You compare all of OS X to only Windows 7. Biased much? How about comparing the timeframes. Windows 7 was launched around October 2009. OS X Snow Leopard was launched around September 2009. Comparing those timeframes for OS X yields better information than you provide:
Windows 7: 12 advisories in 2010 4 advisories in 2009
OS X: 5 advisories in 2010 5 advisories since September 2009
And some of those OS X advisories may be for versions prior to Snow Leopard... I'm not interested in investigating further. Want to throw Vista in there too? 15 advisories in 2010 and 15 more since September 2009. My comparison was between Microsoft's and Apple's boat, so I'll leave you to continue bashing Linux all you like.
The only thing I find the Yellow Pages good for anymore is pizza. When you're doing some late night hacking at the office, it's super easy to flip to the pizza section, find the information there with menus, prices, and delivery hours then call up the one you like. Yeah, I'm sure I could do that by using Google Maps and search nearby for pizza then scan the listings to find each individual website (if they have one) and locate the menu and so on, but what a hassle.
However, sending them the notification is an offer to contract. They accept the terms under the contract by performing the specific actions laid out in the contract which can only be done on my site (so it's not like sending a contract that says 'if the sun rises tomorrow, you agree to pay me money.).
To demonstrate there was a contract, you would need to show that there was consideration and acceptance on their part. You would be unable to demonstrate that (1) Yahoo's crawler is able to comprehend and consider what is being offered, (2) that the crawler's continued operation on your site constitutes acceptance of a contract, and (3) that Yahoo's crawler is an authorized agent of Yahoo Inc.
Under a consent agreement last year, Facebook only has 2 more months to get their act straight or get the plug pulled in Canada.
Irrelevant -- that was for violations of PIPEDA, not because of any T&C listed in a contract.
There's a reason "negative option" (aka opt-out) contracts have been banned for federally-regulated goods and services across Canada, and that the majority of Canadians also enjoy protection against it for all other goods and services - it's misleading to the point of fraud.
"Unless otherwise specified in the Service Agreement, we may change, at any time, any charges, features, content, programming, structure or any other aspects of the Services, as well as any term or provision of the Service Agreement, upon notice to you. If you do not accept a change to the Services, your sole remedy is to terminate the Service Agreement and the Services provided under the Service Agreement, within 30 days of your receipt of our notice of change to the Services (unless we specify a different notice period), by providing us with advance notice of termination pursuant to Section 31. If you do not accept a change to these Terms, your sole remedy is to retain the existing Terms unchanged for the duration of the Commitment Period (as defined below), upon notice to us within 30 days of your receipt of our notice of change in the Terms."
Your scenario, while a good demonstration of why opt-out is bad, has absolutely no legal standing. There was no contract between you and Yahoo, so trying to enforce your $10K a month provision would be a waste of your time and money.
What's really needed is consumer education that agreeing to a contract that states that the provider can change the terms of the contract at any time is a bad thing. The problem is that people are presented with an agreement which they're supposed to read, they check the "I agree" box, and they have now entered into a contract with the provider that has free reign to change the terms according to the contract's provisions.
Of course, approaching Yahoo and saying "I would like to use your free services, but I require custom terms and conditions" would get you laughed at, if you even get a response at all. And there's no way they would consider it unless you're the size of General Motors and you'll be paying them enough money to make it worth their while.
And perhaps a better way for companies to manage the fact that their service offerings will change is to use contract termination clauses. Effectively, something like this: "Service under the terms of the existing agreement will terminate in 30 days, as per provision 8(b) of our agreement. At that time, all features will be disabled and you will no longer be able to use our services. We are introducing a new agreement which you can view here [link]. If you agree to these new terms, they will take effect in 30 days and your service will be uninterrupted. If you do not agree to the new terms, any information associated with your current account will be destroyed after 90 days."
Of course, that's far too ethical to ever happen as it would eliminate dead accounts and get rid of people who don't like the new terms and conditions. That doesn't look good when you have to present the number of users you have to the board and it's half of what it was last quarter.
I love the weasel words that come out in these kinds of discussions. "Most" - what is "most"? One competitor? (Maybe, Apple?).
This reminds me of that Ford commercial I saw a month or two ago, where some dude is talking about how Ford won some kind of "most improved" award. That's like a retarded child who goes from flunking everything to getting straight C- grades... relatively speaking, that's a far greater improvement that the straight A student who starts getting a few A+ grades.
Nobody cares that Microsoft's "focus and investment continues to surpass others". When Microsoft's boat has thousands of holes in it and is sinking faster than the Titanic, is it anything to boast about that you have a great investment in a massive number of people highly focused on sticking their fingers in the holes? Compare that to Apple's boat, where they only have a modest investment because there are only a few holes.
We're simply paring down the number of species that must be taken on board in case a 600 year old man is asked to build another ark. With two of each 5.5 million species, that's 11 million creatures that need to be brought aboard an ark.
The English language, being the whore that it is, pretty much allows you to make any word or phrase mean anything over time, as long as you use the generally accepted meaning at the time.
It follows pretty closely with the scenario I put forth. You assert that there was deliberate and intentional storage of data, something which is contrary to the explanation that Google has put forth. Google claims it was a mistake, and their actions following this discovery do not indicate otherwise.
If the situation can adequately be explained by incompetence (or inexperience), you'd have a point. But it cannot be so explained - unless you'd have me believe a bug existed that could not only capture the data, but also define a database field to store it in?
Oh, now you have knowledge of the storage mechanism they used on the laptop and the schema that was used? Do you know a database was used on the laptop and not, say, one big text file? But hey, maybe a they do use a database on the Street View laptops. Here's one possible table definition:
create table data (
id int not null auto_increment primary key,
ssid_info text not null );
You said before you do not possess first hand knowledge so, unless that has changed in the meantime, your attempts to justify an illogical line of reasoning with an ever-increasing amount of bluster on your part indicates that you are unwilling to admit the possibility that you were incorrect.
In what world does an intern's code make it to production without review?
I realize that most people here live in an ideal world, however based on my experiences I must conclude that I live in an alternate world. Note that in this case, "production" means a laptop in some cheap little rigged-up car that is driving around the streets rather than a public-facing web service that millions may rely upon.
If a consumer purchases apples from this farmer knowing that that farmer is endangering his workers, then yes, he/she is partly to blame for enabling this farmer to keep doing business in this way.
And consumers should take on the responsibility for routinely patrolling private offshore oil rigs, doing a detailed inspection according to industry safety best practices, and report their findings so that other consumers may apply this knowledge and vote with their wallets as appropriate? Consumers are no more able to determine which oil rig(s) their gallon of gas came from as they are which individual farm their bulk apples at Safeway came from.
I would like the magazines to agree to publish whatever I ask them to in their magazines. It's only fair that it works both ways, right?
You can. Its called advertisement.
Not exactly the same, unless you're suggesting that magazines participate in Apple's mobile advertising network, iAd. After I pay Apple $99/year for their developer program, it costs nothing to publishing something to the app store. Can I pay a magazine $99/year and publish article after article in their magazine at no additional cost?
Except, for the PS3 and Wii, you're wrong. The only requirement is that you buy a dev kit from them. After you do that, you can publish whatever the fuck you want.
Wrong. You can make whatever you want with a dev kit, but it requires Sony's or Nintendo's approval to get them to publish it.
On the magazine issue, if the magazines are asking for the ability to control what gets published, I would like the magazines to agree to publish whatever I ask them to in their magazines. It's only fair that it works both ways, right?
I know you're trying to teach him to fish, but I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they will want to teach themselves to fish. They aren't going to go look something up because you called their question stupid.
Maybe it's about time we broke the stereotype of tech-people being unapproachable and snobbish in their unwillingness to tolerate those that know less than they do, no?
My response to the OP wasn't unapproachable or snobbish -- I would classify it as a "polite but terse RTFA", if you will. If the OP took my advice and looked for more info, he could have replied to my post saying "I looked it up and here is what I found" and maybe also made some other interesting commentary that added value to the discussion.
You asked why I didn't simply supply the answer, and that's where I explained that I thought the question was stupid. The way I see it, we have two choices here:
Encourage people to post questions easily answered with a few minutes of research.
Encourage people to research their questions first, then post a question if there was something they didn't understand.
The first choice ends up turning Slashdot into a helpdesk for dummies, where stupid questions are encouraged because people know that someone's going to supply the answer to them. The second choice leads to people understanding that they're going to get called out if they ask a 'Let Me Google That For You' question.
However, let's say that I did answer the OP's question. If we reward simple questions, here's how it might look:
Q: "How do you accidently collect wi-fi data through Street View photos?" A: "You don't. Google also collects SSID information at the same time it snaps Street View photos." Q: "What is SSID?" A: "It stands for Service Set ID, a part of wifi." Q: "What does this have to do with Street View?" A: "They do this to improve location based services." Q: "What are location based services?" A: "They are services which make use of location data to provide additional information."
And so on. Had the OP done some of this research up-front, they might have run across this blog post which explains, in detail, the what and why of everything. Then, they might have asked a different question, such as:
Q: "I understand that the MAC address is being collected as it's guaranteed to be unique to each device, but what value is there in collecting the SSID names along with it since most of them will have the same default name?"
This would have spawned a far richer discussion, with others commenting on the uniqueness of MAC addresses, the possible applications of SSID names, and so on. And hopefully the discussion won't get mired down in people replying with "What is a MAC address?" or "What is the default name?" etc.
Seriously, what fucking drugs are you smoking that you can honestly believe that code wrote itself, and then ran on a computer, all without human intervention?
Here's a scenario:
Someone at Google gets a change request for the Street View vehicles to start collecting SSID names as they roam. It's a simple project, so they hand it off to a summer intern who goes to SourceForge or GitHub or whatever and starts looking for SSID libraries because, after all, he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel. He finds a great SSID library and incorporates it into the project, runs his unit tests to verify that it works according to spec, and they deploy it into the field.
Later on, while doing detailed analysis of the data collected, a Google engineer discovers that the open source library has an undocumented bug that the intern (being inexperienced) didn't catch. While it should only be capturing the SSID information, it actually captures additional traffic from the same wireless device that was sent at the same time as the SSID info. The engineer notifies his manager and they work to correct the bug and redeploy the code to all Street View vehicles.
Now according to you, that scenario would constitute a deliberate and intentional choice to capture additional traffic. I'm saying you're full of shit as I see nothing deliberate and intentional about it. Unless you have information to the contrary, I suggest you do not attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or inexperience).
Slashdot Mirror
You compare all of OS X to only Windows 7. Biased much? How about comparing the timeframes. Windows 7 was launched around October 2009. OS X Snow Leopard was launched around September 2009. Comparing those timeframes for OS X yields better information than you provide:
Windows 7:
12 advisories in 2010
4 advisories in 2009
OS X:
5 advisories in 2010
5 advisories since September 2009
And some of those OS X advisories may be for versions prior to Snow Leopard... I'm not interested in investigating further. Want to throw Vista in there too? 15 advisories in 2010 and 15 more since September 2009. My comparison was between Microsoft's and Apple's boat, so I'll leave you to continue bashing Linux all you like.
6" is considered reasonable by many, but I'm not going to get hung up on details.
Sadly, nobody appreciates the CRC32 value of "On purpose to anger the Next Generation cultists." anymore.
Computer fanatics don't have sects.
That explains the article... "Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm"
I noticed that too. Hardly counts as News for Nerds when it's a year old.
Depends on the topic. Female anatomy is millions of years old, but it would still count as news for nerds.
And whoever doesn't know this great scene from Voyager, please turn in your geek card immediately.
Seven of Nine says "8C89311C"!
My grandparents are all dead. So what now?
Look up your local necromancer in the Yellow Pages?
The only thing I find the Yellow Pages good for anymore is pizza. When you're doing some late night hacking at the office, it's super easy to flip to the pizza section, find the information there with menus, prices, and delivery hours then call up the one you like. Yeah, I'm sure I could do that by using Google Maps and search nearby for pizza then scan the listings to find each individual website (if they have one) and locate the menu and so on, but what a hassle.
Epic whale.
I thought that simply automating a non-automated process is not sufficient to obtain a patent.
So if I develop an automated brain surgeon, that should not be eligible for patent protection?
I too, need profanity to get my points across.
Dick
Thanks for letting us know, Richard.
You can ignore their disclaimer. I do. They give me good service, I give them money. Neither side is going to rock the boat.
It's great you're satisfied with Rogers. My intent was only to demonstrate that your claims that such language was banned is false.
However, sending them the notification is an offer to contract. They accept the terms under the contract by performing the specific actions laid out in the contract which can only be done on my site (so it's not like sending a contract that says 'if the sun rises tomorrow, you agree to pay me money.).
To demonstrate there was a contract, you would need to show that there was consideration and acceptance on their part. You would be unable to demonstrate that (1) Yahoo's crawler is able to comprehend and consider what is being offered, (2) that the crawler's continued operation on your site constitutes acceptance of a contract, and (3) that Yahoo's crawler is an authorized agent of Yahoo Inc.
Under a consent agreement last year, Facebook only has 2 more months to get their act straight or get the plug pulled in Canada.
Irrelevant -- that was for violations of PIPEDA, not because of any T&C listed in a contract.
There's a reason "negative option" (aka opt-out) contracts have been banned for federally-regulated goods and services across Canada, and that the majority of Canadians also enjoy protection against it for all other goods and services - it's misleading to the point of fraud.
Bzzt... try again. http://your.rogers.com/about/legaldisclaimer/TOS_Eng.pdf
"Unless otherwise specified in the Service Agreement, we may change, at any time, any charges, features, content, programming, structure or any other aspects of the Services, as well as any term or provision of the Service Agreement, upon notice to you. If you do not accept a change to the Services, your sole remedy is to terminate the Service Agreement and the Services provided under the Service Agreement, within 30 days of your receipt of our notice of change to the Services (unless we specify a different notice period), by providing us with advance notice of termination pursuant to Section 31. If you do not accept a change to these Terms, your sole remedy is to retain the existing Terms unchanged for the duration of the Commitment Period (as defined below), upon notice to us within 30 days of your receipt of our notice of change in the Terms."
Your scenario, while a good demonstration of why opt-out is bad, has absolutely no legal standing. There was no contract between you and Yahoo, so trying to enforce your $10K a month provision would be a waste of your time and money.
What's really needed is consumer education that agreeing to a contract that states that the provider can change the terms of the contract at any time is a bad thing. The problem is that people are presented with an agreement which they're supposed to read, they check the "I agree" box, and they have now entered into a contract with the provider that has free reign to change the terms according to the contract's provisions.
Of course, approaching Yahoo and saying "I would like to use your free services, but I require custom terms and conditions" would get you laughed at, if you even get a response at all. And there's no way they would consider it unless you're the size of General Motors and you'll be paying them enough money to make it worth their while.
And perhaps a better way for companies to manage the fact that their service offerings will change is to use contract termination clauses. Effectively, something like this: "Service under the terms of the existing agreement will terminate in 30 days, as per provision 8(b) of our agreement. At that time, all features will be disabled and you will no longer be able to use our services. We are introducing a new agreement which you can view here [link]. If you agree to these new terms, they will take effect in 30 days and your service will be uninterrupted. If you do not agree to the new terms, any information associated with your current account will be destroyed after 90 days."
Of course, that's far too ethical to ever happen as it would eliminate dead accounts and get rid of people who don't like the new terms and conditions. That doesn't look good when you have to present the number of users you have to the board and it's half of what it was last quarter.
I love the weasel words that come out in these kinds of discussions. "Most" - what is "most"? One competitor? (Maybe, Apple?).
This reminds me of that Ford commercial I saw a month or two ago, where some dude is talking about how Ford won some kind of "most improved" award. That's like a retarded child who goes from flunking everything to getting straight C- grades ... relatively speaking, that's a far greater improvement that the straight A student who starts getting a few A+ grades.
Nobody cares that Microsoft's "focus and investment continues to surpass others". When Microsoft's boat has thousands of holes in it and is sinking faster than the Titanic, is it anything to boast about that you have a great investment in a massive number of people highly focused on sticking their fingers in the holes? Compare that to Apple's boat, where they only have a modest investment because there are only a few holes.
after we've killed off a bunch of them.
We're simply paring down the number of species that must be taken on board in case a 600 year old man is asked to build another ark. With two of each 5.5 million species, that's 11 million creatures that need to be brought aboard an ark.
The English language, being the whore that it is, pretty much allows you to make any word or phrase mean anything over time, as long as you use the generally accepted meaning at the time.
For all intensive purposes, I could care less.
Not even something like this? and that's just with a 10 second search.
Did you use a proxy in Pakistan to find that?
Your contrived scenario is utterly and completely full of shit.
Here's the actual scenario:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html
It follows pretty closely with the scenario I put forth. You assert that there was deliberate and intentional storage of data, something which is contrary to the explanation that Google has put forth. Google claims it was a mistake, and their actions following this discovery do not indicate otherwise.
If the situation can adequately be explained by incompetence (or inexperience), you'd have a point. But it cannot be so explained - unless you'd have me believe a bug existed that could not only capture the data, but also define a database field to store it in?
Oh, now you have knowledge of the storage mechanism they used on the laptop and the schema that was used? Do you know a database was used on the laptop and not, say, one big text file? But hey, maybe a they do use a database on the Street View laptops. Here's one possible table definition:
create table data (
id int not null auto_increment primary key,
ssid_info text not null
);
You said before you do not possess first hand knowledge so, unless that has changed in the meantime, your attempts to justify an illogical line of reasoning with an ever-increasing amount of bluster on your part indicates that you are unwilling to admit the possibility that you were incorrect.
It's no matter to me. I'm done with this thread.
In what world does an intern's code make it to production without review?
I realize that most people here live in an ideal world, however based on my experiences I must conclude that I live in an alternate world. Note that in this case, "production" means a laptop in some cheap little rigged-up car that is driving around the streets rather than a public-facing web service that millions may rely upon.
If a consumer purchases apples from this farmer knowing that that farmer is endangering his workers, then yes, he/she is partly to blame for enabling this farmer to keep doing business in this way.
And consumers should take on the responsibility for routinely patrolling private offshore oil rigs, doing a detailed inspection according to industry safety best practices, and report their findings so that other consumers may apply this knowledge and vote with their wallets as appropriate? Consumers are no more able to determine which oil rig(s) their gallon of gas came from as they are which individual farm their bulk apples at Safeway came from.
I would like the magazines to agree to publish whatever I ask them to in their magazines. It's only fair that it works both ways, right?
You can. Its called advertisement.
Not exactly the same, unless you're suggesting that magazines participate in Apple's mobile advertising network, iAd. After I pay Apple $99/year for their developer program, it costs nothing to publishing something to the app store. Can I pay a magazine $99/year and publish article after article in their magazine at no additional cost?
Except, for the PS3 and Wii, you're wrong. The only requirement is that you buy a dev kit from them. After you do that, you can publish whatever the fuck you want.
Wrong. You can make whatever you want with a dev kit, but it requires Sony's or Nintendo's approval to get them to publish it.
On the magazine issue, if the magazines are asking for the ability to control what gets published, I would like the magazines to agree to publish whatever I ask them to in their magazines. It's only fair that it works both ways, right?
I know you're trying to teach him to fish, but I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they will want to teach themselves to fish. They aren't going to go look something up because you called their question stupid.
Maybe it's about time we broke the stereotype of tech-people being unapproachable and snobbish in their unwillingness to tolerate those that know less than they do, no?
My response to the OP wasn't unapproachable or snobbish -- I would classify it as a "polite but terse RTFA", if you will. If the OP took my advice and looked for more info, he could have replied to my post saying "I looked it up and here is what I found" and maybe also made some other interesting commentary that added value to the discussion.
You asked why I didn't simply supply the answer, and that's where I explained that I thought the question was stupid. The way I see it, we have two choices here:
The first choice ends up turning Slashdot into a helpdesk for dummies, where stupid questions are encouraged because people know that someone's going to supply the answer to them. The second choice leads to people understanding that they're going to get called out if they ask a 'Let Me Google That For You' question.
However, let's say that I did answer the OP's question. If we reward simple questions, here's how it might look:
Q: "How do you accidently collect wi-fi data through Street View photos?"
A: "You don't. Google also collects SSID information at the same time it snaps Street View photos."
Q: "What is SSID?"
A: "It stands for Service Set ID, a part of wifi."
Q: "What does this have to do with Street View?"
A: "They do this to improve location based services."
Q: "What are location based services?"
A: "They are services which make use of location data to provide additional information."
And so on. Had the OP done some of this research up-front, they might have run across this blog post which explains, in detail, the what and why of everything. Then, they might have asked a different question, such as:
Q: "I understand that the MAC address is being collected as it's guaranteed to be unique to each device, but what value is there in collecting the SSID names along with it since most of them will have the same default name?"
This would have spawned a far richer discussion, with others commenting on the uniqueness of MAC addresses, the possible applications of SSID names, and so on. And hopefully the discussion won't get mired down in people replying with "What is a MAC address?" or "What is the default name?" etc.
Seriously, what fucking drugs are you smoking that you can honestly believe that code wrote itself, and then ran on a computer, all without human intervention?
Here's a scenario:
Someone at Google gets a change request for the Street View vehicles to start collecting SSID names as they roam. It's a simple project, so they hand it off to a summer intern who goes to SourceForge or GitHub or whatever and starts looking for SSID libraries because, after all, he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel. He finds a great SSID library and incorporates it into the project, runs his unit tests to verify that it works according to spec, and they deploy it into the field.
Later on, while doing detailed analysis of the data collected, a Google engineer discovers that the open source library has an undocumented bug that the intern (being inexperienced) didn't catch. While it should only be capturing the SSID information, it actually captures additional traffic from the same wireless device that was sent at the same time as the SSID info. The engineer notifies his manager and they work to correct the bug and redeploy the code to all Street View vehicles.
Now according to you, that scenario would constitute a deliberate and intentional choice to capture additional traffic. I'm saying you're full of shit as I see nothing deliberate and intentional about it. Unless you have information to the contrary, I suggest you do not attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or inexperience).