Curiously Amazon has itself listed as both Amazon and Amazon.com, I have no idea why.
It's easy, you see, Amazon.com is a wholly-owned Irish subsidiary of Amazon, which purchases all of its goods and services directly from Amazon, which is a wholly-owned Irish subsidiary of Amazon.com, who contracts to Amazon through a 5-person office in Ireland operated under a franchise agreement through Amazon.com, an Irish corporation which is a holding company with exclusive license to all rights owned by Amazon, an Irish company.
What is the collected data? last time MS responded, the data collected was no more than what you search engine collects.
1. I don't recall Microsoft ever detailing exactly what data is being collected.
2. It's encrypted, so we can't examine it for ourselves.
3. Microsoft has been deceptive and even telling outright lies since the beginning of the Windows 10 rollout.
I have yet to hear a case where this collection of data was detrimental to an individual.
See 2, above. No one can look and see what data Microsoft is collecting from their Windows 10 PC, so how is one to know whether or not they've been harmed? Your argument is the same one NSA uses to claim they can't be sued over warrantless wiretapping. "No one can prove they specifically were wiretapped, so no one has any standing to sue." I say bullshit to that argument.
Pfft.. too little, too late. JPEG is "good enough" and I don't want a huge clusterfuck of incompatibility problems with my libraries.
In terms of widespread adoption, I think you're right, Joe's Image Viewer is unlikely to ever come with Lepton support. But I wouldn't dismiss this so quickly, as large sites might force the issue into the browser space.
Take Facebook as an example, think of the trillions of photos they store (they claim 2 billion are uploaded each day). Facebook archives older, infrequently-accessed photos to Blu-Ray and has an army of jukeboxes ready to swap in discs when someone actually tries to load that family reunion pic from 8 years ago. Gaining another 20% on compression means not just 20% less live storage, but also 20% fewer optical discs, 20% smaller backups, 20% fewer disc-swapping robots, 20% less square footage to lease and cool... We're talking millions and millions of dollars in savings. Facebook would be stupid not to hand Mozilla a chunk of that money and say "Lepton, implement it." Google and Microsoft would realize their own enormous cost savings by putting Lepton capability into their respective browsers.
Cool, glad they're moving away from Flash. The TV station websites are still pointing at the Flash video player, maybe I'll email them and see if it does any good.
Unfortunately, most NOAA/NWS radar products still require Flash. Livestream, which powers my local TV news broadcasts, also uses a Flash based player. There are a few other use cases for me personally, most of them being government entities.
Am I the only one who actively avoids videos whenever I'm not specifically seeking them out? If I'm looking to watch a movie or TV show or someone's recording of a concert, great, show me the video in glorious HD. Otherwise, please no. On the desktop, auto-playing videos and janky players annoyed me so much I installed a browser extension to force them all to prompt before playing. If I'm on mobile, videos chew through both my battery and my data plan much faster than I'd like. On Twitter where I follow lots of NOAA/NWS accounts, I'm not going to play the little tornado videos they post, I don't see how a 15 second 5MB clip offers compelling added value over a 300KB still photo.
I see multiple negatives and no real upside to communicating this way. I'd rather have fewer videos, not more. Annotating every inane social media comment with a video clip is just pollution. It's bad enough reading through some of that stuff through my own head-voice, I really don't want to experience it all in yours.
Google is good because it interprets what you search for better than other search engines.
And it's good at doing that because it builds its index based upon context and what people are linking to. If you go to Google Images and search for Comcast, you'll see swastikas, a hammer and sickle, and other "inaccurate" images among the top results. That isn't because Google thinks Comcast is run by communist nazis, it's because many other sites out there have posted these images alongside text that refers to Comcast. Likewise, if searching for "three black teenagers" brings up mugshots among the top results, that isn't because Google is racist. It's because many other sites out there have posted those images alongside text that refers to three black teenagers.
Neither of these are Google's problem to "fix," they're examples of Google being good at what it does, as you said. If you don't like Google's results, maybe it's time to ask why the words "three black teenagers" coincide with mugshots so frequently.
I think it's just an odd choice of phraseology on behalf of the petition creator. EFF has filed a number of lawsuits against companies that do harm to consumers, so that's probably the goal here. Count me in.
Treason is "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". Senator Cotton tried to PREVENT Obama from giving aid and comfort to the Iran.
One, Iran is not "the enemy." They might not be our BFF, but we aren't at war and we have open diplomatic relations with them.
Two, Senator Cotton demonstrated allegiance and fealty to a foreign leader (Netanyahu) before America. If Tom Cotton likes Israel so much, maybe he ought to move there.
Is it durable enough to survive cache purging when you close the browser?
For the average reasonable person, the files would likely persist across browser sessions. The browser purging its cache on exit is not default behavior, I had to dig around and enable that myself. Joe Sixpack's computer might store the cache files into tomorrow, or next week, or the next time his computer-savvy nephew comes to visit.
Going forward, could YouTube cure this by adding a notice above the fold to all logged-out video views and periodically to logged-in views? "Use of the YouTube service is subject to the YouTube Terms of Service. Read the Terms"
My issue isn't so much with where the notice is located, it's that (IMHO, IANAL) merely transmitting that notice doesn't bind the end user to a contract. YouTube could place a link to their terms at the top of the page in 100 point font, but if the user isn't required to affirm anything, I don't see an agreement being enforceable. The user could have their browser configured in a manner such that the notice doesn't display for them, no matter where the site intends for it to appear.
As an analogy, Slashdot offers an option to disable seeing other users' signatures. My sig is snarky, but suppose I intend it seriously and I have an army of lawyers working for me. Do you think you should be bound to the terms of my signature if you see it? What if you have signatures disabled on Slashdot and you don't see it? I could easily argue that I put it there, so it's your own fault you didn't read it. You could easily argue that you never saw it. I could argue that if you suppressed it, it's because you went out of your way to use a non-default configuration to bypass my legal notice. The whole thing quickly becomes asinine, as you never really agreed to anything, and I can't possibly prove that you did.
I can think of two scenarios where an agreement could potentially be enforced.
One, when any logged-out user clicks a link to a YouTube video, an interstitial dialog could appear. "To view the video you requested, you must agree with the following terms: [insert 30 pages of legalese]" with a checkbox for "I Agree." If you don't affirm your agreement, you don't get to watch the video. A user whose browser can't properly render and handle the interstitial isn't allowed to access the content.
Two, YouTube could simply require registration and logging in before being able to watch any videos. If you aren't logged in, you can't see shit. I don't have a YouTube account but I'm guessing part of their user registration process already includes the 30 pages of legalese and the "I Agree" checkbox. This way everyone who watches a video is likely to have agreed to the terms at some point, even if they didn't actually read them.
I recall they tried requiring a login in order to view comments, back when they were pushing Google+ like crazy, but they quickly abandoned that tactic. Most people don't want to bother signing up and logging in just to view stuff.
By the way, this is one of the more fruitful discussions I've had on Slashdot in a long time, thanks for that.
The video started playing, not downloading to durable storage.
If it wound up in my browser cache, it downloaded to durable storage. I'm actually not sure whether YouTube videos end up in the cache or not. I know when I use Comcast's streaming service, it generates hundreds of megs worth of cached video files, so streaming can definitely do so. I only notice those because the browser, set to empty the cache on exit, takes a long time to purge those files. I don't really watch anything large enough on YouTube that I'd notice it being purged.
The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
I'd like to see that hold up in court, the notion that the presence of a link to the terms of service somewhere on a web page I visited constitutes any agreement or consideration on my part. Assuming you're referring to the page footer, when I load a YouTube link I never even scroll down far enough to see a link there. I just see the video player and some "related videos" in the right-hand gutter.
They're a bunch of TV schills. Look at their language collocations. It's always the same.
Speaking of language patterns, I don't think I've ever seen anyone spell "shill" that way until today. What a coincidence you've posted in the same thread where a user named PublicSchill is making negative remarks about TeamViewer.
All a terrorist would have to do is watch the line and wait for it to get long enough, or know the peak times that they can get in line and just waltze right through with no screening at all.
All a terrorist has to do right now is walk up to the line at the time of their choosing, at any airport in America, and press a detonator button. Boom, lots of dead people. And yet this isn't happening. Not because of any heroic TSA screening efforts, mind you; that line is outside the secure area, and always will be by definition. There just aren't that many bogeymen out there.
If you carry a smartphone (iOS or Android), you *ALREADY* are carrying around a device that generates reams of telemetry back to the cellular carrier, manufacturer, and OS maker and generates a full record of your movement by which cell towers you connect to or which wi-fi hotspots it sees.
Enough with this red herring.
My phone doesn't have access to the files on my computers - I repeat, my computers, not Microsoft's - where I keep my private data. My computers, not my phone, store my tax documents, source code, proprietary work product and trade secrets, client data and invoicing, my passwords to everything, backups of family members' computers containing much of the same personal information, etc. My computers, not my phone, are where I conduct online banking and shopping and do anything else involving financial transactions and credentials. All of that data is private, and no one has permission to go fishing through it trying to "monetize" me or "enhance my experience." This is non-negotiable.
Google (or NSA) can siphon whatever they want off my phone. They'll find out I play Words with Friends, check Slashdot and Ars while I'm taking a dump, send and receive mostly boring emails on the account connected to the phone, and probably am overzealous about the number of server monitoring texts I have set up. If I really don't want to be physically tracked for some reason, I can leave the phone somewhere or pull the battery and drop the phone in a Faraday bag.
Just because I'm relatively OK with my phone being "leaky," and therefore rather cautious about what winds up there, does not mean I also must accept anyone mining through my private data on my computers. They are two entirely different worlds.
Windows Home edition, everything on "automatic", and no ongoing maintenance was being done to keep it current outside of business hours.
It shouldn't matter.
Microsoft, and in turn most IT professionals, have spent the better part of 20 years encouraging everyone to keep Windows Update turned on. This is how you keep your system secure, guard against exploits and vulnerabilities, and receive bug fixes. It's generally a good thing. Never in all that time did enabling automatic updates, even "everything," run the risk of installing an entirely new fucking operating system without the user asking for it. There's no reason why a machine running any version of Windows, set to automatically install all categories of updates, should ever install an entirely new fucking operating system without the user asking for it. It's behavior that is entirely unexpected and contrary to how Windows Update has worked since its inception.
Microsoft has really gone beyond the pale with this one, as now people are routinely disabling Windows Update, refusing any update that prompts to install, etc. as they're afraid of a Windows 10 installation that they do not want sneaking in. This entire disaster of a product launch has moved security backwards.
Why didn't one of those "over 1000 followers" call the police to try to stop it?
Who knows. Maybe they did, and no one could get there in time. I came across and tuned into the drunk driving chick while she was doing her thing, and several people did contact the police, eventually guiding them to her based on streets and landmarks. I also watched while a suicidal guy in Texas drove around threatening to shoot up Wal-Marts and several viewers were keeping the county sheriff updated as to his whereabouts. They sent a chopper up to find him eventually, at least an hour into his escapade, then he holed up inside his truck occasionally speaking to officers while threatening suicide; I had to give up listening to the scanner and go to sleep before I learned the outcome of that one.
In both of these cases, even with people calling police, it took awhile to get authorities to the correct place because the vast majority of the people watching didn't live anywhere nearby, weren't familiar with the area, weren't necessarily sure how to contact law enforcement there (or where "there" even was), etc. If you tune into a live stream and you see a lady standing in front of some train tracks, what exactly are you going to do? It's not like her GPS coordinates are embedded in the video stream.
The article implies that this was his exit plan when the missing funds were discovered, but the money he "borrowed" from the project wasn't enough to finish the house. So now he has a half-built house that he can't sell to get the money back.
I would argue it's also well understood that things that are "trending" on social media are often being astro-turfed, outright paid for, and are otherwise not really what people are sharing. I just looked at Twitter and two of the supposedly "trending" topics are #OfficeSmallBiz and "Judy Dater - Women." Nobody was really, organically, legitimately making a lot of tweets about either of those things; they're "trending" because Twitter says they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Curiously Amazon has itself listed as both Amazon and Amazon.com, I have no idea why.
It's easy, you see, Amazon.com is a wholly-owned Irish subsidiary of Amazon, which purchases all of its goods and services directly from Amazon, which is a wholly-owned Irish subsidiary of Amazon.com, who contracts to Amazon through a 5-person office in Ireland operated under a franchise agreement through Amazon.com, an Irish corporation which is a holding company with exclusive license to all rights owned by Amazon, an Irish company.
Minor accounting matter, nothing to worry about.
What is the collected data? last time MS responded, the data collected was no more than what you search engine collects.
1. I don't recall Microsoft ever detailing exactly what data is being collected.
2. It's encrypted, so we can't examine it for ourselves.
3. Microsoft has been deceptive and even telling outright lies since the beginning of the Windows 10 rollout.
I have yet to hear a case where this collection of data was detrimental to an individual.
See 2, above. No one can look and see what data Microsoft is collecting from their Windows 10 PC, so how is one to know whether or not they've been harmed? Your argument is the same one NSA uses to claim they can't be sued over warrantless wiretapping. "No one can prove they specifically were wiretapped, so no one has any standing to sue." I say bullshit to that argument.
Pfft.. too little, too late. JPEG is "good enough" and I don't want a huge clusterfuck of incompatibility problems with my libraries.
In terms of widespread adoption, I think you're right, Joe's Image Viewer is unlikely to ever come with Lepton support. But I wouldn't dismiss this so quickly, as large sites might force the issue into the browser space.
Take Facebook as an example, think of the trillions of photos they store (they claim 2 billion are uploaded each day). Facebook archives older, infrequently-accessed photos to Blu-Ray and has an army of jukeboxes ready to swap in discs when someone actually tries to load that family reunion pic from 8 years ago. Gaining another 20% on compression means not just 20% less live storage, but also 20% fewer optical discs, 20% smaller backups, 20% fewer disc-swapping robots, 20% less square footage to lease and cool... We're talking millions and millions of dollars in savings. Facebook would be stupid not to hand Mozilla a chunk of that money and say "Lepton, implement it." Google and Microsoft would realize their own enormous cost savings by putting Lepton capability into their respective browsers.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Cool, glad they're moving away from Flash. The TV station websites are still pointing at the Flash video player, maybe I'll email them and see if it does any good.
Unfortunately, most NOAA/NWS radar products still require Flash. Livestream, which powers my local TV news broadcasts, also uses a Flash based player. There are a few other use cases for me personally, most of them being government entities.
Am I the only one who actively avoids videos whenever I'm not specifically seeking them out? If I'm looking to watch a movie or TV show or someone's recording of a concert, great, show me the video in glorious HD. Otherwise, please no. On the desktop, auto-playing videos and janky players annoyed me so much I installed a browser extension to force them all to prompt before playing. If I'm on mobile, videos chew through both my battery and my data plan much faster than I'd like. On Twitter where I follow lots of NOAA/NWS accounts, I'm not going to play the little tornado videos they post, I don't see how a 15 second 5MB clip offers compelling added value over a 300KB still photo.
I see multiple negatives and no real upside to communicating this way. I'd rather have fewer videos, not more. Annotating every inane social media comment with a video clip is just pollution. It's bad enough reading through some of that stuff through my own head-voice, I really don't want to experience it all in yours.
Google is good because it interprets what you search for better than other search engines.
And it's good at doing that because it builds its index based upon context and what people are linking to. If you go to Google Images and search for Comcast, you'll see swastikas, a hammer and sickle, and other "inaccurate" images among the top results. That isn't because Google thinks Comcast is run by communist nazis, it's because many other sites out there have posted these images alongside text that refers to Comcast. Likewise, if searching for "three black teenagers" brings up mugshots among the top results, that isn't because Google is racist. It's because many other sites out there have posted those images alongside text that refers to three black teenagers.
Neither of these are Google's problem to "fix," they're examples of Google being good at what it does, as you said. If you don't like Google's results, maybe it's time to ask why the words "three black teenagers" coincide with mugshots so frequently.
I think it's just an odd choice of phraseology on behalf of the petition creator. EFF has filed a number of lawsuits against companies that do harm to consumers, so that's probably the goal here. Count me in.
Yes, it does. We put George W. Bush in charge of something and that didn't work out too well either.
Treason is "giving aid and comfort to the enemy".
Senator Cotton tried to PREVENT Obama from giving aid and comfort to the Iran.
One, Iran is not "the enemy." They might not be our BFF, but we aren't at war and we have open diplomatic relations with them.
Two, Senator Cotton demonstrated allegiance and fealty to a foreign leader (Netanyahu) before America. If Tom Cotton likes Israel so much, maybe he ought to move there.
Is it durable enough to survive cache purging when you close the browser?
For the average reasonable person, the files would likely persist across browser sessions. The browser purging its cache on exit is not default behavior, I had to dig around and enable that myself. Joe Sixpack's computer might store the cache files into tomorrow, or next week, or the next time his computer-savvy nephew comes to visit.
Going forward, could YouTube cure this by adding a notice above the fold to all logged-out video views and periodically to logged-in views? "Use of the YouTube service is subject to the YouTube Terms of Service. Read the Terms"
My issue isn't so much with where the notice is located, it's that (IMHO, IANAL) merely transmitting that notice doesn't bind the end user to a contract. YouTube could place a link to their terms at the top of the page in 100 point font, but if the user isn't required to affirm anything, I don't see an agreement being enforceable. The user could have their browser configured in a manner such that the notice doesn't display for them, no matter where the site intends for it to appear.
As an analogy, Slashdot offers an option to disable seeing other users' signatures. My sig is snarky, but suppose I intend it seriously and I have an army of lawyers working for me. Do you think you should be bound to the terms of my signature if you see it? What if you have signatures disabled on Slashdot and you don't see it? I could easily argue that I put it there, so it's your own fault you didn't read it. You could easily argue that you never saw it. I could argue that if you suppressed it, it's because you went out of your way to use a non-default configuration to bypass my legal notice. The whole thing quickly becomes asinine, as you never really agreed to anything, and I can't possibly prove that you did.
I can think of two scenarios where an agreement could potentially be enforced.
One, when any logged-out user clicks a link to a YouTube video, an interstitial dialog could appear. "To view the video you requested, you must agree with the following terms: [insert 30 pages of legalese]" with a checkbox for "I Agree." If you don't affirm your agreement, you don't get to watch the video. A user whose browser can't properly render and handle the interstitial isn't allowed to access the content.
Two, YouTube could simply require registration and logging in before being able to watch any videos. If you aren't logged in, you can't see shit. I don't have a YouTube account but I'm guessing part of their user registration process already includes the 30 pages of legalese and the "I Agree" checkbox. This way everyone who watches a video is likely to have agreed to the terms at some point, even if they didn't actually read them.
I recall they tried requiring a login in order to view comments, back when they were pushing Google+ like crazy, but they quickly abandoned that tactic. Most people don't want to bother signing up and logging in just to view stuff.
By the way, this is one of the more fruitful discussions I've had on Slashdot in a long time, thanks for that.
The video started playing, not downloading to durable storage.
If it wound up in my browser cache, it downloaded to durable storage. I'm actually not sure whether YouTube videos end up in the cache or not. I know when I use Comcast's streaming service, it generates hundreds of megs worth of cached video files, so streaming can definitely do so. I only notice those because the browser, set to empty the cache on exit, takes a long time to purge those files. I don't really watch anything large enough on YouTube that I'd notice it being purged.
The video playback page you visited also contained a link to the terms of service in a place where it is standard practice to place legal notices.
I'd like to see that hold up in court, the notion that the presence of a link to the terms of service somewhere on a web page I visited constitutes any agreement or consideration on my part. Assuming you're referring to the page footer, when I load a YouTube link I never even scroll down far enough to see a link there. I just see the video player and some "related videos" in the right-hand gutter.
They're a bunch of TV schills. Look at their language collocations. It's always the same.
Speaking of language patterns, I don't think I've ever seen anyone spell "shill" that way until today. What a coincidence you've posted in the same thread where a user named PublicSchill is making negative remarks about TeamViewer.
According to the redacted NSLs, the FBI field office is actually located at 7915 Microsoft Way.
Longer than is necessary to view the video in ways authorized by the letter and/or spirit of the terms to which the user agreed.
Except I, the user, didn't agree to any terms. I clicked a link to a YouTube video and the video started playing.
Democracy = Majority Rules.
Fortunately this is not the case, otherwise we'd have a picture of Jesus on the $20 bill and being gay would still be illegal.
All a terrorist would have to do is watch the line and wait for it to get long enough, or know the peak times that they can get in line and just waltze right through with no screening at all.
All a terrorist has to do right now is walk up to the line at the time of their choosing, at any airport in America, and press a detonator button. Boom, lots of dead people. And yet this isn't happening. Not because of any heroic TSA screening efforts, mind you; that line is outside the secure area, and always will be by definition. There just aren't that many bogeymen out there.
If you carry a smartphone (iOS or Android), you *ALREADY* are carrying around a device that generates reams of telemetry back to the cellular carrier, manufacturer, and OS maker and generates a full record of your movement by which cell towers you connect to or which wi-fi hotspots it sees.
Enough with this red herring.
My phone doesn't have access to the files on my computers - I repeat, my computers, not Microsoft's - where I keep my private data. My computers, not my phone, store my tax documents, source code, proprietary work product and trade secrets, client data and invoicing, my passwords to everything, backups of family members' computers containing much of the same personal information, etc. My computers, not my phone, are where I conduct online banking and shopping and do anything else involving financial transactions and credentials. All of that data is private, and no one has permission to go fishing through it trying to "monetize" me or "enhance my experience." This is non-negotiable.
Google (or NSA) can siphon whatever they want off my phone. They'll find out I play Words with Friends, check Slashdot and Ars while I'm taking a dump, send and receive mostly boring emails on the account connected to the phone, and probably am overzealous about the number of server monitoring texts I have set up. If I really don't want to be physically tracked for some reason, I can leave the phone somewhere or pull the battery and drop the phone in a Faraday bag.
Just because I'm relatively OK with my phone being "leaky," and therefore rather cautious about what winds up there, does not mean I also must accept anyone mining through my private data on my computers. They are two entirely different worlds.
Let me guess...
Windows Home edition, everything on "automatic", and no ongoing maintenance was being done to keep it current outside of business hours.
It shouldn't matter.
Microsoft, and in turn most IT professionals, have spent the better part of 20 years encouraging everyone to keep Windows Update turned on. This is how you keep your system secure, guard against exploits and vulnerabilities, and receive bug fixes. It's generally a good thing. Never in all that time did enabling automatic updates, even "everything," run the risk of installing an entirely new fucking operating system without the user asking for it. There's no reason why a machine running any version of Windows, set to automatically install all categories of updates, should ever install an entirely new fucking operating system without the user asking for it. It's behavior that is entirely unexpected and contrary to how Windows Update has worked since its inception.
Microsoft has really gone beyond the pale with this one, as now people are routinely disabling Windows Update, refusing any update that prompts to install, etc. as they're afraid of a Windows 10 installation that they do not want sneaking in. This entire disaster of a product launch has moved security backwards.
Why didn't one of those "over 1000 followers" call the police to try to stop it?
Who knows. Maybe they did, and no one could get there in time. I came across and tuned into the drunk driving chick while she was doing her thing, and several people did contact the police, eventually guiding them to her based on streets and landmarks. I also watched while a suicidal guy in Texas drove around threatening to shoot up Wal-Marts and several viewers were keeping the county sheriff updated as to his whereabouts. They sent a chopper up to find him eventually, at least an hour into his escapade, then he holed up inside his truck occasionally speaking to officers while threatening suicide; I had to give up listening to the scanner and go to sleep before I learned the outcome of that one.
In both of these cases, even with people calling police, it took awhile to get authorities to the correct place because the vast majority of the people watching didn't live anywhere nearby, weren't familiar with the area, weren't necessarily sure how to contact law enforcement there (or where "there" even was), etc. If you tune into a live stream and you see a lady standing in front of some train tracks, what exactly are you going to do? It's not like her GPS coordinates are embedded in the video stream.
The article implies that this was his exit plan when the missing funds were discovered, but the money he "borrowed" from the project wasn't enough to finish the house. So now he has a half-built house that he can't sell to get the money back.
It was a dupe of this story from last Friday, maybe they removed it.
Especially when that third party is Google. Speaking of which, since when did Google own VirusTotal?
I would argue it's also well understood that things that are "trending" on social media are often being astro-turfed, outright paid for, and are otherwise not really what people are sharing. I just looked at Twitter and two of the supposedly "trending" topics are #OfficeSmallBiz and "Judy Dater - Women." Nobody was really, organically, legitimately making a lot of tweets about either of those things; they're "trending" because Twitter says they are.