted his keys? And now he apparently figured the only course of action left was to "simply" delete the files themselves. I don't quite understand that final bit, either.
I have tried to summarize a very complex situation full of half-truths and unproven allegations to the best of my ability. Note that I have absolutely zero inside information, I know no one involved, this is all public information (though fairly inaccessible to many Slashdot users due to the language barrier).
Most people never had a MySpace account.