This is likely to get banned in short order on privacy grounds alone. Even if all processing was done inside the TV (looking for eyeballs),
the fact that any data gleaned would have to be sent upstream to be useful should be enough to get this technology blocked.
Why would any data have to be sent upstream? If you read TFA (or even TFS), you'll see that the intention is to provide information to the viewer, not to the service provider. Therefore, there's no need for the data to go anywhere.
Realistically, if the data gets sent upstream, then no one would ever buy this. If it is only used locally, then there will likely be quite a lot of buyers. Slashdotters tend to be against any and all tracking for any purposes, but if you venture out into the real world, you'll find that there are actually many people who want the personalization that this kind of tracking can provide.
I played the first three Dukes. They were fun. Now I'm older and I don't really game anymore. However, I will go to a game store on June 10th. I have no intention of buying DNF, but I want to touch a copy of it. Until I hold it in my hand, I will continue to assume that this is all a big joke, and I fully expect another "delay" before then.
I think I am missing something... once Childs was fired, he was no longer employed. Under what obligation was he under to continue to work with a former employer to resolve any issue?
The problems with Childs span a two-year period, during which time he was employed. Lots of people seem to think that the issue involves the company asking for passwords, Childs refusing, and the company firing him. But that's not what happened. Technically, he never even got fired. He was on administrative leave at the time that he decided to flee the State, but so much had already gone wrong by then, that grabbing his $10,000 in cash and running off to Nevada was just the straw that broke the legal camel's back. And that's precisely why he was arrested. He already had a meeting scheduled with the CTO for the following week to attempt to resolve the issue. But he decided to flee instead. Dumb.
IE usage is currently estimated to be below 50%, so it would be more like about 6 out of every 14 programs downloaded by Windows users are downloaded by IE.
It's not the OS, it's the users. My malicious download rate on Windows is approximately 0 in infinity. That's because I don't click on every random link on every website I visit, I read dialogs before clicking "OK", and I download things from trusted sites. While in theory, that still doesn't make me completely immune, in practice it's been good so far.
I don't think too many on/. think that deserves jail time though. A firing for unprofessional conduct: sure.
As I understand it, what transformed his case from an employment issue to a criminal issue was when he decided to try to flee the state while still in possession of the passwords and configuration backups that he was keeping from everyone else. If he had just stuck around and worked with his employer to resolve the issue, he likely wouldn't ever have seen the inside of a jail cell.
One route by which a false causation could occur here is through one of the most obvious effects of caffeine - its a diuretic. The summary could have just as easily said "Pissing often helps prevent prostate cancer"
The study does point out that decaf coffee had the same effect as regular, so it's not the caffeine, or any effect of the caffeine, that does this.
Your assumptions about my work situation are not accurate, however I recognize that mine is not at all the normal situation. But what you're saying is really exactly the point. In a corporate environment, users don't manage their computers— their IT departments do. So this "torture" he's talking about doesn't actually apply to the users.
What's he's really saying is "managing computers is hard for your IT department, so fire them all and let us do that part for you".
He might have had a point if he had been talking about home users. Essentially, ChromeOS allows home users to have an IT department manage their computers for them. This would be quite useful for a lot of people.
The problem with his statements is that he was explicitly not talking about home users, but corporate users, who already have an IT department to manage their computers.
Except that he is talking about corporate users, not home users.
"...the company claimed 75% of business users can be converted from Windows to Chrome OS right away."
"But by next year, Brin hopes the vast majority of Googlers will be doing their work on Chrome OS."
"...presents a 'stateless' model that Brin believes will eliminate complexity for users and IT departments by un-tethering people from machines that are difficult to set up and manage."
"...they surveyed 400 companies..."
"...including partnerships with VMware and Citrix to deliver remote access to enterprise applications."
Basically, all he's doing is suggesting that you replace "letting your IT department manage your computers" with "letting Google's IT department manage your computers.
A more accurate headline would've been "Sergey Brin thinks managing your own computer is 'torture'."
More interesting is the implication that, with the exception of about 20% of their employees, the brilliant engineers at Google can't handle managing their own computer. I use Windows at work. I can't say that I spend a whole lot of time "managing" my computer. I'm too busy getting work done— and hanging out on Slashdot, of course;).
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator!
You call that fixed?!? I don't know what you're seeing, but over here on my screen, it's currently showing about 200 different quotes all separated by "%". I wouldn't exactly call that "fixed".
I really wish the Slashdot developers would figure out how to set up a separate test environment, rather than just coding directly on the production servers, which seems to be how things are done here.
The trial has been going on for almost two months. There's more to it than just a missing router and an autopsy report. I'm not saying he did or didn't do it, but drawing a conclusion in a murder trial based on a Slashdot summary is absurd.
He doesn't have to prove he is innocent. They have to prove he is guilty.
But that's the point. They've spent weeks presenting a case to prove he's guilty. Now he's defending himself by saying, among other things, "all your evidence is clearly wrong, because she phoned me after I supposedly killed her". And they're responding by saying "not necessarily so, since you could've faked that call, therefore the rest of our case is still plausible". And they'd be right on that point.
Note that this is merely one tiny detail of the case, even though the summary tries to make it sound like it's the smoking gun.
What can they tell you, the serial number of the unit in your car? I'm sure law enforcement, with the ten minutes a month they don't spend trying to hunt down people with insignificant personal quantities of marijuana, will set up a checkpoint so they can check the serial numbers of every TomTom looking for that bastard with serial #93824920535326469 who went 5 miles over the speed limit last week at 4am.
I don't personally think the police would have any interest whatsoever in using this data to hunt down a particular speeder. However, just looking at this hypothetically, they absolutely could track the individual down using the GPS data. They don't need to set up a checkpoint and wait for the vehicle to happen to pass through, all they have to do is look at the GPS data to see where the vehicle parks every night. Chances are, that's the home of the vehicle's owner.
Well, now we're really straying off the original point, which was whether or not encrypting your wireless connection made it easier or harder to avoid wrongful accusations. If the police want to do something sneaky, such as plant evidence on your hard drive, for example, then your choice to lock your router or not will make no difference whatsoever. If anything, it strengthens my original point that locking down your network decreases the chance that you'll have to deal with such accusations in the first place, so it therefore also decreases the chance that police misconduct will be an issue you need to worry about.
If a criminal is going to use someone else's wireless, they won't even bother breaking the encryption when it's easier to just locate an open connection. So, if your connection is open, someone might use it for nefarious activities, but if it's locked, most likely no one will, even if it's not too difficult to break in.
Of course, either way you have plausible deniability. If it's open, you can say that someone else must have used it. If it's locked, you can say that someone else must have broken in and used it. Either way, when the police look at your computer and find no traces of illegal activity, they'll let you go, just like they did with the guy in the story. But at least if you take efforts to secure your wireless, you reduce the likelihood that you'll ever be in that situation in the first place.
If it's as simple as pulling the plug when the cops knock at your door, then is it really that much more difficult to pull the plug when the cops bust the door down? If you're a pedophile using TrueCrypt, are you going to "pull the plug" every time your doorbell rings, just in case it's the cops? He was asleep when the raid occurred, so the computer was probably already off.
There's no reason to physically bust down the door in the middle of the night, throw the suspect down a flight of stairs, and basically terrorize a man and his wife for two hours, just to catch a guy who downloaded some pictures, and all purely on the basis of an IP address. According to TFA, once they realized they had the wrong guy, they actually did a little more investigation, and found that the P2P user had connected from other IP addresses as well, and two of them were accessed using a secure token which led them directly to the actual perpetrator. If they had bothered to actually do a thorough investigation in the first place, this would never have happened. And, even with their amateur investigative skills, if they had executed the warrant in a more reasonable manner (i.e. knock on the door and ask to be let in), then the first warrant wouldn't have been quite so traumatic, and the second one (when they arrested the actual perpetrator) would still have been just as effective.
There was simply no need for the testosterone-fueled military tactics.
Breaking home wireless encryption isn't that hard...
But it's not worth the effort as long as there are unprotected routers available.
It's a bit like using a steering wheel lock in your car. It's not that they can't be defeated, it's just that there's no point wasting time trying to defeat it when there are plenty of cars without one.
Wow, you've totally made my day! I've never been called an "open source fanboy" before (I'm typing this on a Windows Server 2008 box that's currently running Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Eclipse, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, SQL Server Management Studio, and Visual Studio— I guess two open source apps out of eight on a closed-source OS is good enough for a "fanboy"). Thanks!
Then why'd you even mention source code? And how does this conclusion differentiate any phone from any other?
Well, it was kind of an afterthought, to be honest. You can't know for sure that the source code actually matches the binary, but real world experience suggests that most of the time, it does. Therefore, seeing the source code provides a certain (though nowhere near absolute) level of trustworthiness.
Of course, the real point of my post was simply that worrying about whether or not your phone is actually doing what it claims to do when you shut off the GPS is a bit too tin-foil-hat for my tastes. The battery usage alone should be a strong (although, again, not absolute) indicator of that. If the AC wants to stay awake worrying that his phone is tracking him, and if you want to stay awake worrying about the dangers lurking in open source software (although, those same dangers are at least as likely in closed source software, so I wonder why you use any software at all), then so be it. I'm just going to enjoy my new-found fanboy status.:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is likely to get banned in short order on privacy grounds alone. Even if all processing was done inside the TV (looking for eyeballs), the fact that any data gleaned would have to be sent upstream to be useful should be enough to get this technology blocked.
Why would any data have to be sent upstream? If you read TFA (or even TFS), you'll see that the intention is to provide information to the viewer, not to the service provider. Therefore, there's no need for the data to go anywhere.
Realistically, if the data gets sent upstream, then no one would ever buy this. If it is only used locally, then there will likely be quite a lot of buyers. Slashdotters tend to be against any and all tracking for any purposes, but if you venture out into the real world, you'll find that there are actually many people who want the personalization that this kind of tracking can provide.
or is he trying to manipulate the price through the media?
Two paragraphs above that:
Microsoft shares shot up 0.87 percent in after-hours trading, the most of any Dow Jones industrial average component.
So I'd say "yes", and add "successfully".
I played the first three Dukes. They were fun. Now I'm older and I don't really game anymore. However, I will go to a game store on June 10th. I have no intention of buying DNF, but I want to touch a copy of it. Until I hold it in my hand, I will continue to assume that this is all a big joke, and I fully expect another "delay" before then.
At the very least, install Lookout.
Sorry. Can you point to the place where it is illegal to take a vacation to Vegas and spend $10,000?
Oh, FFS, you're not honestly that stupid. That isn't even remotely what I stated. Go back to school and learn to read and comprehend.
I think I am missing something... once Childs was fired, he was no longer employed. Under what obligation was he under to continue to work with a former employer to resolve any issue?
The problems with Childs span a two-year period, during which time he was employed. Lots of people seem to think that the issue involves the company asking for passwords, Childs refusing, and the company firing him. But that's not what happened. Technically, he never even got fired. He was on administrative leave at the time that he decided to flee the State, but so much had already gone wrong by then, that grabbing his $10,000 in cash and running off to Nevada was just the straw that broke the legal camel's back. And that's precisely why he was arrested. He already had a meeting scheduled with the CTO for the following week to attempt to resolve the issue. But he decided to flee instead. Dumb.
I would love to see a software repository for Windows. But how do you get people to start using it? You have to... train them.
The point is that the issue is still the users, not the OS.
There are many ways to train users to be more responsible. A trusted software repository might be one of those ways.
IE usage is currently estimated to be below 50%, so it would be more like about 6 out of every 14 programs downloaded by Windows users are downloaded by IE.
It's not the OS, it's the users. My malicious download rate on Windows is approximately 0 in infinity. That's because I don't click on every random link on every website I visit, I read dialogs before clicking "OK", and I download things from trusted sites. While in theory, that still doesn't make me completely immune, in practice it's been good so far.
People need training, not a new OS.
I don't think too many on /. think that deserves jail time though. A firing for unprofessional conduct: sure.
As I understand it, what transformed his case from an employment issue to a criminal issue was when he decided to try to flee the state while still in possession of the passwords and configuration backups that he was keeping from everyone else. If he had just stuck around and worked with his employer to resolve the issue, he likely wouldn't ever have seen the inside of a jail cell.
One route by which a false causation could occur here is through one of the most obvious effects of caffeine - its a diuretic. The summary could have just as easily said "Pissing often helps prevent prostate cancer"
The study does point out that decaf coffee had the same effect as regular, so it's not the caffeine, or any effect of the caffeine, that does this.
Your assumptions about my work situation are not accurate, however I recognize that mine is not at all the normal situation. But what you're saying is really exactly the point. In a corporate environment, users don't manage their computers— their IT departments do. So this "torture" he's talking about doesn't actually apply to the users.
What's he's really saying is "managing computers is hard for your IT department, so fire them all and let us do that part for you".
He might have had a point if he had been talking about home users. Essentially, ChromeOS allows home users to have an IT department manage their computers for them. This would be quite useful for a lot of people.
The problem with his statements is that he was explicitly not talking about home users, but corporate users, who already have an IT department to manage their computers.
Except that he is talking about corporate users, not home users.
"...the company claimed 75% of business users can be converted from Windows to Chrome OS right away."
"But by next year, Brin hopes the vast majority of Googlers will be doing their work on Chrome OS."
"...presents a 'stateless' model that Brin believes will eliminate complexity for users and IT departments by un-tethering people from machines that are difficult to set up and manage."
"...they surveyed 400 companies..."
"...including partnerships with VMware and Citrix to deliver remote access to enterprise applications."
Basically, all he's doing is suggesting that you replace "letting your IT department manage your computers" with "letting Google's IT department manage your computers.
A more accurate headline would've been "Sergey Brin thinks managing your own computer is 'torture'."
More interesting is the implication that, with the exception of about 20% of their employees, the brilliant engineers at Google can't handle managing their own computer. I use Windows at work. I can't say that I spend a whole lot of time "managing" my computer. I'm too busy getting work done— and hanging out on Slashdot, of course ;).
On a different note, Slashdot has finally fixed its fortune cookie generator!
You call that fixed?!? I don't know what you're seeing, but over here on my screen, it's currently showing about 200 different quotes all separated by "%". I wouldn't exactly call that "fixed".
I really wish the Slashdot developers would figure out how to set up a separate test environment, rather than just coding directly on the production servers, which seems to be how things are done here.
Annoying? Given the atrocity that is the new comment system, that quote is just about the only reason I keep coming back.
The trial has been going on for almost two months. There's more to it than just a missing router and an autopsy report. I'm not saying he did or didn't do it, but drawing a conclusion in a murder trial based on a Slashdot summary is absurd.
He doesn't have to prove he is innocent. They have to prove he is guilty.
But that's the point. They've spent weeks presenting a case to prove he's guilty. Now he's defending himself by saying, among other things, "all your evidence is clearly wrong, because she phoned me after I supposedly killed her". And they're responding by saying "not necessarily so, since you could've faked that call, therefore the rest of our case is still plausible". And they'd be right on that point.
Note that this is merely one tiny detail of the case, even though the summary tries to make it sound like it's the smoking gun.
Plus, ever since Breezy, they've been sticking to incrementing the initials of the name with every version, which is a damned handy mnemonic.
Until October, 2017 rolls around...
:)
What can they tell you, the serial number of the unit in your car? I'm sure law enforcement, with the ten minutes a month they don't spend trying to hunt down people with insignificant personal quantities of marijuana, will set up a checkpoint so they can check the serial numbers of every TomTom looking for that bastard with serial #93824920535326469 who went 5 miles over the speed limit last week at 4am.
I don't personally think the police would have any interest whatsoever in using this data to hunt down a particular speeder. However, just looking at this hypothetically, they absolutely could track the individual down using the GPS data. They don't need to set up a checkpoint and wait for the vehicle to happen to pass through, all they have to do is look at the GPS data to see where the vehicle parks every night. Chances are, that's the home of the vehicle's owner.
Well, now we're really straying off the original point, which was whether or not encrypting your wireless connection made it easier or harder to avoid wrongful accusations. If the police want to do something sneaky, such as plant evidence on your hard drive, for example, then your choice to lock your router or not will make no difference whatsoever. If anything, it strengthens my original point that locking down your network decreases the chance that you'll have to deal with such accusations in the first place, so it therefore also decreases the chance that police misconduct will be an issue you need to worry about.
I got his point. You didn't get mine.
If a criminal is going to use someone else's wireless, they won't even bother breaking the encryption when it's easier to just locate an open connection. So, if your connection is open, someone might use it for nefarious activities, but if it's locked, most likely no one will, even if it's not too difficult to break in.
Of course, either way you have plausible deniability. If it's open, you can say that someone else must have used it. If it's locked, you can say that someone else must have broken in and used it. Either way, when the police look at your computer and find no traces of illegal activity, they'll let you go, just like they did with the guy in the story. But at least if you take efforts to secure your wireless, you reduce the likelihood that you'll ever be in that situation in the first place.
If it's as simple as pulling the plug when the cops knock at your door, then is it really that much more difficult to pull the plug when the cops bust the door down? If you're a pedophile using TrueCrypt, are you going to "pull the plug" every time your doorbell rings, just in case it's the cops? He was asleep when the raid occurred, so the computer was probably already off.
There's no reason to physically bust down the door in the middle of the night, throw the suspect down a flight of stairs, and basically terrorize a man and his wife for two hours, just to catch a guy who downloaded some pictures, and all purely on the basis of an IP address. According to TFA, once they realized they had the wrong guy, they actually did a little more investigation, and found that the P2P user had connected from other IP addresses as well, and two of them were accessed using a secure token which led them directly to the actual perpetrator. If they had bothered to actually do a thorough investigation in the first place, this would never have happened. And, even with their amateur investigative skills, if they had executed the warrant in a more reasonable manner (i.e. knock on the door and ask to be let in), then the first warrant wouldn't have been quite so traumatic, and the second one (when they arrested the actual perpetrator) would still have been just as effective.
There was simply no need for the testosterone-fueled military tactics.
Breaking home wireless encryption isn't that hard...
But it's not worth the effort as long as there are unprotected routers available.
It's a bit like using a steering wheel lock in your car. It's not that they can't be defeated, it's just that there's no point wasting time trying to defeat it when there are plenty of cars without one.
Wow, you've totally made my day! I've never been called an "open source fanboy" before (I'm typing this on a Windows Server 2008 box that's currently running Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Eclipse, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, SQL Server Management Studio, and Visual Studio— I guess two open source apps out of eight on a closed-source OS is good enough for a "fanboy"). Thanks!
Then why'd you even mention source code? And how does this conclusion differentiate any phone from any other?
Well, it was kind of an afterthought, to be honest. You can't know for sure that the source code actually matches the binary, but real world experience suggests that most of the time, it does. Therefore, seeing the source code provides a certain (though nowhere near absolute) level of trustworthiness.
Of course, the real point of my post was simply that worrying about whether or not your phone is actually doing what it claims to do when you shut off the GPS is a bit too tin-foil-hat for my tastes. The battery usage alone should be a strong (although, again, not absolute) indicator of that. If the AC wants to stay awake worrying that his phone is tracking him, and if you want to stay awake worrying about the dangers lurking in open source software (although, those same dangers are at least as likely in closed source software, so I wonder why you use any software at all), then so be it. I'm just going to enjoy my new-found fanboy status. :)