"They refused, creating an unnecessary risk for Android users in order to score cheap PR points."
...amazing how that can be obverted to say "Tim Sweeney refused to prioritize publishing the update and an apology because it would cost Epic PR points".
...although seriously, I'm not carping on you about that. You're totally right that Google could have simply dropped a signature for Epic's installer into their vulnerability monitor and instantly yanked it off every Android device if they'd wanted to, but Epic would have really thrown a tantrum about that.
It's very simple, and it's not what this headline says.
Epic decided to forgo the Play Store for releasing Fortnite.
Google said "Okay, but this sort of thing can make our platform less secure. Be careful out there."
Epic releasesd an installer for Fortnite that could install Fortnite without the Play Store.
Google looks at it, and sees that it can be used to install more than just Fortnite, because it contains some stupidCode that can be used to install all sorts of malicious things because someone at Epic was very careless.
Google tells Epic about this lame bit of coding, and tells them they've got seven days to fix it because it would be really, really bad if this were exploited by someone who wanted a whole lotta phones on their DDoS botnet (for example).
Epic says "We believe we have 90 days to fix it" and releases a new installer without the stupidCode in it.
Seven days goes by, Google releases details of the stupidCode so that other people can learn from and not make this same foolish mistake.
Epic throws a tantrum.
The TL;DR is that this wouldn't have been a problem if someone at Epic hadn't decided to just throw an installer out there without looking at it carefully first, and Google probably should have given them 30 days instead of 7, but probably gave them only seven days because it lets them reinforce their point that poorly-written third-party installers are bad. Epic gave them reason to do that when they started talking to the press and basically whining about the Play Store cut as if Google did nothing to deserve any money (because it's so obviously both easy and free to build and maintain a giant marketplace with some semblance of standards), and Google appears to have noticed that if they ignore the tall tales "web reporters" spin, they eventually wind up having to explain complex concepts to state Senators and that tends to be very expensive.
Because a great many of us actually work with this technology on a daily basis, and recognize it as the type of thing you might look at hoping you could use it to make services more reliable but would probably have to give up and toss if it didn't pan out. Also, Quartz's article was mostly tin-foil shade-throwing.
"Nobody, not a government or a private enterprise, can be trusted with private proprietorship of this much data at this level of detail." and "The problem is neural networks, turning subjectivity into objectivity, and the unreliability of the source data."
First problem, Google wasn't storing the data despite how hard the article attempts to imply it.
Second problem, the "level of detail" is pretty damned coarse and your cellular service providers have been selling that very data to the government with little to no oversight for years now.
Third problem, what the hell do neural networks have to do with this?
The article published by Quartz was irresponsible fear mongering. They did exactly zero research on this story aside from apparently hassling a Google employee about the practice. One would think they could have at least asked the person who supplied them with their screenshot what they thought the software was doing, but instead chose to take a Mulligan with: "It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery."
It may not be clear to a dimwitted journalist, but it's something a decent network engineer is going to get a faraway look about when asked, because they're going to be thinking about whether or not it would be useful for network discovery. Quartz was also told up front that the practice was being ended because it didn't work out.
...but then Quartz goes straight to speculation and fear-mongering with: "But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together."
The problem? Cell phones don't use multiple towers at the same time and that would be required for the triangulation the article mentions to take place. Their article's claim is so badly detached from reality that they might as well be speculating that the cell phones are using microwaves to slowly cook all the neighborhood children since they broadcast on such a high frequency. Another issue, Quartz is told that the data is gathered but discarded (and had always been discarded) but chooses to conflate the various meanings of the word "collected" in the article's title so that it seems Google was actually recording those results. Quartz uses another nasty conflation trick at the end of the article by bringing up the completely unrelated subject of geofenced advertising (which does actually require more granular data than looking up a cell ID would ever provide) and talking about that for a bit without ever providing a bit of relevance to the data collection.
This is turning into another endless bugaboo like the nonsense around collecting SSIDs by doing packet dumps that was somehow supposed to be eavesdropping on everyone's pornography habits or something judging by the way the press was talking it up. We eventually learned that a PR firm that was hired by Facebook was behind the schlepping of that terrible narrative. At the present time we can only speculate as to who is behind this crap story that won't die, but I'm sure it'll come out eventually. I find it highly dubious that a mediocre website would ever have been engaged in research of the type this takes, all on their own. Someone handed Keith Collins this story and they were shallow enough to run with it. Having looked at what other stories he's written for Quartz, he just isn't smart (or knowledgeable) enough to have come up with this all on his own.
This completely ignores the point that the kid downloaded publicly available documents from a publicly available web server which under normal circumstances and when operating as intended did not restrict access to said documents.
In short, he did not violate any law, therefore there is no reason to assess "intent". They're still trying to cover their asses for having uploaded sensitive documents to a public webserver, and using some kid as a sacrificial lamb to do it is not okay.
... the new GPS chipsets will enable compromising millions of the new devices simultaneously via simple buffer overflows sent from orbiting satellites or handheld devices purchased from Alibaba and eBay for only $25 unit cost.
Reselling tickets isn't illegal everywhere, nor is that the problem this is meant to address.
Since you've not yet noticed, presently the state of affairs is that for every event being held at a place larger than a double-wide trailer converted into a dive bar online ticket sales are happening, and those online ticket sales are being dominated by bots which exhaust the supply of tickets as fast as technologically possible. Sometimes a little faster because the bots can and will overload the ticket sales sites. The end result being that it doesn't matter where the event you want to go is, or how popular the performer is... You can be sitting at your computer watching the clock and waiting for the time the tickets will go on sale, and at that precise time thousands if not hundreds of thousands of connections will go to the site via bots and they will buy every last ticket. By the time you've even gotten to click the button to confirm that you want a ticket, all the tickets have already been purchased by the bots. Regular patrons simply don't stand a chance anymore.
This law will make it *easy* to prosecute the people who've been ruining everyone's chances of ever seeing a show for a reasonable price.
We don't like click-baity, misleading, and misrepresentative headlines here. They're disingenuous and you should be ashamed for having snuck this one past the editors.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the mail spools of gov't officials would contain malware, because they're just bound to be targets for spearphishers. To people who can manage to examine files without uncontrollably clicking on them until they execute, this malware poses *zero* threat....and yet here this headline and article is, trying to make it sound like WikiLeaks has been in some way *infected* with malware that is a danger to visitors of the site, and that Assange is improperly and unprofessionally downplaying that threat.
Whatever Clinton is paying you, it's not worth it. Your integrity is worth more than money.
The venue's measures would not change the situation. These devices do not operate with a requirement of exclusive access to frequencies. They *already* share spectrum remarkably well, and channel/frequency-hop and adjust power as necessary.
This article is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Probably the only truly honest thing in there is their admission that they have services available. It is not a "study" in any reputable sense of the word, and Softpedia is basically lying to you by calling it that. Softpedia is also very blatantly conflating vulnerabilities with mere attack vectors.
Let me highlight for you the most glaring example of "using a lot of words to lie" that are in the "study" they're linking to... Starting right in the middle of page two they try to compare and contrast a malvertising attack that uses flash as a vector and one that uses HTML5. Unfortunately for them, their HTML5 example is not only fairly nebulous but they cite a redirection to the Angler Exploit kit as if this really meant anything more than an attempt at compromise. One might then ask... what mechanisms does the Angler Exploit Kit use to compromise the system running the browser? Well... That's primarily exploiting vulnerabilities in Flash. This sort of logical shortcoming means one of two things... Either the author is too ignorant to speak authoritatively on the matter or they're just lying. Take your pick.
Why should they be subject to regulations incurred by their size when no other company has in the last twenty years?
Google got where they are by doing a good job--not through anti-competitive practices or corporate skullduggery. If Google somehow irrevocably deletes a significant portion of the internet and then calls it "a natural network correction" while taking home millions of page views, then maybe we can talk about regulating them. Until then what they have isn't a "stranglehold" it's a winning approach.
Epstein is apparently just looking to score readers by raising ire, because most of his arguments are deeply questionable. The bit about the payday loan companies being turned away from AdWords is a fairly disingenuous point for him to bring up. For one, Google didn't blacklist them from anything but AdWords. Search results for payday loans still find and return hits to all the shady operators out there....and yes, they're pretty much all shady to the degree that payday loans are explicitly illegal in half a dozen states and the predatory lending practices and rate schedules they use are illegal in most states. Epstein is rather conspicuously not remembering that the last time Google had an issue with an industry buying up AdWords, it was pharma-related and they wound up paying $500 million in fines to the DoJ. This is really no different.
Please move along. This is just a man who has run out of ideas and is fantasizing about high valuations and using catch-phrases and buzzwords to paint a pretty picture for the press.
...you *dense* motherfuckers.
It's rather likely this wasn't C&D over trademark as much as it was a crappy smear campaign they wanted to put a stop to.
"Parody protection" isn't something you can invoke willy-nilly because you think it might be funny.
In other news, stupid people continue to blame others for their inability to perform simple tasks (like clicking a blue button that's been in the same place literally forever, instead of an orange, animated one) without fucking things up.
...because I think it might actually serve as a wake-up call to Comcast if there were a public litany of how much of an utter shitshow Comcast's operational processes are. Maybe. Possibly. Okay, so maybe nothing short of the moon cracking open to reveal an angry alien race personally calling Comcast to the mat over their bullshit will do that, but we're still allowed to dream, aren't we?
Here's an idea... How about instead of blindly blaming the tech workers, someone makes an attempt to assign blame for the out-of-control rents to the people who actually have control over them?
I know it sounds like a wild plan, full of risk and possibly requiring an hour or two of actual research, but it seems to me that calling out the property holding companies and landlords would be a far more effective way to put a stop to the rent crisis in San Francisco.
I know it doesn't fit the narrative of xenophobia at all, because most of those people have lived in San Francisco for some time now....or maybe they don't. How would you know until you actually did a bit of research? Here's another possible avenue of research... Ask literally anyone working in the tech industry if they'd like to pay higher, or lower rent....then try and reconcile their answers with what's going on. How could it possibly be that despite every last one of them wanting to pay less in rent (something you have in common!) they are supposedly responsible for the increases in rent?
...or could it be that San Francisco's "natives" are really turning into a bunch of douchebag hipsters that think voicing their opinion is more important than having an opinion based on common sense and knowledge?
Can we stop with the fanboy nonsense already? "Faster performance"? Tell us how is this relevant with context? The ODROID requires markedly more power than the Pis do, so if it didn't run faster they would simply have made an inferior product. Considering that power draw is generally a factor in these things, it's simply disingenuous to even mention "faster" without considering work-done-per-amp-hour. Just because it's posted on Phoronix doesn't automatically mean it's not just meaningless fanboy jibber-jabber designed to generate clickthroughs.
Otherwise, a good desktop PC is an "alternative" that "exists" and can stomp them both into the dirt--if one ignores the wildly greater power consumption, heat production, massive increase in size, and cost.
Short version: The SJW camp was campaigning for people to vote "no award" just to thwart the people who refused to vote for authors simply because they were bisexual or whatever. The Puppies' camps were talking the entire time about voting for works based on the quality of the work, alone. They did not feel someone should win an award for fiction writing simply because they were of a non-traditional gender or the other reasons the SJWs were nominating stories that were not quality related.
This is where one of the "your genitalia is more important than your writing skills" people was instructing their camp to vote No Award because otherwise the Puppies people might cause an author they voted for based on the quality of the work to win an award.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly how is something meant to run on Android NOT "in its ecosystem"?
...amazing how that can be obverted to say "Tim Sweeney refused to prioritize publishing the update and an apology because it would cost Epic PR points".
...although seriously, I'm not carping on you about that. You're totally right that Google could have simply dropped a signature for Epic's installer into their vulnerability monitor and instantly yanked it off every Android device if they'd wanted to, but Epic would have really thrown a tantrum about that.
It's very simple, and it's not what this headline says.
Epic decided to forgo the Play Store for releasing Fortnite.
Google said "Okay, but this sort of thing can make our platform less secure. Be careful out there."
Epic releasesd an installer for Fortnite that could install Fortnite without the Play Store.
Google looks at it, and sees that it can be used to install more than just Fortnite, because it contains some stupidCode that can be used to install all sorts of malicious things because someone at Epic was very careless.
Google tells Epic about this lame bit of coding, and tells them they've got seven days to fix it because it would be really, really bad if this were exploited by someone who wanted a whole lotta phones on their DDoS botnet (for example).
Epic says "We believe we have 90 days to fix it" and releases a new installer without the stupidCode in it.
Seven days goes by, Google releases details of the stupidCode so that other people can learn from and not make this same foolish mistake.
Epic throws a tantrum.
The TL;DR is that this wouldn't have been a problem if someone at Epic hadn't decided to just throw an installer out there without looking at it carefully first, and Google probably should have given them 30 days instead of 7, but probably gave them only seven days because it lets them reinforce their point that poorly-written third-party installers are bad. Epic gave them reason to do that when they started talking to the press and basically whining about the Play Store cut as if Google did nothing to deserve any money (because it's so obviously both easy and free to build and maintain a giant marketplace with some semblance of standards), and Google appears to have noticed that if they ignore the tall tales "web reporters" spin, they eventually wind up having to explain complex concepts to state Senators and that tends to be very expensive.
Because a great many of us actually work with this technology on a daily basis, and recognize it as the type of thing you might look at hoping you could use it to make services more reliable but would probably have to give up and toss if it didn't pan out. Also, Quartz's article was mostly tin-foil shade-throwing.
"Nobody, not a government or a private enterprise, can be trusted with private proprietorship of this much data at this level of detail." and "The problem is neural networks, turning subjectivity into objectivity, and the unreliability of the source data."
First problem, Google wasn't storing the data despite how hard the article attempts to imply it.
Second problem, the "level of detail" is pretty damned coarse and your cellular service providers have been selling that very data to the government with little to no oversight for years now.
Third problem, what the hell do neural networks have to do with this?
Remember to breathe.
The article published by Quartz was irresponsible fear mongering. They did exactly zero research on this story aside from apparently hassling a Google employee about the practice. One would think they could have at least asked the person who supplied them with their screenshot what they thought the software was doing, but instead chose to take a Mulligan with: "It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery."
It may not be clear to a dimwitted journalist, but it's something a decent network engineer is going to get a faraway look about when asked, because they're going to be thinking about whether or not it would be useful for network discovery. Quartz was also told up front that the practice was being ended because it didn't work out.
...but then Quartz goes straight to speculation and fear-mongering with: "But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together."
The problem? Cell phones don't use multiple towers at the same time and that would be required for the triangulation the article mentions to take place. Their article's claim is so badly detached from reality that they might as well be speculating that the cell phones are using microwaves to slowly cook all the neighborhood children since they broadcast on such a high frequency. Another issue, Quartz is told that the data is gathered but discarded (and had always been discarded) but chooses to conflate the various meanings of the word "collected" in the article's title so that it seems Google was actually recording those results. Quartz uses another nasty conflation trick at the end of the article by bringing up the completely unrelated subject of geofenced advertising (which does actually require more granular data than looking up a cell ID would ever provide) and talking about that for a bit without ever providing a bit of relevance to the data collection.
This is turning into another endless bugaboo like the nonsense around collecting SSIDs by doing packet dumps that was somehow supposed to be eavesdropping on everyone's pornography habits or something judging by the way the press was talking it up. We eventually learned that a PR firm that was hired by Facebook was behind the schlepping of that terrible narrative. At the present time we can only speculate as to who is behind this crap story that won't die, but I'm sure it'll come out eventually. I find it highly dubious that a mediocre website would ever have been engaged in research of the type this takes, all on their own. Someone handed Keith Collins this story and they were shallow enough to run with it. Having looked at what other stories he's written for Quartz, he just isn't smart (or knowledgeable) enough to have come up with this all on his own.
This completely ignores the point that the kid downloaded publicly available documents from a publicly available web server which under normal circumstances and when operating as intended did not restrict access to said documents.
In short, he did not violate any law, therefore there is no reason to assess "intent". They're still trying to cover their asses for having uploaded sensitive documents to a public webserver, and using some kid as a sacrificial lamb to do it is not okay.
Better still, demand that the news sites stop making their pages 70% advertisements.
... the new GPS chipsets will enable compromising millions of the new devices simultaneously via simple buffer overflows sent from orbiting satellites or handheld devices purchased from Alibaba and eBay for only $25 unit cost.
Except there's a dramatic difference between a bus accident and a plane crash. One yields bodies, the other yields "buckets of assorted body parts".
Reselling tickets isn't illegal everywhere, nor is that the problem this is meant to address.
Since you've not yet noticed, presently the state of affairs is that for every event being held at a place larger than a double-wide trailer converted into a dive bar online ticket sales are happening, and those online ticket sales are being dominated by bots which exhaust the supply of tickets as fast as technologically possible. Sometimes a little faster because the bots can and will overload the ticket sales sites. The end result being that it doesn't matter where the event you want to go is, or how popular the performer is... You can be sitting at your computer watching the clock and waiting for the time the tickets will go on sale, and at that precise time thousands if not hundreds of thousands of connections will go to the site via bots and they will buy every last ticket. By the time you've even gotten to click the button to confirm that you want a ticket, all the tickets have already been purchased by the bots. Regular patrons simply don't stand a chance anymore.
This law will make it *easy* to prosecute the people who've been ruining everyone's chances of ever seeing a show for a reasonable price.
We don't like click-baity, misleading, and misrepresentative headlines here. They're disingenuous and you should be ashamed for having snuck this one past the editors. It should come as a surprise to no one that the mail spools of gov't officials would contain malware, because they're just bound to be targets for spearphishers. To people who can manage to examine files without uncontrollably clicking on them until they execute, this malware poses *zero* threat. ...and yet here this headline and article is, trying to make it sound like WikiLeaks has been in some way *infected* with malware that is a danger to visitors of the site, and that Assange is improperly and unprofessionally downplaying that threat.
Whatever Clinton is paying you, it's not worth it. Your integrity is worth more than money.
What part of "you must use our wifi network or nothing" do you not understand to be "restricting" their use?
The venue's measures would not change the situation. These devices do not operate with a requirement of exclusive access to frequencies. They *already* share spectrum remarkably well, and channel/frequency-hop and adjust power as necessary.
This article is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Probably the only truly honest thing in there is their admission that they have services available. It is not a "study" in any reputable sense of the word, and Softpedia is basically lying to you by calling it that. Softpedia is also very blatantly conflating vulnerabilities with mere attack vectors.
Let me highlight for you the most glaring example of "using a lot of words to lie" that are in the "study" they're linking to... Starting right in the middle of page two they try to compare and contrast a malvertising attack that uses flash as a vector and one that uses HTML5. Unfortunately for them, their HTML5 example is not only fairly nebulous but they cite a redirection to the Angler Exploit kit as if this really meant anything more than an attempt at compromise. One might then ask... what mechanisms does the Angler Exploit Kit use to compromise the system running the browser? Well... That's primarily exploiting vulnerabilities in Flash. This sort of logical shortcoming means one of two things... Either the author is too ignorant to speak authoritatively on the matter or they're just lying. Take your pick.
Google got where they are by doing a good job--not through anti-competitive practices or corporate skullduggery. If Google somehow irrevocably deletes a significant portion of the internet and then calls it "a natural network correction" while taking home millions of page views, then maybe we can talk about regulating them. Until then what they have isn't a "stranglehold" it's a winning approach.
Epstein is apparently just looking to score readers by raising ire, because most of his arguments are deeply questionable. The bit about the payday loan companies being turned away from AdWords is a fairly disingenuous point for him to bring up. For one, Google didn't blacklist them from anything but AdWords. Search results for payday loans still find and return hits to all the shady operators out there. ...and yes, they're pretty much all shady to the degree that payday loans are explicitly illegal in half a dozen states and the predatory lending practices and rate schedules they use are illegal in most states. Epstein is rather conspicuously not remembering that the last time Google had an issue with an industry buying up AdWords, it was pharma-related and they wound up paying $500 million in fines to the DoJ. This is really no different.
Please move along. This is just a man who has run out of ideas and is fantasizing about high valuations and using catch-phrases and buzzwords to paint a pretty picture for the press.
...you *dense* motherfuckers. It's rather likely this wasn't C&D over trademark as much as it was a crappy smear campaign they wanted to put a stop to. "Parody protection" isn't something you can invoke willy-nilly because you think it might be funny.
...and yet, after all this running of your mouth, the normal Send button stayed right where it's always been, making your entire post a non-sequitir.
In other news, stupid people continue to blame others for their inability to perform simple tasks (like clicking a blue button that's been in the same place literally forever, instead of an orange, animated one) without fucking things up.
...because I think it might actually serve as a wake-up call to Comcast if there were a public litany of how much of an utter shitshow Comcast's operational processes are. Maybe. Possibly. Okay, so maybe nothing short of the moon cracking open to reveal an angry alien race personally calling Comcast to the mat over their bullshit will do that, but we're still allowed to dream, aren't we?
Here's an idea... How about instead of blindly blaming the tech workers, someone makes an attempt to assign blame for the out-of-control rents to the people who actually have control over them?
I know it sounds like a wild plan, full of risk and possibly requiring an hour or two of actual research, but it seems to me that calling out the property holding companies and landlords would be a far more effective way to put a stop to the rent crisis in San Francisco.
I know it doesn't fit the narrative of xenophobia at all, because most of those people have lived in San Francisco for some time now. ...or maybe they don't. How would you know until you actually did a bit of research? Here's another possible avenue of research... Ask literally anyone working in the tech industry if they'd like to pay higher, or lower rent. ...then try and reconcile their answers with what's going on. How could it possibly be that despite every last one of them wanting to pay less in rent (something you have in common!) they are supposedly responsible for the increases in rent?
...or could it be that San Francisco's "natives" are really turning into a bunch of douchebag hipsters that think voicing their opinion is more important than having an opinion based on common sense and knowledge?
Can we stop with the fanboy nonsense already? "Faster performance"? Tell us how is this relevant with context? The ODROID requires markedly more power than the Pis do, so if it didn't run faster they would simply have made an inferior product. Considering that power draw is generally a factor in these things, it's simply disingenuous to even mention "faster" without considering work-done-per-amp-hour. Just because it's posted on Phoronix doesn't automatically mean it's not just meaningless fanboy jibber-jabber designed to generate clickthroughs.
Otherwise, a good desktop PC is an "alternative" that "exists" and can stomp them both into the dirt--if one ignores the wildly greater power consumption, heat production, massive increase in size, and cost.
Please read http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-f... and then say that again.
Short version: The SJW camp was campaigning for people to vote "no award" just to thwart the people who refused to vote for authors simply because they were bisexual or whatever. The Puppies' camps were talking the entire time about voting for works based on the quality of the work, alone. They did not feel someone should win an award for fiction writing simply because they were of a non-traditional gender or the other reasons the SJWs were nominating stories that were not quality related.
This is a lie and nothing but a lie.
If you do even the least bit of research, you will find pages like this one...
The Puppy Free Hugo Award Voter's Guide
This is where one of the "your genitalia is more important than your writing skills" people was instructing their camp to vote No Award because otherwise the Puppies people might cause an author they voted for based on the quality of the work to win an award.