Yeah. So they can scan my email. The Gmail account is mostly throwaway stuff, so they can conclude from harvesting my email... that I get a trivial amount of throwaway stuff. Seriously. I think the Gmail account has handled less than 10 total emails. Ever.
I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
Of course you are. You're using their routers, their CO equipment... that's no less (and no more) sacrosanct than the ISP's SMTP servers. 15 seconds with IOS and one Wireshark session and your emails would belong to the ISP's network techs.
There are some people who really feel disturbed about that kind of policy
Sure. If (A) my e-mail actually mattered, and (B) more specifically my email traffic passing through gmail actually mattered, then I'd be upset. Or not, since I did knowingly sign up for the service.
For me, it's a difference which makes no difference. If it matters, encrypt. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
So Google is aware that certain World of Warcraft accounts have expired. Gosh. Maybe they'll tailor the web ads they can't show me to offer me the non-existent opportunity to buy online gold. w00t.
Anything that matters would be GPG encrypted. And nothing that matters goes to this account anyways.
Do you mean that you use your ISP's SMTP server? What about when you're on the road?
On the road == business. "Leisure travel" is for suckers. "Travel" and "Travail" are based on the same Latin root for damn good reason.
If I'm traveling on business, the only email I need to see is business email, and the business makes adequate provision for that.
Oh, you mean, "what if I have to see my PERSONAL email while I'm doing the Road Warrior thing?" The answer is "I never HAVE to see my personal email."
I feel a little bad for people who've chosen to tether themselves to connectivity. Email is a functional convenience. It's not socializing, it's not connectedness, it's not a network. And IT IS NOT A NECESSITY. Speaking strictly for myself, o'course.
No, I'm not antisocial. I just don't mistake "on-line" for "socializing".
Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails
"Advertising"? What is this "advertising" you speak of?
Gmail IMAP. I don't see the ads because I don't use the webserver. And I don't send outbound mail. I don't need to; I use an ISP mailbox for primary mail. GMail is just a receive-only convenience as far as I'm concerned.
No mention of privacy in the title. All patient privacy stuff is the included Privacy Rule section (Section 264), although the law itself is devoid of actual standards and guidance. That was all added administratively after the fact.
Keep your personal machine off the Hospital network.
The only really sane policy: if it's on the Hospital network, it conforms to IT security guidance. Period.
I'm assuming you're in the U.S. "Exuberant" is an apt description of HIPAA data infrastructure guidance, but it's still the law of the land. I don't want my patient information accidentally sneaking out on your laptop's unencrypted hard drive.
If you must conduct personal internet business at work and don't want to convert your personal computer into a personally-owned company-configured machine, bypass the hospital net with a 3g dongle and your own data plan.
They have a nearly endless supply of lesser management pawns to absorb all blame
Ooooh, that brings to mind a phrase which, if it hasn't been coined, should be.
"Ablative managment": The layers and layers of expendable mid-level cannon fodder with enough responsibility to absorb blame, enough purported independence to support plausible deniability for their superiors, and enough commodity interchangeable to be easily and cheaply ejected and replaced. Used to shield the precious core of Board Members, CxOs, Senior VPs from PR or legal flamage.
EULAs are not uniformly invalid. In certain jurisdictions, clickwrap (click "agree" and damn your soul for all eternity) licenses are valid. Certain jurisdictions also buy into the "licensed, not sold" line of thought that makes this contravention of First Sale possible.
A few minutes of Googling fails to turn up any legal matter (opinions or court decisions) one way or the other on the enforceability of "subject to change at any time" terms we're discussing here. So I suspect it's uncharted territory until a lawsuit brings it into scrutiny. Maybe this lawsuit.
Yes, I know it's not the best comparison in the world
Dang skippin' it's not the best comparison; it's neither a car analogy nor a pizza analogy.
If any human being came back to a buyer post-sale and changed the purchased product without consent from the buyer,
Oh, you see, you bought the hardware, but you just LICENSED the software. SCE isn't modifying the hardware, just the software which they still own and you use only at their sufferance. First sale ("you bought it, you own it") doesn't apply.
At least, that's the stand SCE and most other system providers take. If you buy hardware, that's yours. But you didn't buy the copyrighted software embedded in the device. You licensed it. (Hence, "End User License Agreement".) They (the copyright holder, the only true owner of the software) can change that software any time they please, because they own it. If the EULA includes language that says they can change the capabilities of the software at any time without notice or recourse, copyright doesn't forbid it. And the only recourse you would have is something much like the lawsuits you see here: "The hardware you sold me depends on a certain capability set provided by the software. You have a legal obligation to provide basic capabilities in order to render the hardware fit for the purposes it was sold for."
And because "legal obligation" and "basic capabilities" are debatable, that's why it pretty much has to be a lawsuit. For instance, is "Other OS" a "basic capability"? Does its removal render the hardware unfit for its purposes? SCE has already stated they don't think so. The plaintiffs appear to disagree. We shall see how it goes.
Then you should have probably mentioned that you're trading on a special personal relationship with your service provider. Most consumers have no such access, so your advice to complain in person is, at best, useless (i.e., walk into Foobar Cable Co's local office, rant at nice reception desk lady, get blank stares, leave angrier than when you entered), and at worst, dangerous (walk into Foobar Cable Co's local office, rant, get tazed or shot by the police responding to the nice reception desk lady's panicked 911 phone call).
Oh, no you're missing the point. GPP's seen the light, and has found the ONLY GOOD WAY to deal with the issue. And now we can "encourage" everyone to do THE ONLY GOOD THING. After all, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
The best of all worlds: smug self-righteousness enforced with State Power. It's a popular and time-tested combination.
2.88 MB? That's like.... mythical. That's a Bigfoot riding on the back of a unicorn.
But assuming they were using the...mythical... 2.88MB format, then, yes, 1/15th is approximately the capacity of any number of single-sided single-density 5.25" formats.
But 2.88MB? That wasn't even the same media as the classical 3.5" DSHD diskette. Special drive, special medium, special BIOS or driver support. Hell, by that standard, the 21 MB Floptical falls into the same category.
If TFA was seriously thinking about the 2.88MB diskette, they need to start passing around whatever they were smoking.
Not all Amigas have hard drives, or make it particularly easy to use one. If nothing else, unless you modded it, you'd still need 3.5" DSDD floppies for Kickstart.
Well, if you painstakingly crack the casing, remove the media, and strip out the hub to prove your point... well, if can be floppy, or it can be usable, but it can't be both at the same time.
Whereas the 8" and 5.25" media was pretty dang floppy even in its intact, fully usable form. The contrast justifies the otherwise trivial observation.
Or are you too young to know the pain of the ONLY COPY of priceless data destroyed by accidentally creasing the 5.25" it was stored on? The rigid case of a 3.5" diskette was a HUGE improvement.
1) I heard "stiffy disk" used. But never with a straight face. "Floppy" was, indeed, the non-literal most commonly used name. 2) I dunno where they got that "15" from. What does that make the putative 5.25" diskette's capacity, about 96kB? Only some really pre-historic 8-bit machines (Atari comes to mind) in a single-sided single-density mode got so little storage on a diskette.
Arizona has a fine militia. It's completely uninvolved in this fiasco.
Now if the Governor calls out the Guard, we can talk about militias. Until then, we can stop pretending this is a state sovereignty and state self-defense issue.
This is no different than if the EU State of Poland mobilized its laws and cops to protect itself from militias from Russia. Poland has that right.
Poland is a sovereign nation-state. Arizona is not. No matter what fantasies you entertain.
I didn't actually read the report, since I'm too cheap to buy it, but the abstract said (A) they modeled the behavior of the LEO net with full capability and with failure levels up to 36 bad sats, and (B) the average e-to-e latency was 178 ms. In the abstract, there was no linkage between those two independent facts. You may, if you wish, construe that the 178 ms was the worst case. I doubt you have evidence of this (unless you actually purchased the paper... and this is/., so I find that pretty unlikely...), but no one can take away your freedom of belief.
OTOH, the second paper, which IS available for free reading (as long as you're not afraid of PDF), states pretty unambiguously that a 14-Iridium path has e-to-e latency approaching the simple flight-time round trip delay of a geosat. And 14 hops is, from what I understand in Iridium World, pretty extreme. So for most Iridium situations, yes, latency is far superior to Inmarsat et al.
Ask yourself this: would the disparities in pricing still exist if all contracts were payed in gold?
Yes. Gold-producing regions and states would be forced to induce artificial scarcity in the the monetary standard commodity or face inflation. In other words, they'd have to manage their money supplies. Just like now.
I continue to be amazed at the irrational belief that gold is some kind of "natural currency". Gold is shiny, and pretty, and heavy, and feels nice to play with, but magic it isn't.
Well, ok, mea culpa. I failed to exclude tortuous, artificial, hypothetical, contrived, and utterly useless methods for <evil corporate giant of the week> to get your {MAC address|Social Security Number|precious bodily fluids|prize-winning cherry cobbler recipe}.
Let's just say that, according to normal practice and established networking protocols, Google won't be getting your MAC address. And if they did, by sneaking an "ifconfig -a" or "ipconfig/all" (or whatever works on your operating system) into software they provide and you run...well, by golly, you let 'em, by running their software. Or something like that. OTOH, I hope <evil corporate giant of the week> gets crucified. Like other <evil corporate giants of the week> have been. (Sony rootkit, I'm looking at you...)
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/386/
Yeah. So they can scan my email. The Gmail account is mostly throwaway stuff, so they can conclude from harvesting my email... that I get a trivial amount of throwaway stuff. Seriously. I think the Gmail account has handled less than 10 total emails. Ever.
I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
Of course you are. You're using their routers, their CO equipment... that's no less (and no more) sacrosanct than the ISP's SMTP servers. 15 seconds with IOS and one Wireshark session and your emails would belong to the ISP's network techs.
There are some people who really feel disturbed about that kind of policy
Sure. If (A) my e-mail actually mattered, and (B) more specifically my email traffic passing through gmail actually mattered, then I'd be upset. Or not, since I did knowingly sign up for the service.
For me, it's a difference which makes no difference. If it matters, encrypt. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
So Google is aware that certain World of Warcraft accounts have expired. Gosh. Maybe they'll tailor the web ads they can't show me to offer me the non-existent opportunity to buy online gold. w00t.
Anything that matters would be GPG encrypted. And nothing that matters goes to this account anyways.
Do you mean that you use your ISP's SMTP server? What about when you're on the road?
On the road == business. "Leisure travel" is for suckers. "Travel" and "Travail" are based on the same Latin root for damn good reason.
If I'm traveling on business, the only email I need to see is business email, and the business makes adequate provision for that.
Oh, you mean, "what if I have to see my PERSONAL email while I'm doing the Road Warrior thing?" The answer is "I never HAVE to see my personal email."
I feel a little bad for people who've chosen to tether themselves to connectivity. Email is a functional convenience. It's not socializing, it's not connectedness, it's not a network. And IT IS NOT A NECESSITY. Speaking strictly for myself, o'course.
No, I'm not antisocial. I just don't mistake "on-line" for "socializing".
Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails
"Advertising"? What is this "advertising" you speak of?
Gmail IMAP. I don't see the ads because I don't use the webserver. And I don't send outbound mail. I don't need to; I use an ISP mailbox for primary mail. GMail is just a receive-only convenience as far as I'm concerned.
I'm not sure if I'd take a Finn's advice on culinary matters, though. Poke salad is almost certainly both healthier and tastier than salmiakki.
HIPPA - Health Insurance Privacy and Protection Act
You got the acronym wrong (although a lot of people do), and then synthesized a non-existent name to expand it. You get credit for thoroughness.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
No mention of privacy in the title. All patient privacy stuff is the included Privacy Rule section (Section 264), although the law itself is devoid of actual standards and guidance. That was all added administratively after the fact.
Keep your personal machine off the Hospital network.
The only really sane policy: if it's on the Hospital network, it conforms to IT security guidance. Period.
I'm assuming you're in the U.S. "Exuberant" is an apt description of HIPAA data infrastructure guidance, but it's still the law of the land. I don't want my patient information accidentally sneaking out on your laptop's unencrypted hard drive.
If you must conduct personal internet business at work and don't want to convert your personal computer into a personally-owned company-configured machine, bypass the hospital net with a 3g dongle and your own data plan.
They have a nearly endless supply of lesser management pawns to absorb all blame
Ooooh, that brings to mind a phrase which, if it hasn't been coined, should be.
"Ablative managment": The layers and layers of expendable mid-level cannon fodder with enough responsibility to absorb blame, enough purported independence to support plausible deniability for their superiors, and enough commodity interchangeable to be easily and cheaply ejected and replaced. Used to shield the precious core of Board Members, CxOs, Senior VPs from PR or legal flamage.
[citation required]
EULAs are not uniformly invalid. In certain jurisdictions, clickwrap (click "agree" and damn your soul for all eternity) licenses are valid. Certain jurisdictions also buy into the "licensed, not sold" line of thought that makes this contravention of First Sale possible.
A few minutes of Googling fails to turn up any legal matter (opinions or court decisions) one way or the other on the enforceability of "subject to change at any time" terms we're discussing here. So I suspect it's uncharted territory until a lawsuit brings it into scrutiny. Maybe this lawsuit.
Yes, I know it's not the best comparison in the world
Dang skippin' it's not the best comparison; it's neither a car analogy nor a pizza analogy.
If any human being came back to a buyer post-sale and changed the purchased product without consent from the buyer,
Oh, you see, you bought the hardware, but you just LICENSED the software. SCE isn't modifying the hardware, just the software which they still own and you use only at their sufferance. First sale ("you bought it, you own it") doesn't apply.
At least, that's the stand SCE and most other system providers take. If you buy hardware, that's yours. But you didn't buy the copyrighted software embedded in the device. You licensed it. (Hence, "End User License Agreement".) They (the copyright holder, the only true owner of the software) can change that software any time they please, because they own it. If the EULA includes language that says they can change the capabilities of the software at any time without notice or recourse, copyright doesn't forbid it. And the only recourse you would have is something much like the lawsuits you see here: "The hardware you sold me depends on a certain capability set provided by the software. You have a legal obligation to provide basic capabilities in order to render the hardware fit for the purposes it was sold for."
And because "legal obligation" and "basic capabilities" are debatable, that's why it pretty much has to be a lawsuit. For instance, is "Other OS" a "basic capability"? Does its removal render the hardware unfit for its purposes? SCE has already stated they don't think so. The plaintiffs appear to disagree. We shall see how it goes.
No, IANAL. But this is how it smells to me.
Then you should have probably mentioned that you're trading on a special personal relationship with your service provider. Most consumers have no such access, so your advice to complain in person is, at best, useless (i.e., walk into Foobar Cable Co's local office, rant at nice reception desk lady, get blank stares, leave angrier than when you entered), and at worst, dangerous (walk into Foobar Cable Co's local office, rant, get tazed or shot by the police responding to the nice reception desk lady's panicked 911 phone call).
Oh, no you're missing the point. GPP's seen the light, and has found the ONLY GOOD WAY to deal with the issue. And now we can "encourage" everyone to do THE ONLY GOOD THING. After all, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
The best of all worlds: smug self-righteousness enforced with State Power. It's a popular and time-tested combination.
Whoa, Camel cigarette stores have a ball pit and free Wi-Fi? Awesome.
Why doesn't my liquor store have a rockin' climbing gym? CALL MY ASSEMBLYMAN!
2.88 MB? That's like.... mythical. That's a Bigfoot riding on the back of a unicorn.
But assuming they were using the...mythical... 2.88MB format, then, yes, 1/15th is approximately the capacity of any number of single-sided single-density 5.25" formats.
But 2.88MB? That wasn't even the same media as the classical 3.5" DSHD diskette. Special drive, special medium, special BIOS or driver support. Hell, by that standard, the 21 MB Floptical falls into the same category.
If TFA was seriously thinking about the 2.88MB diskette, they need to start passing around whatever they were smoking.
Mine, in the basement. Set up and running, though.
Feb 1996 A1000 with a Microbotics Starboard 2 with BATTERY BACKED REAL TIME CLOCK! W00T!
Pretty much stock. So floppy disks matter to me. You might say that this subject is relevant to my interests.
Not all Amigas have hard drives, or make it particularly easy to use one. If nothing else, unless you modded it, you'd still need 3.5" DSDD floppies for Kickstart.
Well, if you painstakingly crack the casing, remove the media, and strip out the hub to prove your point... well, if can be floppy, or it can be usable, but it can't be both at the same time.
Whereas the 8" and 5.25" media was pretty dang floppy even in its intact, fully usable form. The contrast justifies the otherwise trivial observation.
Or are you too young to know the pain of the ONLY COPY of priceless data destroyed by accidentally creasing the 5.25" it was stored on? The rigid case of a 3.5" diskette was a HUGE improvement.
1) I heard "stiffy disk" used. But never with a straight face. "Floppy" was, indeed, the non-literal most commonly used name.
2) I dunno where they got that "15" from. What does that make the putative 5.25" diskette's capacity, about 96kB? Only some really pre-historic 8-bit machines (Atari comes to mind) in a single-sided single-density mode got so little storage on a diskette.
Caturday-style. LolSCOs, if you will.
"Icanhazcopyrite?" springs to mind.
Arizona has a fine militia. It's completely uninvolved in this fiasco.
Now if the Governor calls out the Guard, we can talk about militias. Until then, we can stop pretending this is a state sovereignty and state self-defense issue.
This is no different than if the EU State of Poland mobilized its laws and cops to protect itself from militias from Russia. Poland has that right.
Poland is a sovereign nation-state. Arizona is not. No matter what fantasies you entertain.
I didn't actually read the report, since I'm too cheap to buy it, but the abstract said (A) they modeled the behavior of the LEO net with full capability and with failure levels up to 36 bad sats, and (B) the average e-to-e latency was 178 ms. In the abstract, there was no linkage between those two independent facts. You may, if you wish, construe that the 178 ms was the worst case. I doubt you have evidence of this (unless you actually purchased the paper... and this is /., so I find that pretty unlikely...), but no one can take away your freedom of belief.
OTOH, the second paper, which IS available for free reading (as long as you're not afraid of PDF), states pretty unambiguously that a 14-Iridium path has e-to-e latency approaching the simple flight-time round trip delay of a geosat. And 14 hops is, from what I understand in Iridium World, pretty extreme. So for most Iridium situations, yes, latency is far superior to Inmarsat et al.
If you buy a modern Jaguar, and the EULA of the engine controller firmware says so, you almost certainly may need explicit permission to resell it.
In theory, anyway. Probably not really, yet. But watch for it.
This is the (il)logical conclusion of copyright-and-license as an end-run around first sale.
Ask yourself this: would the disparities in pricing still exist if all contracts were payed in gold?
Yes. Gold-producing regions and states would be forced to induce artificial scarcity in the the monetary standard commodity or face inflation. In other words, they'd have to manage their money supplies. Just like now.
I continue to be amazed at the irrational belief that gold is some kind of "natural currency". Gold is shiny, and pretty, and heavy, and feels nice to play with, but magic it isn't.
Well, ok, mea culpa. I failed to exclude tortuous, artificial, hypothetical, contrived, and utterly useless methods for <evil corporate giant of the week> to get your {MAC address|Social Security Number|precious bodily fluids|prize-winning cherry cobbler recipe}.
Let's just say that, according to normal practice and established networking protocols, Google won't be getting your MAC address. And if they did, by sneaking an "ifconfig -a" or "ipconfig /all" (or whatever works on your operating system) into software they provide and you run...well, by golly, you let 'em, by running their software. Or something like that. OTOH, I hope <evil corporate giant of the week> gets crucified. Like other <evil corporate giants of the week> have been. (Sony rootkit, I'm looking at you...)
Magneto.
No, not really, not as far as I know, but you'd expect it'd be a serious problem.