You joke about this, but FB was using under-aged girls in suggestive poses in an Eharmony ad. They removed them after being informed, but it shows they have some QC issues in marketing and legal.
Not to mention that Facebook really aren't going to have the slightest interest in the average user, nor in using their content if and when they leave the site.
You say that now... wait till they license 1,000,000 pictures in bulk at $0.01/image to someone who publishes gay pin-up calenders... including that picture of you at the beach with your shirt off when you were 17...
I don't buy it. I bike, walk and use public transit.
I bet you think you're clever though, with your pithy "Who do you buy your gasoline from" crap. Like living with ideals is an impossible and ridiculous thing that nobody really does and no one is really expected to do. Personally, I disassociate myself permanently from people and organizations I don't like. Won't work for em, won't buy from em, won't be involved, won't help make them strong. Hell, I didn't like what my government has been doing last number of years, so I stopped paying my taxes. Almost went to jail for that, but my hands are clean. I did not help them.
When I can't do this, I acknowledge that I'm guilty of facilitating that which I despise. I recognize that the statement "I can't sever my involvement" is really "I'm not prepared to live in the fashion necessary to sever my involvement", and therefore I'm really just passing the hardship along to others. That makes me accountable to those others, and I may one day be called on to pay the piper, and if they come for me, it will be right and good and my own damned fault.
It's called taking responsibility, maybe you ought to look into it.
No it doesn't. You're still destroying the value of the creation as part of the mechanism that funds the creation. An idea that isn't propagated is underexploited. Achieving maximum exploitation of ideas requires that the mechanism for funding is not tied to the right-to-copy. We need a new way. We're only hurting ourselves sticking with this system...
Personally, I hold those who gave Apple money personally responsible for this, and for any legal precedents that end up being set. Those lawyers didn't pay for themselves...
That's exactly what I mean. You can't see CBC's stuff if you're overseas, you can't see the BBC's stuff if you're overseas, etc...
Having foreigners immerse themselves in your culture is a good thing. It makes them sympathetic to your perspectives. A nation paying to create cultural works and then refusing to allow people from other countries to see them unless they trade something shiny first is just plain stupid.
you do realize that even if a government pays for it, it still actually costs you money right?
Yeah, I realize. If I'm going to be indirectly involved in supporting people while they make stuff, I want everyone to have access to it. If it's going to be part of the common pool of culture, I'm OK with helping fund its creation. Otherwise, I'm not.
My favorite stuff is almost always government funded anyways.
I've got an old Athlon with Mythbuntu and XBMC sitting in the living room streaming content off my home network, and I'm quite content not having cable. People who visit that do have cable with all the trimmings want to know how they can buy what I've got because it's better than what they have at home.
I could use another terabyte drive on the thing though...
Why isn't the free distribution of cultural content considered part of a countries diplomatic budget? It should be...
I fail to see where your functional duplicate matters in the slightest. My security conscious employer is going to know that my eyeball has been removed, and will revoke the authorization immediately after being informed. If I don't show up for work one day, and am unreachable, all of my credentials will again be revoked. My bank is going to be only slightly less responsive - the worst case will be that they are informed by my employer that something is amiss.
Perhaps you could describe the scenario you envision?
Well, first I make a copy of your eyeball, and use it to access your bank account, and make some long distance phone calls, and buy some stuff. Then I publish it online so others can make copies and do the same, pretending to be you.
So, you contact the bank, and ask them to revoke your eyeball, and you call the phone company and your credit company and do the same thing. Fine, now I can't pretend to be you.
Now, how are you going to open another bank account? Are you going to grow a new eyeball? Are they going to email you a new eyeball that has to be activated within the next 24 hours or it will expire?
If you want an example, a group in Germany already did the same thing, except it was a fingerprint and not an eyeball. Wolfgang Schauble, who was Germany's interior minister at the time and for all I know still is, was a big supporter of systematic biometrics. Then his fingerprint became something you could download off the internet and tape to your finger. I wonder how he feels about the idea now...
I agree -- any database that does not support foreign keys (referential integrity) is really not a database -- it's just a toy.
Use Oracle, DB2, or Postgres for any 'real' work.
See, that's the thing. There are narrow niches where that's a strength, where a little bit of garbage data in there isn't going to cause any harm, and the speed mitigates the weaknesses. And if they had been upfront and forthright about the capacities of the project, that would have been fine.
But when you come across another "not-a-bug-a-gotcha-or-a-feature" every other month that you didn't know about because they were forthright, and you're forced to work with projects that were incredibly poorly designed because people trusted the developers advice and did everything wrong... there isn't any trust there. You couldn't feel safe using it for anything significant unless you're actually getting right in there and hacking it yourself and seeing what it does, because you know from experience that they'd flat out lie to you if they thought it would increase their market share.
What a funny interview. He talks all about trust and open source, and yet one of the major reasons I have always avoided open source is because I personally distrusted the two major developers.
I remember reading countless times how this or that missing feature wasn't needed, and how it was bad practice to use it in the first place. Then, next version, they'd brag that they had it. They would ignore referential integrity, but hide that fact, and call their bugs "Gotchas" or "Features". They would claim that having intelligence in the database and reduce traffic across the wire was bad practice, and that you should move entire result sets into the middle tier and filter it there in their forums, and on and on and on.
If they had been forthright about what compromises they made, what the strengths and weaknesses of their design were, and been prepared to acknowledge that there were tasks it wasn't fit for, I might have put it to more use. But at the end of the day, I couldn't trust the developers not to engage in misleading behavior, so I stayed far away from it, and used PostgreSQL instead.
In the end, the developers tried to pull a DivX Networks/Project Mayo type of move and rip off the community, and this was only reversed when Sun bought them out.
It's good to see that those lying, thieving bastards are no longer involved with the project. Particularly since I am now obligated to use their bastard child at work.
"Argh, I lost my key! I lost all those files that we need to get the government off our backs, and all our customer lists, and everything! Shit! We just went out of business!".
Just thought I'd throw in there, the reason there's hardly any information available is mostly because the sweetheart deals come hand in hand with non-disclosure agreements. Microsoft is evil, not stupid...
Oh. They were evil because some people said they were evil. It is wrong to be unpopular.
And yes, that IS what you're saying, and yes, saying it DOES prove you to be the craven idiot you so rightly fear yourself to be. Because that's the only possible reason you would retreat into that kind of circular reasoning.
Nice try. Except I wasn't using public opinion to justify the truth of my statement. I was demonstrating that there is CONSENSUS that my statement is true. And there is such consensus, and has been for a long time. Enough consensus to unite peoples from all races, all religions, all nationalities behind a common goal of opposing the evil that was being done.
By your logic 9/11 victims where not innocent since America had been messing with Afghanistan long before 9//11 hence any victims would simply be casualties of war no different than the people American troops are fighting.
They're not innocent. They're liars and thieves and exploiters of decent hard working human beings, and they should have suffered more before they died. They should have been waterboarded first.
If they were innocent, free peoples around the world wouldn't have been staging mass protests for years about the evil shit they were doing.
A quick scan alerted authorities to the presence of a number of dangerous items in your kitchen, bathroom and garage.
Homeland Security will be around shortly to confiscate them and ask you some very important questions. In accordance with the USA PATRIOT act you may be subject to criminal prosecution if you discuss this investigation.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation, citizen.
"Hey Joe, check out Fred's channel... a bunch of those Homeland Security dickheads are over there giving him a good time. There are only 6 of em... lets get the guys together and go give Fred a hand..."
Clearly, this sort of thing can bite both ways... and it's not the masses that have the most to fear...
I'd suggest using sentences, taking the first letter from each word.
"I was born in Timbuktu in 72 and I don't know what to do!" turns into "IwbiTi72aIdkwtd!"
16 characters, upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation, and it's practically impossible to forget.
You can also program yourself this way.
"I will get up at 8 and not be late for work!" turns into "Iwgua8anblfw!", which is still strong, but also causes you to repeat the phrase to yourself every time you log in, so maybe you won't get canned for showing up at your desk at quarter to 10.
That shows that the government can track individuals, not that they do so for people they don't suspect of terrorism or crimes.
If you think about it, you might come to the conclusion that it's actually technically easier to systematically track everyone all the time and then dig through the logs than it is to keep track of a bunch of individuals on demand when you don't know where they are when it's time to start and you lose them the moment you stop.
Do you believe that the sort of people we're talking about here would do extra work to know less?
You need to get real about the fact that those privately funded privacy activist organizations are actually about protecting asymmetric advantage. Small groups have access to vast pools of information that you and your peers do have access to. You will most likely not be able to put a stop to this in any practical sense.
Your choice is, do you prefer the security of having most of the people that you meet ignorant, including yourself, and live with the fact that there are people out there who know so much more than you that it changes the very nature of how they understand the world in ways that give them immense power?
Or, do you prefer the security of knowing that even though other people know a great deal about you before they even meet you, your knowledge is equal to their own.
It would seem to me that while the second choice would allow others to act against me with a great deal of information, it would also allow me to see them as they are doing so and take steps, such as drawing other peoples attention to what is going on.
I think this is preferable to living in ignorance, personally.
If you're a big company, you've got a lot of recorded history that you legally must keep. The bigger you are, the more this is true.
If you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS.
This represents an increasing amount of costs that you must pay before you make or sell anything whatsoever, just to be allowed to operate.
Meanwhile, new companies who do not have that legacy can use free software to handle their administration, and they don't have to pay the "MS tax." This means that they can be less efficient, have lower economy of scale, but still be more competitive than the established businesses.
MS is never going to open up their technology. Financially, it's better for their investors to watch it waste away to meaninglessness and gain tax benefits from the depreciation than to do so.
Personally, I think the final legacy of Microsoft will be the death of a multitude of business enterprises that have stood for decades. In the end, the decision to participate in Bill's little scheme is going to kill businesses, and the bigger and more firmly established they are, the more they are at risk.
In a way, it might even make the whole Microsoft experience worthwhile in the end, like yucky medicine that makes your whole body convulse with disgust but poisons the cancers in you and causes them to die...
If the government agencies and large corporations already knew everything that Google Latitude reveals, and they do, then I didn't lose any privacy. Neither did any of you. You can't lose what you didn't have.
What actually happened was, we just got brought into the loop. That's it, that's all.
If you think this is a bad thing, then it's probably time to grow some integrity and tell your spouse about your affair...
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a CIO, and you sign something like this, you should lose your job.
You joke about this, but FB was using under-aged girls in suggestive poses in an Eharmony ad. They removed them after being informed, but it shows they have some QC issues in marketing and legal.
I wasn't joking. I just got moderated that way.
Not to mention that Facebook really aren't going to have the slightest interest in the average user, nor in using their content if and when they leave the site.
You say that now... wait till they license 1,000,000 pictures in bulk at $0.01/image to someone who publishes gay pin-up calenders... including that picture of you at the beach with your shirt off when you were 17...
Who do you buy your gasoline from?
I don't buy it. I bike, walk and use public transit.
I bet you think you're clever though, with your pithy "Who do you buy your gasoline from" crap. Like living with ideals is an impossible and ridiculous thing that nobody really does and no one is really expected to do. Personally, I disassociate myself permanently from people and organizations I don't like. Won't work for em, won't buy from em, won't be involved, won't help make them strong. Hell, I didn't like what my government has been doing last number of years, so I stopped paying my taxes. Almost went to jail for that, but my hands are clean. I did not help them.
When I can't do this, I acknowledge that I'm guilty of facilitating that which I despise. I recognize that the statement "I can't sever my involvement" is really "I'm not prepared to live in the fashion necessary to sever my involvement", and therefore I'm really just passing the hardship along to others. That makes me accountable to those others, and I may one day be called on to pay the piper, and if they come for me, it will be right and good and my own damned fault.
It's called taking responsibility, maybe you ought to look into it.
No it doesn't. You're still destroying the value of the creation as part of the mechanism that funds the creation. An idea that isn't propagated is underexploited. Achieving maximum exploitation of ideas requires that the mechanism for funding is not tied to the right-to-copy. We need a new way. We're only hurting ourselves sticking with this system...
Personally, I hold those who gave Apple money personally responsible for this, and for any legal precedents that end up being set. Those lawyers didn't pay for themselves...
You mean like the CBC here in Canada? :-)
That's exactly what I mean. You can't see CBC's stuff if you're overseas, you can't see the BBC's stuff if you're overseas, etc...
Having foreigners immerse themselves in your culture is a good thing. It makes them sympathetic to your perspectives. A nation paying to create cultural works and then refusing to allow people from other countries to see them unless they trade something shiny first is just plain stupid.
you do realize that even if a government pays for it, it still actually costs you money right?
Yeah, I realize. If I'm going to be indirectly involved in supporting people while they make stuff, I want everyone to have access to it. If it's going to be part of the common pool of culture, I'm OK with helping fund its creation. Otherwise, I'm not.
My favorite stuff is almost always government funded anyways.
I've got an old Athlon with Mythbuntu and XBMC sitting in the living room streaming content off my home network, and I'm quite content not having cable. People who visit that do have cable with all the trimmings want to know how they can buy what I've got because it's better than what they have at home.
I could use another terabyte drive on the thing though...
Why isn't the free distribution of cultural content considered part of a countries diplomatic budget? It should be...
I fail to see where your functional duplicate matters in the slightest. My security conscious employer is going to know that my eyeball has been removed, and will revoke the authorization immediately after being informed. If I don't show up for work one day, and am unreachable, all of my credentials will again be revoked. My bank is going to be only slightly less responsive - the worst case will be that they are informed by my employer that something is amiss.
Perhaps you could describe the scenario you envision?
Well, first I make a copy of your eyeball, and use it to access your bank account, and make some long distance phone calls, and buy some stuff. Then I publish it online so others can make copies and do the same, pretending to be you.
So, you contact the bank, and ask them to revoke your eyeball, and you call the phone company and your credit company and do the same thing. Fine, now I can't pretend to be you.
Now, how are you going to open another bank account? Are you going to grow a new eyeball? Are they going to email you a new eyeball that has to be activated within the next 24 hours or it will expire?
If you want an example, a group in Germany already did the same thing, except it was a fingerprint and not an eyeball. Wolfgang Schauble, who was Germany's interior minister at the time and for all I know still is, was a big supporter of systematic biometrics. Then his fingerprint became something you could download off the internet and tape to your finger. I wonder how he feels about the idea now...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/german_minister.html
Still confused?
I agree -- any database that does not support foreign keys (referential integrity) is really not a database -- it's just a toy. Use Oracle, DB2, or Postgres for any 'real' work.
See, that's the thing. There are narrow niches where that's a strength, where a little bit of garbage data in there isn't going to cause any harm, and the speed mitigates the weaknesses. And if they had been upfront and forthright about the capacities of the project, that would have been fine.
But when you come across another "not-a-bug-a-gotcha-or-a-feature" every other month that you didn't know about because they were forthright, and you're forced to work with projects that were incredibly poorly designed because people trusted the developers advice and did everything wrong... there isn't any trust there. You couldn't feel safe using it for anything significant unless you're actually getting right in there and hacking it yourself and seeing what it does, because you know from experience that they'd flat out lie to you if they thought it would increase their market share.
What a funny interview. He talks all about trust and open source, and yet one of the major reasons I have always avoided open source is because I personally distrusted the two major developers.
I remember reading countless times how this or that missing feature wasn't needed, and how it was bad practice to use it in the first place. Then, next version, they'd brag that they had it. They would ignore referential integrity, but hide that fact, and call their bugs "Gotchas" or "Features". They would claim that having intelligence in the database and reduce traffic across the wire was bad practice, and that you should move entire result sets into the middle tier and filter it there in their forums, and on and on and on.
If they had been forthright about what compromises they made, what the strengths and weaknesses of their design were, and been prepared to acknowledge that there were tasks it wasn't fit for, I might have put it to more use. But at the end of the day, I couldn't trust the developers not to engage in misleading behavior, so I stayed far away from it, and used PostgreSQL instead.
In the end, the developers tried to pull a DivX Networks/Project Mayo type of move and rip off the community, and this was only reversed when Sun bought them out.
It's good to see that those lying, thieving bastards are no longer involved with the project. Particularly since I am now obligated to use their bastard child at work.
Try keeping a believable pulse, complete with oxygenated blood, going in a removed eyeball.
Try replacing your eyeball, once I've made a functional duplicate, and published the design online.
More like,
"Argh, I lost my key! I lost all those files that we need to get the government off our backs, and all our customer lists, and everything! Shit! We just went out of business!".
Just thought I'd throw in there, the reason there's hardly any information available is mostly because the sweetheart deals come hand in hand with non-disclosure agreements. Microsoft is evil, not stupid...
Oh. They were evil because some people said they were evil. It is wrong to be unpopular.
And yes, that IS what you're saying, and yes, saying it DOES prove you to be the craven idiot you so rightly fear yourself to be. Because that's the only possible reason you would retreat into that kind of circular reasoning.
Nice try. Except I wasn't using public opinion to justify the truth of my statement. I was demonstrating that there is CONSENSUS that my statement is true. And there is such consensus, and has been for a long time. Enough consensus to unite peoples from all races, all religions, all nationalities behind a common goal of opposing the evil that was being done.
You must be just terrified.
By your logic 9/11 victims where not innocent since America had been messing with Afghanistan long before 9//11 hence any victims would simply be casualties of war no different than the people American troops are fighting.
They're not innocent. They're liars and thieves and exploiters of decent hard working human beings, and they should have suffered more before they died. They should have been waterboarded first.
If they were innocent, free peoples around the world wouldn't have been staging mass protests for years about the evil shit they were doing.
A quick scan alerted authorities to the presence of a number of dangerous items in your kitchen, bathroom and garage.
Homeland Security will be around shortly to confiscate them and ask you some very important questions. In accordance with the USA PATRIOT act you may be subject to criminal prosecution if you discuss this investigation.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation, citizen.
"Hey Joe, check out Fred's channel... a bunch of those Homeland Security dickheads are over there giving him a good time. There are only 6 of em... lets get the guys together and go give Fred a hand..."
Clearly, this sort of thing can bite both ways... and it's not the masses that have the most to fear...
I'd suggest using sentences, taking the first letter from each word.
"I was born in Timbuktu in 72 and I don't know what to do!" turns into "IwbiTi72aIdkwtd!"
16 characters, upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation, and it's practically impossible to forget.
You can also program yourself this way.
"I will get up at 8 and not be late for work!" turns into "Iwgua8anblfw!", which is still strong, but also causes you to repeat the phrase to yourself every time you log in, so maybe you won't get canned for showing up at your desk at quarter to 10.
It will be hard to stay in touch, and your family will miss you. You should skip the whole thing and stay home where you belong.
That shows that the government can track individuals, not that they do so for people they don't suspect of terrorism or crimes.
If you think about it, you might come to the conclusion that it's actually technically easier to systematically track everyone all the time and then dig through the logs than it is to keep track of a bunch of individuals on demand when you don't know where they are when it's time to start and you lose them the moment you stop.
Do you believe that the sort of people we're talking about here would do extra work to know less?
You need to get real about the fact that those privately funded privacy activist organizations are actually about protecting asymmetric advantage. Small groups have access to vast pools of information that you and your peers do have access to. You will most likely not be able to put a stop to this in any practical sense.
Your choice is, do you prefer the security of having most of the people that you meet ignorant, including yourself, and live with the fact that there are people out there who know so much more than you that it changes the very nature of how they understand the world in ways that give them immense power?
Or, do you prefer the security of knowing that even though other people know a great deal about you before they even meet you, your knowledge is equal to their own.
It would seem to me that while the second choice would allow others to act against me with a great deal of information, it would also allow me to see them as they are doing so and take steps, such as drawing other peoples attention to what is going on.
I think this is preferable to living in ignorance, personally.
If you're a big company, you've got a lot of recorded history that you legally must keep. The bigger you are, the more this is true.
If you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS.
This represents an increasing amount of costs that you must pay before you make or sell anything whatsoever, just to be allowed to operate.
Meanwhile, new companies who do not have that legacy can use free software to handle their administration, and they don't have to pay the "MS tax." This means that they can be less efficient, have lower economy of scale, but still be more competitive than the established businesses.
MS is never going to open up their technology. Financially, it's better for their investors to watch it waste away to meaninglessness and gain tax benefits from the depreciation than to do so.
Personally, I think the final legacy of Microsoft will be the death of a multitude of business enterprises that have stood for decades. In the end, the decision to participate in Bill's little scheme is going to kill businesses, and the bigger and more firmly established they are, the more they are at risk.
In a way, it might even make the whole Microsoft experience worthwhile in the end, like yucky medicine that makes your whole body convulse with disgust but poisons the cancers in you and causes them to die...
If the government agencies and large corporations already knew everything that Google Latitude reveals, and they do, then I didn't lose any privacy. Neither did any of you. You can't lose what you didn't have.
What actually happened was, we just got brought into the loop. That's it, that's all.
If you think this is a bad thing, then it's probably time to grow some integrity and tell your spouse about your affair...
We've already tried this. It's called the "lynch mob". The main result seems to be that we decided round-robin executioners were not such a good idea.
Looking at how it all turned out, seems to me that the royal we were wrong, and the idea might need to be revisited.