Yes, they're monitoring calls that originate outside the US, just not calls whose caller and receiver are both outside the US (which Verizon probably wouldn't have access to anyway). But it's already assumed there is some cross-country sharing between intelligence services going on to get around pesky international laws.
The actual order is secret, and I didn't find any links to the actual order, though a number of organizations claimed to have a copy.
The Guardian has a copy here. I believe they actually broke the story, not Wired.
And you're right, it's not limited to a subset; it is ALL calls not wholly originating outside the US:
an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls. This Order does not require Verizon to produce telephony metadata for communications wholly originating and terminating in foreign countries. Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information,. including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.
The most worrying part to me is not the call records, which we already knew the NSA was tapping into at the trunk level, but that they have access to all cellphone call metadata, including location vis a vis cell tower triangulation. This effectively means the NSA can roughly track the movements of all Americans, or at least those of us whose smartphone data services are constantly pinging the network.
I never understood why people just go through these scanners like sheep. I have never been through one despite flying periodically -- one can and should decline the scan.
In the USA, yes you can decline and instead get sexually groped by a TSA employee. In other countries like the UK you can't decline -- if you want to get on your flight, you go through the scanner.
$30 million for a newsreader app. Really. $30 million.
Apple recently spent, according to estimates, $20 million on a company which allows phones to map indoor spaces. That tech will directly help improve their Maps product. So $20 million for very innovative stuff. Apple will surely get their money's worth out of that purchase.
In contrast, $30 million for Summly, which probably just packaged some open source libraries for summarizing documents. I don't see any secret sauce or innovation in this product. This purchase smells of desperation by Mayer & Co, but I guess if I was Yahoo and had no products anyone cared about, I'd be desperate too.
Digital has nothing to do with this -- this is for listeners who still prefer a physical product to hold.
As a recording engineer, you should know that tape machines are a PITA in terms of maintenance and upkeep. Not something your average indie band has the money/skills/space to keep around in working order. And good-quality tape is harder to find these days. This vinyl system, if it works as well as they say it does, allows an artist to do a small run of high-quality physical products. 180g vinyl is top quality, assuming the transfer is good. This is a great thing for indie artists. Think of it as craft beer for musicians.
While the parent used the incorrect term, what the IRS is capable of is functionally equivalent. The IRS has the legal authority to make liens, garnish wages, and seize assets for failure to pay income tax. So they could certainly take that farm away.
A lot of the current UX people are pretty young (and I'm talking about both Android and Apple), and don't seem to have a solid grasp of historical UX precedents. (same thing is true of art directors and programmers) Google seems to think they invented all this stuff, but as you say the Macintosh had a GUI design bible that is still very relevant today and covers most of what Google is trying to spin as their profound discoveries. Unfortunately even the UX designers at Apple seem to cast aside this bible. Everyone wants to make their mark and do something different than what was done before, even if it's not the right decision, even if it hurts the user's experience. Often hubris clouds their judgment. Jony Ive is a great designer because he serves the product, not his ego.
Pretty much this. Do they expect web standards to never change again? There must be something else going on...lack of interest, internal politics, funding, et al.
So the attackers were able to get what sounds like direct access to the user database, or best case a backup copy, and yet we're expected to believe that the attackers couldn't gain access to the content database? (assuming it's even a different database) Or at least crack some really weak passwords within the two days before this was reported to users?
In this kind of attack, the baddies are after the content. The user accounts themselves are mostly worthless -- can't really use them for spam or phishing. But there's probably some dummies out there who have put sensitive information in Evernote, and that's what I'd guess the bad guys are after.
My guess is, Evernote has no frickin idea whether content was stolen or not, but they DO know that if they said that publicly they'd be in hot water.
Yeah, he's not developing his own rocket and capsule system; he'll be contracting that out. Probably to SpaceX for the rocket. His team will probably act more like a design feasibility and mission control team.
1) Creates unsustainable business models. They fund startups which have no real business model, other than "get a boatload of users by offering the product for free, and then either sell the company or monetize users through profiling". This does not offer sustainable growth, and more often results in the site shutting down when the userbase doesn't materialize. see: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, on and on.
2) Suppresses competition. Artificially lowering the price of a product to free puts competitors that do not have millions in startup money to burn through at a substantial disadvantage, even if they have a better-quality product. This is akin to (although actually more severe than) China flooding the U.S. with cheap goods that local companies cannot compete with on cost.
3) Turns the customer into a product. VC money has mostly funded web startups which operate on the previously discussed business model of making the service the razor, and making the users the razor blades. It's a self-propagating situation, as new VC-funded startups compete against other free-service VC startups. These free services rarely have direct advertising; instead, the user is invariably the product which is sold to advertisers, or another company.
Your examples are anecdotal and are not really commercial services. Also, I should clarify that I'm not opposed to VC money. The traditional idea of venture capital is that it helps an existing business expand operations or invest in R&D they wouldn't have the money to otherwise; a financial second-stage rocket. VC firms now hand out money to people that only have a vague idea of what they are building, and have no idea how to monetize their product. But that's ok, because VC money gets you articles on Techcrunch and The Verge, and that gets you lots of buzz and thus users. Users who amble into the slaughterhouse to be packaged up as products.
In theory your idea is good, but what group will be responsible for the whitelisting, and what power would they actually have to enforce restrictions upon advertisers? ICANN? They've been corrupt since day one. This would probably have to be a governmental body -- either the UN or more likely an org within the US government -- and I don't think governmental regulation of the web is where we want to end up.
2.0 released as Ruby turns 20 years old
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Happy birthday to Ruby! Pretty cool the way that numeric coincidence worked out.
2.0 looks like a nice step forwards. I'm not sure where I stand on Refinements yet. I hate the method overriding of base classes that goes on in Ruby land, and Refinements is supposed to minimize the bad affects of that by offering scoped alterations, but from what I've heard there's a lot of side effects. Frankly, I think Ruby needs a 'protected' type; any other solution is just monkeys all the way down. But I could say this about a lot of the popular languages right now.
Collapse of this system is inevitable; and when it does, it might be replaced with something saner where ads are rare and subtle.
The only saner system is one where a business has an honest relationship with its customers -- money for goods and services. Anything else in a capitalist, free-market economy gives you very little rights. Even though print newspapers and magazines mostly survive on ad revenue, customers still pay for the content. That creates a relationship between provider of service and the customers of that service. This delusion that people have that all digital content should be free is a self-destructive delusion. If a business refers to people as consumers instead of customers, stay away.
Well, the public was given a choice back in the 90's. There were ad-driven sites, and there were subscription-based sites.
We know which business model won. The "free" one, because people tend to value short-term rewards over long-term ones. The tracking and collusion by ad companies is just natural evolution of the wild west world of internet advertising. Ad rates have gotten so low that Google would probably be as poor as Yahoo if they weren't keeping tabs on you wherever you go and offering that profiling to advertisers. Facebook as well.
So, this completely has to do with ads on the internet. The public chose short-term self-interest, and now we're reaping the consequences of that choice. I know that a lot of newer slashdotters probably work at VC-funded startups, and think that the internet is just a giant playground where everything is free, but some of us lived and worked through dot-com fantasyland 1.0, and the reality is that businesses have to actually make money. The sad thing is that we're just going through the same cycle again. VC money is a cancer on the tech industry, because it creates unsustainable business models, suppresses competition, and turns the customer into a product.
Bungie has open-sourced the Marathon series, with builds available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so that may be a better experience than the iPad version.
You're right -- Macs of the day did have better graphics capabilities than equivalent PCs, so that may account for the higher resolutions and texture bit-depths. But I think most of the innovation just comes from smart people making cool stuff.
Yes, Marathon did have angled floors. Destructible stuff, I'm not sure -- the last time I played through the series was in the 90's. Guess I should download those games as well!
Bungie has open-sourced the Marathon series, with builds available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so that may be a better experience than the iPad version.
You're right -- Macs of the day did have better graphics capabilities than equivalent PCs, so that may account for the higher resolutions and texture bit-depths. But I think most of the innovation just comes from smart people making cool stuff.
Yes, Marathon did have angled floors. Destructible stuff, I'm not sure -- the last time I played through the series was in the 90's. Guess I should download those games as well!
The Marathon series has also been open-sourced by Bungie, and builds are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Probably a better experience than the iPad version (haven't played it), but YMMV. They're actually pretty good single-player games.
With regards to your questions, Macs of the day did have an edge on graphics as compared to PCs, so that could account for the higher resolutions and higher bit-depth textures. But most of it is just smart people making cool stuff. As for destructible stuff, you know, I don't really remember. I haven't really played through the Marathon games since the 90's -- I should probably download them myself! But yes, Marathon has angled floors, and also features liquids, with different physics for each type.
Well it wasn't true 3D; the Build engine was basically 2.5D -- the levels were still 2D, with an added height component -- using a lot of clever hacks to enable Z-axis levels and targeting. It worked well enough, and was a lot faster than the true-3D Quake on machines of the day. Quake needed a Pentium; if memory serves, Duke could run well on a 486.
I'd disagree that it was the best-featured engine of the day though. Bungie's Marathon engine was 2.5D with free-look and z-axis targeting, but also allowed for higher bit-depth textures, featured a basic physics engine for weapon effects, featured alt-fire modes for weapons, and more advanced networking. And it came out in 1994; Duke arrived in 1996. Ultimately, they're both innovative engines, but I'd give the nod to Marathon as being the best of the time.
The crash reports -- like other services of its ilk -- are sent to and stored on Crashlytics' servers. The current TOS limit usage of reports by Crashlytics to providing the service to you and for service diagnostics. Of course, they change the TOS anytime they feel like it.
Twitter recently bought Crashlytics, a company making pretty good crash reporting tool and service for iOS and Android. The usual "nothing will change" and made it free for everyone. How long will that last, a year? My guess is, just like Posterous they will absorb whatever they can of their tech into internal tools and then shut it down. Otherwise, why would they make it free? It's disappointing when innovative tech companies like Crashlytics get swallowed and digested like this.
The app developers on Google Play -- unlike Apple's App Store -- are required to remit tax payments to the states/countries(?) in which apps are sold, as the developers seem to be the legal sellers of their apps. Thus, the developers need to know where buyers live. Or at least the state; I don't know what's required for tax/documentation purposes. It's a sketchy system Google has set up, and from a developer POV Apple certainly abstracts away much of the pain points of selling products. However, my guess is that most Android app developers aren't properly remitting tax payments to local tax authorities anyway...
So how would this be more open that Flash? While the Flash Player (AVM) is closed source, the entire AS3 library is open source.
I know that everyone's hatred of Flash often gets in the way of facts and reality, but everything regarding Flash -- the SWF format, the AVM2 bytecode, the communication protocols -- has been open-sourced except for Adobe's Flash IDE.
I've been aware of NeoOffice, but haven't tried it. I'll take a look, thanks for the pointer. How does it compare on features to OO/LO? It's a shame that there's so many different projects instead of combining the best parts of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they're monitoring calls that originate outside the US, just not calls whose caller and receiver are both outside the US (which Verizon probably wouldn't have access to anyway). But it's already assumed there is some cross-country sharing between intelligence services going on to get around pesky international laws.
The Guardian has a copy here. I believe they actually broke the story, not Wired.
And you're right, it's not limited to a subset; it is ALL calls not wholly originating outside the US:
The most worrying part to me is not the call records, which we already knew the NSA was tapping into at the trunk level, but that they have access to all cellphone call metadata, including location vis a vis cell tower triangulation. This effectively means the NSA can roughly track the movements of all Americans, or at least those of us whose smartphone data services are constantly pinging the network.
In the USA, yes you can decline and instead get sexually groped by a TSA employee. In other countries like the UK you can't decline -- if you want to get on your flight, you go through the scanner.
The git source is still available (http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=summary); it is only the patches for the bug-in-question that are closed off. This seems entirely reasonable given the severity of this vulnerability.
$30 million for a newsreader app. Really. $30 million.
Apple recently spent, according to estimates, $20 million on a company which allows phones to map indoor spaces. That tech will directly help improve their Maps product. So $20 million for very innovative stuff. Apple will surely get their money's worth out of that purchase.
In contrast, $30 million for Summly, which probably just packaged some open source libraries for summarizing documents. I don't see any secret sauce or innovation in this product. This purchase smells of desperation by Mayer & Co, but I guess if I was Yahoo and had no products anyone cared about, I'd be desperate too.
Digital has nothing to do with this -- this is for listeners who still prefer a physical product to hold.
As a recording engineer, you should know that tape machines are a PITA in terms of maintenance and upkeep. Not something your average indie band has the money/skills/space to keep around in working order. And good-quality tape is harder to find these days. This vinyl system, if it works as well as they say it does, allows an artist to do a small run of high-quality physical products. 180g vinyl is top quality, assuming the transfer is good. This is a great thing for indie artists. Think of it as craft beer for musicians.
While the parent used the incorrect term, what the IRS is capable of is functionally equivalent. The IRS has the legal authority to make liens, garnish wages, and seize assets for failure to pay income tax. So they could certainly take that farm away.
A lot of the current UX people are pretty young (and I'm talking about both Android and Apple), and don't seem to have a solid grasp of historical UX precedents. (same thing is true of art directors and programmers) Google seems to think they invented all this stuff, but as you say the Macintosh had a GUI design bible that is still very relevant today and covers most of what Google is trying to spin as their profound discoveries. Unfortunately even the UX designers at Apple seem to cast aside this bible. Everyone wants to make their mark and do something different than what was done before, even if it's not the right decision, even if it hurts the user's experience. Often hubris clouds their judgment. Jony Ive is a great designer because he serves the product, not his ego.
Pretty much this. Do they expect web standards to never change again? There must be something else going on...lack of interest, internal politics, funding, et al.
So the attackers were able to get what sounds like direct access to the user database, or best case a backup copy, and yet we're expected to believe that the attackers couldn't gain access to the content database? (assuming it's even a different database) Or at least crack some really weak passwords within the two days before this was reported to users?
In this kind of attack, the baddies are after the content. The user accounts themselves are mostly worthless -- can't really use them for spam or phishing. But there's probably some dummies out there who have put sensitive information in Evernote, and that's what I'd guess the bad guys are after.
My guess is, Evernote has no frickin idea whether content was stolen or not, but they DO know that if they said that publicly they'd be in hot water.
Yeah, he's not developing his own rocket and capsule system; he'll be contracting that out. Probably to SpaceX for the rocket. His team will probably act more like a design feasibility and mission control team.
False.
VC Money:
1) Creates unsustainable business models. They fund startups which have no real business model, other than "get a boatload of users by offering the product for free, and then either sell the company or monetize users through profiling". This does not offer sustainable growth, and more often results in the site shutting down when the userbase doesn't materialize. see: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, on and on.
2) Suppresses competition. Artificially lowering the price of a product to free puts competitors that do not have millions in startup money to burn through at a substantial disadvantage, even if they have a better-quality product. This is akin to (although actually more severe than) China flooding the U.S. with cheap goods that local companies cannot compete with on cost.
3) Turns the customer into a product. VC money has mostly funded web startups which operate on the previously discussed business model of making the service the razor, and making the users the razor blades. It's a self-propagating situation, as new VC-funded startups compete against other free-service VC startups. These free services rarely have direct advertising; instead, the user is invariably the product which is sold to advertisers, or another company.
Your examples are anecdotal and are not really commercial services. Also, I should clarify that I'm not opposed to VC money. The traditional idea of venture capital is that it helps an existing business expand operations or invest in R&D they wouldn't have the money to otherwise; a financial second-stage rocket. VC firms now hand out money to people that only have a vague idea of what they are building, and have no idea how to monetize their product. But that's ok, because VC money gets you articles on Techcrunch and The Verge, and that gets you lots of buzz and thus users. Users who amble into the slaughterhouse to be packaged up as products.
In theory your idea is good, but what group will be responsible for the whitelisting, and what power would they actually have to enforce restrictions upon advertisers? ICANN? They've been corrupt since day one. This would probably have to be a governmental body -- either the UN or more likely an org within the US government -- and I don't think governmental regulation of the web is where we want to end up.
Happy birthday to Ruby! Pretty cool the way that numeric coincidence worked out.
2.0 looks like a nice step forwards. I'm not sure where I stand on Refinements yet. I hate the method overriding of base classes that goes on in Ruby land, and Refinements is supposed to minimize the bad affects of that by offering scoped alterations, but from what I've heard there's a lot of side effects. Frankly, I think Ruby needs a 'protected' type; any other solution is just monkeys all the way down. But I could say this about a lot of the popular languages right now.
The only saner system is one where a business has an honest relationship with its customers -- money for goods and services. Anything else in a capitalist, free-market economy gives you very little rights. Even though print newspapers and magazines mostly survive on ad revenue, customers still pay for the content. That creates a relationship between provider of service and the customers of that service. This delusion that people have that all digital content should be free is a self-destructive delusion. If a business refers to people as consumers instead of customers, stay away.
Frankly, I prefer what the other Hicks (and Ripley) said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s1MspmfEwg
Well, the public was given a choice back in the 90's. There were ad-driven sites, and there were subscription-based sites.
We know which business model won. The "free" one, because people tend to value short-term rewards over long-term ones. The tracking and collusion by ad companies is just natural evolution of the wild west world of internet advertising. Ad rates have gotten so low that Google would probably be as poor as Yahoo if they weren't keeping tabs on you wherever you go and offering that profiling to advertisers. Facebook as well.
So, this completely has to do with ads on the internet. The public chose short-term self-interest, and now we're reaping the consequences of that choice. I know that a lot of newer slashdotters probably work at VC-funded startups, and think that the internet is just a giant playground where everything is free, but some of us lived and worked through dot-com fantasyland 1.0, and the reality is that businesses have to actually make money. The sad thing is that we're just going through the same cycle again. VC money is a cancer on the tech industry, because it creates unsustainable business models, suppresses competition, and turns the customer into a product.
Bungie has open-sourced the Marathon series, with builds available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so that may be a better experience than the iPad version.
You're right -- Macs of the day did have better graphics capabilities than equivalent PCs, so that may account for the higher resolutions and texture bit-depths. But I think most of the innovation just comes from smart people making cool stuff.
Yes, Marathon did have angled floors. Destructible stuff, I'm not sure -- the last time I played through the series was in the 90's. Guess I should download those games as well!
Bungie has open-sourced the Marathon series, with builds available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so that may be a better experience than the iPad version.
You're right -- Macs of the day did have better graphics capabilities than equivalent PCs, so that may account for the higher resolutions and texture bit-depths. But I think most of the innovation just comes from smart people making cool stuff.
Yes, Marathon did have angled floors. Destructible stuff, I'm not sure -- the last time I played through the series was in the 90's. Guess I should download those games as well!
The Marathon series has also been open-sourced by Bungie, and builds are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Probably a better experience than the iPad version (haven't played it), but YMMV. They're actually pretty good single-player games.
With regards to your questions, Macs of the day did have an edge on graphics as compared to PCs, so that could account for the higher resolutions and higher bit-depth textures. But most of it is just smart people making cool stuff. As for destructible stuff, you know, I don't really remember. I haven't really played through the Marathon games since the 90's -- I should probably download them myself! But yes, Marathon has angled floors, and also features liquids, with different physics for each type.
Well it wasn't true 3D; the Build engine was basically 2.5D -- the levels were still 2D, with an added height component -- using a lot of clever hacks to enable Z-axis levels and targeting. It worked well enough, and was a lot faster than the true-3D Quake on machines of the day. Quake needed a Pentium; if memory serves, Duke could run well on a 486.
I'd disagree that it was the best-featured engine of the day though. Bungie's Marathon engine was 2.5D with free-look and z-axis targeting, but also allowed for higher bit-depth textures, featured a basic physics engine for weapon effects, featured alt-fire modes for weapons, and more advanced networking. And it came out in 1994; Duke arrived in 1996. Ultimately, they're both innovative engines, but I'd give the nod to Marathon as being the best of the time.
The crash reports -- like other services of its ilk -- are sent to and stored on Crashlytics' servers. The current TOS limit usage of reports by Crashlytics to providing the service to you and for service diagnostics. Of course, they change the TOS anytime they feel like it.
Twitter recently bought Crashlytics, a company making pretty good crash reporting tool and service for iOS and Android. The usual "nothing will change" and made it free for everyone. How long will that last, a year? My guess is, just like Posterous they will absorb whatever they can of their tech into internal tools and then shut it down. Otherwise, why would they make it free? It's disappointing when innovative tech companies like Crashlytics get swallowed and digested like this.
The app developers on Google Play -- unlike Apple's App Store -- are required to remit tax payments to the states/countries(?) in which apps are sold, as the developers seem to be the legal sellers of their apps. Thus, the developers need to know where buyers live. Or at least the state; I don't know what's required for tax/documentation purposes. It's a sketchy system Google has set up, and from a developer POV Apple certainly abstracts away much of the pain points of selling products. However, my guess is that most Android app developers aren't properly remitting tax payments to local tax authorities anyway...
I know that everyone's hatred of Flash often gets in the way of facts and reality, but everything regarding Flash -- the SWF format, the AVM2 bytecode, the communication protocols -- has been open-sourced except for Adobe's Flash IDE.
I've been aware of NeoOffice, but haven't tried it. I'll take a look, thanks for the pointer. How does it compare on features to OO/LO? It's a shame that there's so many different projects instead of combining the best parts of them.