Oh, and that Privacy Foundation report is *3* years old. Their primary complaint appears to be focused on differences between the privacy statement in the manual and online. Well, no f***ing duh. That manual was printed and placed in the box nearly a year before being purchased. Why not complain about the instructions not matching the actual tivo GUI, while you're at it? Even the demo content on the units were of a previous version of the GUI.
(And given their further complaint about software updates, it's clear the Privacy Foundation is a bunch of idiots. The software updates are a clearly defined part of the subscriber agreement.)
(Thanks for 10,000 links about the same damned Privacy Foundation report.)
"No one wants to be a target of the Privacy Foundation, and TiVo certainly doesn't want to be mentioned as a company that abuses people's information. But they haven't done anything wrong," McNealy said.
Have you read the article? There is a huge difference between "can" and "do". Everything you do can be tracked back to you -- with varying degrees of difficulty. Tivo can trace the origin of every file sent to their servers -- the same way anyone with a web server can. For Tivo, that's matching IP addresses with accounting logs to see who had what address at the time -- assuming they dialed in, otherwise it gets a lot more difficult.
Jim Barton, TiVo's chief technology officer, acknowledged that the company does collect information about what its subscribers watch but that--contrary to the Privacy Foundation findings--it strips names out of the data.
There's nothing to "strip out"... the tivo doesn't store any one's name. It has a serial number -- the Tivo Service ID -- and that's it.
The "thumb" and viewing history data sent to tivo contains no personally identifiable information. No version of tivo code has ever done so (and I've picked apart many versions.) Even the file name is not trackable. The only thing that appears in the logs on the tivo is the zipcode and a RANDOM number that's rewritten in-line when uploaded:
backChannelPrv: @ftp:/204.176.49.11:/TivoData/bprv/20000810/000000.RANDOMIZE.27613.bz2| ... starting backhaul about to do ftp doing Put/var/tmp/tivoLog.prv.gz 204.176.49.11...
The actual filename isn't logged anywhere. And the syslogs (the "diagnostic information") sent per call are for the previous day (since the last call.) And they do not contain any information about what you have been viewing.
I stand by my original comment. Privacy fanatics fucking piss me off. The Privacy Foundation can kiss my ass. Can tivo trace stuff back to me? Of course they can. Does anyone have any proof tivo has done so? NO. In fact, the weight of evidence is in their favor. They have gone to extrordinary lengths to make it difficult to link the stats to a single tivo. And what would be the point to mapping things back to an individual tivo? (note "tivo" and not "person", there's no way to know who's finger was on the remote 100% of the time -- even for single person households.)
I can assure you I know a great deal more than you do about the tivo. And I would suspect, volumes more than the raving privacy lunatics picking at the tivo. Until someone can prove Tivo, Inc. is mapping viewing habits to specific people without their knowledge and permission, I don't care what they might be able to do.
Phillips isn't doing anything. TIVO is. Phillips makes the box; Tivo, Inc. programs it. And it is not f***ing new! Tivo has had an opt-out for years. (from day one?)
Of course there's identifying data in the call. How the hell do you think they track which tivo's have paid for service? Don't be so paranoid and/or stupid. Your viewing habits are not sent with any ID attached. The finest detail they have is the zip code. So, unless you are the only tivo subscriber in your zip code (unlikely), it would be difficult to trace it back to a specific subscriber. AND YOU CAN HAVE THAT REPORTING TURNED OFF.
Every time tivo has changed their privacy policy, I have receive email telling me so. At no point have they ever said they would not sell viewing statistics. They have stated repeatedly that such stats are not personally identifiable -- they are processed as aggregate statistics by zip code.
They've been selling embedded ads for several years now. Ever noticed an extra menu item in Tivo Central? Or in the showcases? (BMW ads, movie previews, junk from Best Buy, etc.) I've been conditioned to ignore them.
If they say they aren't tracking you specifically, they are lying.
Oh f*** off you paranoid idiot. Go build your own tivo for 10x the cost and 10000x the headache.
Privacy fanatics piss me off.
(No one I know with a Tivo would willingly give it up.)
Really? There's Replay and Tivo -- and associated "branded" devices thereof. And then there's the various cable company's boxes and DISH Network's thing(s). Not exactly the same as microwave and TV selections...
TIVO sells your personal data...
Ok, let's beat that dead monkey some more. The data tivo collects is anonymous. It is not linked to any single box or owner. AND, you can make a single phone call and have the reporting shut off. Read the f***ing manual, ok. And for the record, I don't mind this information finding its way back to Hollywood. They'll know what commercials people actually want to watch (i.e. "what works") and what shows people record and watch repeatedly (i.e. "what's popular".)
Actually, they are not. In true Microsoft style, they are providing what others are (were) providing to their customers. The only reason the cable cartel is providing DVRs is because people were (and still are) buying replay tv's and tivo and running their cable through them. And I'm certain there were companies planing on integrating a digital cable decoder into the DVR to eliminate the cable box and additional encoding. (just like the DTivo.)
And by so doing, they are retaining control over their cable system. If they want to prevent commercial skipping, there's NOTHING to stop them. If they want to limit your viewing of a show to three times, they can....
I've been skipping ads for more than decade, long before there were any Tivo's. The industry needs to wise-up and realize people don't want to watch 15+ minutes of the same, boring, junk every hour. That said, there are a few commercials I actually backup to watch (and even save.)
There's a reason I don't watch "live" TV and rarely watch any of the commercial laden broadcast channels (even tho' I pay Directv to receive them.)
No. As has been repeated for years in HAM circles... this is not illegal as the radio is simply transmitting the bits exactly as it received them -- i.e. something else encrypted the bits.
(WEP does muddy the water. But it's rather simple to break, so I doubt the.gov boys care.)
In the context of the cell phone, the entire thing is one unit. As such, the scambling of a voice call is prohibited -- the radio is the device doing the scambling. (even when it's digital cellular network.) The GSMK phone cleverly uses a loophole (albeit a small one)... it makes DATA calls.
Which begs the question: how many people actually turn on this very feature in their cable/dsl router? Yes, netgear, linksys, and other vendor's consumer "routers" have virus software awareness built into them.
Personally, I never load the firmware image with that (stupid) capability. Just because I have AV software installed and running doesn't mean nothing will get through. And AV software that does "passive" inspection of web and email traffic more often screws those things up more than protect anything -- that's why I removed PC-Cillin from my laptop; the web filter kept sending my requests to the wrong server (usually cisco, oddly enough.)
Of course, given enough traffic you could become CPU bound. Then you'll have to buy a Juniper:-)
Or an NSE based Cisco platform. I've tried this sort of nbar filtering on a 7401 with a few dozen MB/s flowing through it. The router didn't even notice it. That's the magic of PXF -- hardware assisted inspection.
Breadth of experience, no. I've not been around thousands of tape libraries. However, I have been around a few for years. Maybe I'm just lucky... none of the StorageTek libraries I've been around were messed up. (of course, all but the last one were brand new.) All of the sony autoloaders I've had for a few years have failed -- and they've all been very heavily used by me and their previous owner(s).
And, btw, yes, I've been the toady working the 20hr day to swap tapes. For daily backups, it's a 5min/day job. Weekly/monthly backups are very long, boring days.
$5.15/hr is $10k/yr (full-time.) A $10k library, amortized over 5 years, is much cheaper - even if the teen is working half-time. The library works 24hr/day. And 10k will buy a whole lot of library these days.
Funny. Actually, my favorite job was working for the NC DOT -- landscape department. You're outside all day. You get to break stuff you don't have to fix:-) (most of the time it's not even DOT hardware.) You can drive the wrong way on the interstate, across the median, up on-ramps, etc. (even park infront of cops hiding to catch speeders.) Of course, there are the less glamorous tasks... cleaning the exhaust vents at rest areas, working on "waste water filter plants" at rest areas, mowing grass (I've carried a weed-eater(tm) 10,000 miles), etc.
But I still loved that job. Where else are you going to get the opportunaty to pull down a power line, plus pole, and kill power to entire lake-side community, that's hours from the nearest Duke power crew? (and I was on the top of that truck.)
[PS: That was not our fault. The grade crew cut down too much of the hill and made the line sag. We'd driven under it several times prior. And the pole was already cracked. It was only a 3-phase line to a house so it really wasn't anything to see -- nice loud pop 'tho.]
At [censored] (an ISP), My bosses and I interviewed several people for a network engineering position. Roger (boss #2) and I took each one of them, following the b.s. personal questioning (who are you and what do what), over to a set of routers to see if what they had on paper meant anything. There had already been one useless "well papered" person on the staff. None of them were prepared for such a test. We sat them infront of some of the oldest Cisco routers outside Cisco (ok, the oldest:-) -- the old white cisco 2500's (igs's or accesspro's)) and gave them a simple network diagram to go build. And we stood there and watched -- and joked behind them (which is how they'd be working anyway.) Only one of the six interviewees was calm and knew what he was doing.
In my mind, that's a perfectly valid test. As a network toady at an ISP, you will rarely have any advanced warning of things breaking. And you'll have zero time to come up with a solution -- certainly no time to be searching google or grep'ing manuals. In fact, you might not even be able to reach google. I've knocked myself out of the network a few times -- only once was I not expecting it (never attempt to reload the access-list attached to the interface your traffic is traversing.)
Odd, I've never seen a robot drop, mis-feed, or jam a tape. And they cost far less, and work far more hours than a high-school kid.
UPC codes take some work to scan. A smudge or bend makes it hard to read. And for self-checkout, it's much easier for people to put something through a hoop than it is to get them to find and align the UPC code for scanning. Don't laugh... I've seen people too dumb to scan their own items. (Personally, I'm too fast for the self-scanner. Gimme the real register.)
IT or Engineering
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
RFID tags aren't, IMO, "IT". That was a engineering gig maybe spawned from an IT problem (how to better manage inventory and warehouses.) How are these people defining "IT"? Anything that deals with computers and/or technology?
... where "limited cases" are all public, unlicensed bands, and any licensed spectrum where the license doesn't (specifically) allow it. This covers HAMs, the aforementioned cordless, and most cell networks. (however, I'd have to go fish through the FCC records to see what they are currently allowing -- GSM's "encryption" included.)
Heh, well, if you use the "published" numbers, there aren't that many US taps per year. I've venture a guess there are a lot more that aren't on the books.
works in any GSM 1900 network that provides data call facilities
Man, they're getting awfully close to that hair... by making a data call and doing the voice digitization (and crypto) at the handset, they just might get past US (FCC) regulations. This is, thus, the same thing as an encrypting ISDN phone set (which do exist.)
This might not go over very well in the US. Data mode on cell phones is usually a charge-by-the-byte extra service.
According to CALEA requirements, if the telco knows the encryption codes, they must hand them over when presented with a tap order -- or deliver decrypted data.
And in the US, encrypted radio transmissions are illegal -- that's why current cell phones don't have any encryption at all; they rely on spread spectrum tricks to make it hard to listen in (and it isn't that hard.) As the FCC licenses the spectrum used by cell phone carriers, there may be some steap barriers to deployment in the US.
telephone companies built the infrastructure for broadband
The telco's did not build the infrastructure "for broadband". They built a system for phones and the technology evolved to ever more inventively use that system, from 300 baud, quad-tone modems to xDSL (which are basically captive radios.) The telcos resisted broadband deployment with every ounce of their lives -- that is, until they realized how much $$$ it would bring in at which point they've done everything they can to keep everybody else out of the market.
(Plus, our tax dollars paid for the cabling that is the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN.))
Cable companies reluctantly upgraded their networks to support broadband only to compete with DSL. I'll tell the Time Warner story again... TW tested cables modem technology in Raleigh, NC circa 1996. The equipment was installed in the "telco room" at Interpath (then at the Capital Broadcasting Corp. office @ 711 Hillsborough St.) I saw the equipment; I touched the equipment. It was demo'd at some conference a few weeks later to everyone's amazement. Yet, Raleigh was the LAST city to have cablemodem service deployed -- years later. And the only reason was the lack of competitive pressure.
And TW only upgraded the network in Cary after the city counsel threatened to revoke their cable TV contract and run their own city-wide fiber network.
But truthfully, even when I had 100M access to the world -- working at an ISP, I rarely consumed much of it. I created measurable spikes in traffic graphs, but only of a few percent (of OC-3's) for short periods (rarely over an hour.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and that Privacy Foundation report is *3* years old. Their primary complaint appears to be focused on differences between the privacy statement in the manual and online. Well, no f***ing duh. That manual was printed and placed in the box nearly a year before being purchased. Why not complain about the instructions not matching the actual tivo GUI, while you're at it? Even the demo content on the units were of a previous version of the GUI.
(And given their further complaint about software updates, it's clear the Privacy Foundation is a bunch of idiots. The software updates are a clearly defined part of the subscriber agreement.)
- "No one wants to be a target of the Privacy Foundation, and TiVo certainly doesn't want to be mentioned as a company that abuses people's information. But they haven't done anything wrong," McNealy said.
Have you read the article? There is a huge difference between "can" and "do". Everything you do can be tracked back to you -- with varying degrees of difficulty. Tivo can trace the origin of every file sent to their servers -- the same way anyone with a web server can. For Tivo, that's matching IP addresses with accounting logs to see who had what address at the time -- assuming they dialed in, otherwise it gets a lot more difficult.- Jim Barton, TiVo's chief technology officer, acknowledged that the company does collect information about what its subscribers watch but that--contrary to the Privacy Foundation findings--it strips names out of the data.
There's nothing to "strip out"... the tivo doesn't store any one's name. It has a serial number -- the Tivo Service ID -- and that's it.The "thumb" and viewing history data sent to tivo contains no personally identifiable information. No version of tivo code has ever done so (and I've picked apart many versions.) Even the file name is not trackable. The only thing that appears in the logs on the tivo is the zipcode and a RANDOM number that's rewritten in-line when uploaded:
- backChannelPrv: @ftp:/204.176.49.11:/TivoData/bprv/20000810/00000
0 .RANDOMIZE.27613.bz2|
... /var/tmp/tivoLog.prv.gz 204.176.49.11 ...
The actual filename isn't logged anywhere. And the syslogs (the "diagnostic information") sent per call are for the previous day (since the last call.) And they do not contain any information about what you have been viewing.starting backhaul
about to do ftp
doing Put
I stand by my original comment. Privacy fanatics fucking piss me off. The Privacy Foundation can kiss my ass. Can tivo trace stuff back to me? Of course they can. Does anyone have any proof tivo has done so? NO. In fact, the weight of evidence is in their favor. They have gone to extrordinary lengths to make it difficult to link the stats to a single tivo. And what would be the point to mapping things back to an individual tivo? (note "tivo" and not "person", there's no way to know who's finger was on the remote 100% of the time -- even for single person households.)
I can assure you I know a great deal more than you do about the tivo. And I would suspect, volumes more than the raving privacy lunatics picking at the tivo. Until someone can prove Tivo, Inc. is mapping viewing habits to specific people without their knowledge and permission, I don't care what they might be able to do.
Of course there's identifying data in the call. How the hell do you think they track which tivo's have paid for service? Don't be so paranoid and/or stupid. Your viewing habits are not sent with any ID attached. The finest detail they have is the zip code. So, unless you are the only tivo subscriber in your zip code (unlikely), it would be difficult to trace it back to a specific subscriber. AND YOU CAN HAVE THAT REPORTING TURNED OFF.
Every time tivo has changed their privacy policy, I have receive email telling me so. At no point have they ever said they would not sell viewing statistics. They have stated repeatedly that such stats are not personally identifiable -- they are processed as aggregate statistics by zip code.
They've been selling embedded ads for several years now. Ever noticed an extra menu item in Tivo Central? Or in the showcases? (BMW ads, movie previews, junk from Best Buy, etc.) I've been conditioned to ignore them.
- If they say they aren't tracking you specifically, they are lying.
Oh f*** off you paranoid idiot. Go build your own tivo for 10x the cost and 10000x the headache.Privacy fanatics piss me off.
(No one I know with a Tivo would willingly give it up.)
- There is quite a bit of competition out there
Really? There's Replay and Tivo -- and associated "branded" devices thereof. And then there's the various cable company's boxes and DISH Network's thing(s). Not exactly the same as microwave and TV selections...- TIVO sells your personal data...
Ok, let's beat that dead monkey some more. The data tivo collects is anonymous. It is not linked to any single box or owner. AND, you can make a single phone call and have the reporting shut off. Read the f***ing manual, ok. And for the record, I don't mind this information finding its way back to Hollywood. They'll know what commercials people actually want to watch (i.e. "what works") and what shows people record and watch repeatedly (i.e. "what's popular".)- they are deploying what the customer whats
Actually, they are not. In true Microsoft style, they are providing what others are (were) providing to their customers. The only reason the cable cartel is providing DVRs is because people were (and still are) buying replay tv's and tivo and running their cable through them. And I'm certain there were companies planing on integrating a digital cable decoder into the DVR to eliminate the cable box and additional encoding. (just like the DTivo.)And by so doing, they are retaining control over their cable system. If they want to prevent commercial skipping, there's NOTHING to stop them. If they want to limit your viewing of a show to three times, they can.
I've been skipping ads for more than decade, long before there were any Tivo's. The industry needs to wise-up and realize people don't want to watch 15+ minutes of the same, boring, junk every hour. That said, there are a few commercials I actually backup to watch (and even save.)
There's a reason I don't watch "live" TV and rarely watch any of the commercial laden broadcast channels (even tho' I pay Directv to receive them.)
No. As has been repeated for years in HAM circles... this is not illegal as the radio is simply transmitting the bits exactly as it received them -- i.e. something else encrypted the bits.
.gov boys care.)
(WEP does muddy the water. But it's rather simple to break, so I doubt the
In the context of the cell phone, the entire thing is one unit. As such, the scambling of a voice call is prohibited -- the radio is the device doing the scambling. (even when it's digital cellular network.) The GSMK phone cleverly uses a loophole (albeit a small one)... it makes DATA calls.
Which begs the question: how many people actually turn on this very feature in their cable/dsl router? Yes, netgear, linksys, and other vendor's consumer "routers" have virus software awareness built into them.
Personally, I never load the firmware image with that (stupid) capability. Just because I have AV software installed and running doesn't mean nothing will get through. And AV software that does "passive" inspection of web and email traffic more often screws those things up more than protect anything -- that's why I removed PC-Cillin from my laptop; the web filter kept sending my requests to the wrong server (usually cisco, oddly enough.)
- Of course, given enough traffic you could become CPU bound. Then you'll have to buy a Juniper
:-)
Or an NSE based Cisco platform. I've tried this sort of nbar filtering on a 7401 with a few dozen MB/s flowing through it. The router didn't even notice it. That's the magic of PXF -- hardware assisted inspection.Breadth of experience, no. I've not been around thousands of tape libraries. However, I have been around a few for years. Maybe I'm just lucky... none of the StorageTek libraries I've been around were messed up. (of course, all but the last one were brand new.) All of the sony autoloaders I've had for a few years have failed -- and they've all been very heavily used by me and their previous owner(s).
And, btw, yes, I've been the toady working the 20hr day to swap tapes. For daily backups, it's a 5min/day job. Weekly/monthly backups are very long, boring days.
$5.15/hr is $10k/yr (full-time.) A $10k library, amortized over 5 years, is much cheaper - even if the teen is working half-time. The library works 24hr/day. And 10k will buy a whole lot of library these days.
I stand corrected... slashcode (current version) eats !
There's also a 'Please use fewer 'junk' characters' rule. God dammit, give me the <pre> I've begged for for 4 years!
- ...
- education...
Think home schooling.- ...
- haircut...
What about the Suck Cut (tm)?Most people just use '.' or a damn lot of ' 's
Funny. Actually, my favorite job was working for the NC DOT -- landscape department. You're outside all day. You get to break stuff you don't have to fix :-) (most of the time it's not even DOT hardware.) You can drive the wrong way on the interstate, across the median, up on-ramps, etc. (even park infront of cops hiding to catch speeders.) Of course, there are the less glamorous tasks... cleaning the exhaust vents at rest areas, working on "waste water filter plants" at rest areas, mowing grass (I've carried a weed-eater(tm) 10,000 miles), etc.
But I still loved that job. Where else are you going to get the opportunaty to pull down a power line, plus pole, and kill power to entire lake-side community, that's hours from the nearest Duke power crew? (and I was on the top of that truck.)
[PS: That was not our fault. The grade crew cut down too much of the hill and made the line sag. We'd driven under it several times prior. And the pole was already cracked. It was only a 3-phase line to a house so it really wasn't anything to see -- nice loud pop 'tho.]
At [censored] (an ISP), My bosses and I interviewed several people for a network engineering position. Roger (boss #2) and I took each one of them, following the b.s. personal questioning (who are you and what do what), over to a set of routers to see if what they had on paper meant anything. There had already been one useless "well papered" person on the staff. None of them were prepared for such a test. We sat them infront of some of the oldest Cisco routers outside Cisco (ok, the oldest :-) -- the old white cisco 2500's (igs's or accesspro's)) and gave them a simple network diagram to go build. And we stood there and watched -- and joked behind them (which is how they'd be working anyway.) Only one of the six interviewees was calm and knew what he was doing.
In my mind, that's a perfectly valid test. As a network toady at an ISP, you will rarely have any advanced warning of things breaking. And you'll have zero time to come up with a solution -- certainly no time to be searching google or grep'ing manuals. In fact, you might not even be able to reach google. I've knocked myself out of the network a few times -- only once was I not expecting it (never attempt to reload the access-list attached to the interface your traffic is traversing.)
Is it a text file or binary ''data''? There's no need to write anything; just download sed or the like and be done with it.
Odd, I've never seen a robot drop, mis-feed, or jam a tape. And they cost far less, and work far more hours than a high-school kid.
UPC codes take some work to scan. A smudge or bend makes it hard to read. And for self-checkout, it's much easier for people to put something through a hoop than it is to get them to find and align the UPC code for scanning. Don't laugh... I've seen people too dumb to scan their own items. (Personally, I'm too fast for the self-scanner. Gimme the real register.)
RFID tags aren't, IMO, "IT". That was a engineering gig maybe spawned from an IT problem (how to better manage inventory and warehouses.) How are these people defining "IT"? Anything that deals with computers and/or technology?
... where "limited cases" are all public, unlicensed bands, and any licensed spectrum where the license doesn't (specifically) allow it. This covers HAMs, the aforementioned cordless, and most cell networks. (however, I'd have to go fish through the FCC records to see what they are currently allowing -- GSM's "encryption" included.)
Heh, well, if you use the "published" numbers, there aren't that many US taps per year. I've venture a guess there are a lot more that aren't on the books.
- works in any GSM 1900 network that provides data call facilities
Man, they're getting awfully close to that hair... by making a data call and doing the voice digitization (and crypto) at the handset, they just might get past US (FCC) regulations. This is, thus, the same thing as an encrypting ISDN phone set (which do exist.)This might not go over very well in the US. Data mode on cell phones is usually a charge-by-the-byte extra service.
According to CALEA requirements, if the telco knows the encryption codes, they must hand them over when presented with a tap order -- or deliver decrypted data.
And in the US, encrypted radio transmissions are illegal -- that's why current cell phones don't have any encryption at all; they rely on spread spectrum tricks to make it hard to listen in (and it isn't that hard.) As the FCC licenses the spectrum used by cell phone carriers, there may be some steap barriers to deployment in the US.
- telephone companies built the infrastructure for broadband
The telco's did not build the infrastructure "for broadband". They built a system for phones and the technology evolved to ever more inventively use that system, from 300 baud, quad-tone modems to xDSL (which are basically captive radios.) The telcos resisted broadband deployment with every ounce of their lives -- that is, until they realized how much $$$ it would bring in at which point they've done everything they can to keep everybody else out of the market.(Plus, our tax dollars paid for the cabling that is the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN.))
Cable companies reluctantly upgraded their networks to support broadband only to compete with DSL. I'll tell the Time Warner story again... TW tested cables modem technology in Raleigh, NC circa 1996. The equipment was installed in the "telco room" at Interpath (then at the Capital Broadcasting Corp. office @ 711 Hillsborough St.) I saw the equipment; I touched the equipment. It was demo'd at some conference a few weeks later to everyone's amazement. Yet, Raleigh was the LAST city to have cablemodem service deployed -- years later. And the only reason was the lack of competitive pressure.
And TW only upgraded the network in Cary after the city counsel threatened to revoke their cable TV contract and run their own city-wide fiber network.
"Build it. And they will come."
But truthfully, even when I had 100M access to the world -- working at an ISP, I rarely consumed much of it. I created measurable spikes in traffic graphs, but only of a few percent (of OC-3's) for short periods (rarely over an hour.)