Well, yes. But that doesn't mean we should entirely remove companies form the market for demonstrating what a phenomenally bad idea software patents are. They deserve to have their cases squashed and their softare patent portfolio invalidated - but do the consumers really profit if Apple's technological effects on the market get taken away because of industry-wide dubious business decisions coupled with trigger-happiness on Apple's part? Do we stand to profit more from a quickly ended patent war or from Apple continuing to release iOS? Whether you like Apple or not, they constantly bring up new concepts (whether they came up with them or not).
Also remember, Apple used their softwate patents "defensively". They used them inappropriately (by retaliating against valid patent claims from Nokia with software patents) but this is exactly what all the companies sitting on software patent stockpiles do: They claim to only have their patents around for MAD purposes. Now we see how this plays out. If anything, it's a valuable chance to observe large-scale patant warfare and its effects.
I hope that this patent war will quickly spread out as far as possible and entangle as many actors as possible. Software patents are going to be much more vulnerable when several corporations are losing megabucks through them. And in the long term maybe we get a scenario where all players involved in this war continue to force each other to constantly improve while software patents are completely demolished. I think that would be the best outcome for the consumer.
Wait a second. You're telling me that the mobile OS market is characterized by a particularly low barrier to entry but at the same time is one where the first company to market (in this case Nokia, through the Symbian platform) has an overwhelming cost advantage over everyone else. I find it hard to reconcile these two standpoints.
I also don't think that the competition is inconsequential from an OS improvement standpoint; for instance, Microsoft responded to the success of iPhone OS by designing Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7, which move away from the old pseudo-desktop user interface to one more suitable for mobile devices. Would they have done so if Apple hadn't shown that smartphone-specific interfaces work really well? I doubt it.
Also, even though Apple does compete on marketing, what's to stop anyone from doing the same with any other platform? In fact, is there anyone who competes differently? You either sell to the consumer market (which means your marketing is all about how cool your product is) or you market to companies and professionals (a smaller, more specific market).
Why? So Google has less incentive to innovate? Competition is good. A healthy market is one where multiple systems compete against each other, constantly being forced to improve in order to gain an edge. A market where Google stands alone is neither competitive nor healthy. Of course there's still Microsoft (well, not if they continue down the path they are on), Nokia (small presence in the USA) and RIM (not very attractive for non-business customers) but as far as brand recognition goes it's currently iOS vs. Android.
On the other hand, Google tends to use amazingly slow servers for some functions. When I decided to edit my hosts file to have www.google-analytics.com point to 0.0.0.0 it shaved a good ten to fifteen seconds off my page loading times because GA had such ridiculously long loading times.
Maybe they've since brought their infrastructure in order and maybe they always hosted their libraries in a more reasonable manner than GA but I'd still be wary of Google-hosted libraries - if the user doesn't have them cached I'd expect them to increase the loading time to epic proportions, making for a horrible first impression.
Well, that explains a lot of things. Thanks for letting me know (although I should have become suspicious when I noticed that 3.7 and 4.0 are "both" slated for release in 2010).
I think the author never noticed that *nix and Windows NT happened and doesn't differentiate between "the system folder" and "the application data folder". In my case, "deeply in the system folder" will mean "deeply in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox".
Aren't netbooks a particularly thin-margin sector? It makes more sense for Apple to expand their wildly popular i(Phone)OS device range with a UMPC than to enter a hotly-contested market where a low price is paramount. Apple do "decent price/performance ratio" but they don't do "cheap".
But locking down the iPad makes sense. The iPad is explicitly designed and marketed as an iOS device that does what the iPhone does, only with a bigger screen. Dekstop computers, however, do completely differnet things. Development, for instance. Apple is not going to let people compile and run random software on iOS or a similarly locked-down OS because doing so completely circumvents the lockdown. So Apple has the choice between either continuing to ship OS X as a general-purpose operating system, completely reworking their development toolchain so that it works on Windows and/or Linux or selling console-style developer kits.
But this oil spill is not some kind of unprecedented event that we don't know how to deal with. This all happened some 30 years ago in virtually identical fashion. There even was the same company involved (the involved company was Sedco, which later merged with Transocean).
Of course everyone acts like it never happened before.
Apparently Mac users get out-of-process Flash not before Firefox 4.0. So I just hope 3.7 in its extension-breaking glory will be released soon so I can tell YouTube to use WebM and avoid Adobe's horrible not-designed-for-video-playback video playback technology as much as possible.
Of course. Because we'd tear down all of our own power plants and leave the Sahara plants - I'm sorry, plant, because we'd never distribute these in any way - completely unprotected. We'd also magically reduce our energy consumption so all of Europe runs off a single 45 PWh installation - so in 2020 Europa as a whole will use 40 PWh instead of the 300 PWh it uses today. While we're at it we'll hand out nuclear weapons to the numerous unstable regimes in North Africa because hey, we don't need all that nuclear fuel anymore.
Or hey, how about we keep our power plants despite the Sahara project filling a whole 15% of our energy needs. And we'll probably want to ensure that nobody messes with our various distributed solar power plants in the region.
I have one use for SMS: Short-term meeting place negotiation. Phone calls may or may not be appropriate depending on where the recipient is and what he's doing and email requires the recipient to have either a mail-enabled phone or be online at the moment, both of which can be unikely to known false (depending on the person in question).
Yes, you can coordinate in advance but if for some reason you couldn't or didn't SMS becomes quite useful.
One [...] well placed nuke and all their expensive energy modifications go dark.
That argument could be used against any investment anywhere. Even satellites - you just need to nuke the rocket shortly before launch and boom, your expensive satellite is gone. Nuclear warfare has been fairly uncommon since the fourties, even in a North Africa which appears to consist of Iran, Somalia and the Congo if some of the other posters are to be believed.
At 3200 mega-are hours (or 32 million square kilometer hours) that battery could supply one fifth of the total land area of the Earth with 3 volts for one hour, though. That's pretty powerful.
That is an entirely stupid analogy, since people have obvious reasons to expect privacy when behind their own walls.
I am behind my own walls. I plug in the little box my telephone company sent me and my computer can connect to the Internet Explorer. I'm not broadcasting anything; I'm not a radio station. I'm just using the wireless. Why shouldn't I expect privacy? After all, I'm in my own home.
Remember that most people don't hold a degree in computer science and aren't likely to be informed about the technical details of wireless networking and related security standards. It's also not reasonable to expect everyone to learn all that. Random people being able to listen in on their WLAN traffic is unintuitive to most people unlike with a radio where it's obvious that they're broadcasting.
Unless you expect everyone to be an expert on everything you can't expect everyone to be an expert on wireless data transmission security measures. So you can either argue that nobody should have privacy, that only the knowledgeable should have privacy (actually the same as the first one as everyone has to ensure their privacy themselves) or that everyone should have privacy even if they don't have the technical skills to ensure it themselves.
In other terms: If you want to use computers, why on Earth would you not have a degree in computer science?
Remember that most people use technology without really knowing how it works because it would be un unrealistic burden to expect them to know. Let's take home security: Few people have effective home security; someone knowledgeable can relatively easily enter even without having to cause any damage. But trespass is illegal even if you don't break or steal anything. Why? The home owner should have known about the state of the art in home security and invested accordingly.
It's unreasonable to expect everyone to be an expert on everything. Thus we have laws that punish certain behaviors even if those behaviors could be prevented by experts. In certain jurisdictions it was decided that privacy extends to data sent over unencrypted wireless LANs because it was unreasonable to expect every citizen to be knowledgeable about wireless networking security procedures. I find this reasonable as otherwise we could argue against a lot of laws that protect people who aren't knowledgeable about a certain topic.
A case can be made for intercepting the data but what about storing it? Google collected and kept the data. They'd be in a lot less hot water if they had made efforts to get rid of the payload data as quickly as possible.
And no, they can't argue that they didn't know it's illegal to store this kind of data in certain countries. They have plenty of lawyers they should have consulted and listened to prior to starting a large-scale data collection campaign in another country.
You mean you're recording a movie, and a naked person walks past the spot you're recording, and you accidentally record it, and then you store it for several months, and the German government finds out and wants to know what you recorded because it might infringe on privacy laws, and only after probing do you admit that you filmed the naked person, so you apologize and offer to delete what you've recorded, and then five governments intervene?
Because that's how it happened. With a lot of naked persons.
Of course many people here argue that negligience means you go scot-free because hey, you didn't mean it. And if anyone else involved hasn't acted in a way appropriate for a safety professional you also go scot-free because hey, they had it coming. At least they argue that if you're Google.
Except that the capturing software they used was an off-the-shelf (or rather off-the-repository) program that can be configured to either log the payload data or not. The configuration of the software was definitely a central thing done by someone technical and the decision on what to do with the collected data afterwards also was.
Even if the payload data were in some way neccessary (perhaps because extracting SSIDs in realtime is beyond the abilities of affordable systems) Google could have tossed it as soon as the SSIDs were extracted. They didn't, which was a matter of policy.
The only communication difficulties were between the lawyers and whoever was in charge: The lawyers were either not consulted on possible legal issues or not listened to. And that's negligience.
Their motivations may be considered but for determining whether or not they are liable for breaking the law it's not. If you run a red light and are caught it doesn't matter what your motivation was unless a real emergency neccessitated the act - you're guilty of running a red light. Google collected data the law prohibits them from collecting, thus they are liable. What they intended to do with the data may influence the verdict but it doesn't change the fact that they broke the law.
So, no, it's not EXACTLY what happened. The 'gather data' phase lasted a long time, didn't it? Did no one see that the payloads were there? Is Google's QA so asleep-at-the-wheel that it wasn't discovered for such a long time? Because it came out in a blog, rather than in a release, Google blew the entire matter from a PR perspective, too.
Exactly. Either Google can argue that it took them months to figure out the privacy laws of the countries they were operating in and they weren't smart enough to check in advance (making one wary of using their services, which might contain similar mistakes) or they argue that they are so technically inept that they didn't realize they had way more data on their hands than neccessary to represent SSIDs and signal strengths (which again makes one wary because that raises the question of how broken their products might be). Or they could argue that they don't give a shit about local law until it becomes a PR problem at which point they have admitted that "do no evil" is a thing of the past.
This is Google. These people have excellent computer scientists and excellent lawyers. At some point someone decided not to listen to one of those groups and now it's biting them in the ass.
Yet they only intended to collect ESSIDs. Essentially they used off-the-tarball software and didn't flip the "record everything" switch off after they were done testing their equipment, then publicly disclosed the situation when it was discovered.
They could have acted worse but they should have made sure their equipment does what they want it to do in the first place. Google was being negligient here and European law does see negligience in the treatment of other people's data as something bad.
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Well, yes. But that doesn't mean we should entirely remove companies form the market for demonstrating what a phenomenally bad idea software patents are. They deserve to have their cases squashed and their softare patent portfolio invalidated - but do the consumers really profit if Apple's technological effects on the market get taken away because of industry-wide dubious business decisions coupled with trigger-happiness on Apple's part? Do we stand to profit more from a quickly ended patent war or from Apple continuing to release iOS? Whether you like Apple or not, they constantly bring up new concepts (whether they came up with them or not).
Also remember, Apple used their softwate patents "defensively". They used them inappropriately (by retaliating against valid patent claims from Nokia with software patents) but this is exactly what all the companies sitting on software patent stockpiles do: They claim to only have their patents around for MAD purposes. Now we see how this plays out. If anything, it's a valuable chance to observe large-scale patant warfare and its effects.
I hope that this patent war will quickly spread out as far as possible and entangle as many actors as possible. Software patents are going to be much more vulnerable when several corporations are losing megabucks through them. And in the long term maybe we get a scenario where all players involved in this war continue to force each other to constantly improve while software patents are completely demolished. I think that would be the best outcome for the consumer.
Wait a second. You're telling me that the mobile OS market is characterized by a particularly low barrier to entry but at the same time is one where the first company to market (in this case Nokia, through the Symbian platform) has an overwhelming cost advantage over everyone else. I find it hard to reconcile these two standpoints.
I also don't think that the competition is inconsequential from an OS improvement standpoint; for instance, Microsoft responded to the success of iPhone OS by designing Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7, which move away from the old pseudo-desktop user interface to one more suitable for mobile devices. Would they have done so if Apple hadn't shown that smartphone-specific interfaces work really well? I doubt it.
Also, even though Apple does compete on marketing, what's to stop anyone from doing the same with any other platform? In fact, is there anyone who competes differently? You either sell to the consumer market (which means your marketing is all about how cool your product is) or you market to companies and professionals (a smaller, more specific market).
To quote Penny Arcade, "the braying and neighing of barnyard animals"?
Why? So Google has less incentive to innovate? Competition is good. A healthy market is one where multiple systems compete against each other, constantly being forced to improve in order to gain an edge. A market where Google stands alone is neither competitive nor healthy. Of course there's still Microsoft (well, not if they continue down the path they are on), Nokia (small presence in the USA) and RIM (not very attractive for non-business customers) but as far as brand recognition goes it's currently iOS vs. Android.
On the other hand, Google tends to use amazingly slow servers for some functions. When I decided to edit my hosts file to have www.google-analytics.com point to 0.0.0.0 it shaved a good ten to fifteen seconds off my page loading times because GA had such ridiculously long loading times.
Maybe they've since brought their infrastructure in order and maybe they always hosted their libraries in a more reasonable manner than GA but I'd still be wary of Google-hosted libraries - if the user doesn't have them cached I'd expect them to increase the loading time to epic proportions, making for a horrible first impression.
Well, that explains a lot of things. Thanks for letting me know (although I should have become suspicious when I noticed that 3.7 and 4.0 are "both" slated for release in 2010).
I think the author never noticed that *nix and Windows NT happened and doesn't differentiate between "the system folder" and "the application data folder". In my case, "deeply in the system folder" will mean "deeply in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox".
Aren't netbooks a particularly thin-margin sector? It makes more sense for Apple to expand their wildly popular i(Phone)OS device range with a UMPC than to enter a hotly-contested market where a low price is paramount. Apple do "decent price/performance ratio" but they don't do "cheap".
But locking down the iPad makes sense. The iPad is explicitly designed and marketed as an iOS device that does what the iPhone does, only with a bigger screen. Dekstop computers, however, do completely differnet things. Development, for instance. Apple is not going to let people compile and run random software on iOS or a similarly locked-down OS because doing so completely circumvents the lockdown. So Apple has the choice between either continuing to ship OS X as a general-purpose operating system, completely reworking their development toolchain so that it works on Windows and/or Linux or selling console-style developer kits.
I find the latter options unrealistic.
But this oil spill is not some kind of unprecedented event that we don't know how to deal with. This all happened some 30 years ago in virtually identical fashion. There even was the same company involved (the involved company was Sedco, which later merged with Transocean).
Of course everyone acts like it never happened before.
Apparently Mac users get out-of-process Flash not before Firefox 4.0. So I just hope 3.7 in its extension-breaking glory will be released soon so I can tell YouTube to use WebM and avoid Adobe's horrible not-designed-for-video-playback video playback technology as much as possible.
Of course. Because we'd tear down all of our own power plants and leave the Sahara plants - I'm sorry, plant, because we'd never distribute these in any way - completely unprotected. We'd also magically reduce our energy consumption so all of Europe runs off a single 45 PWh installation - so in 2020 Europa as a whole will use 40 PWh instead of the 300 PWh it uses today. While we're at it we'll hand out nuclear weapons to the numerous unstable regimes in North Africa because hey, we don't need all that nuclear fuel anymore.
Or hey, how about we keep our power plants despite the Sahara project filling a whole 15% of our energy needs. And we'll probably want to ensure that nobody messes with our various distributed solar power plants in the region.
I'm 25 and I share the GP's assessment. Most mobile phones have a horrible UI.
I have one use for SMS: Short-term meeting place negotiation. Phone calls may or may not be appropriate depending on where the recipient is and what he's doing and email requires the recipient to have either a mail-enabled phone or be online at the moment, both of which can be unikely to known false (depending on the person in question).
Yes, you can coordinate in advance but if for some reason you couldn't or didn't SMS becomes quite useful.
One [...] well placed nuke and all their expensive energy modifications go dark.
That argument could be used against any investment anywhere. Even satellites - you just need to nuke the rocket shortly before launch and boom, your expensive satellite is gone. Nuclear warfare has been fairly uncommon since the fourties, even in a North Africa which appears to consist of Iran, Somalia and the Congo if some of the other posters are to be believed.
At 3200 mega-are hours (or 32 million square kilometer hours) that battery could supply one fifth of the total land area of the Earth with 3 volts for one hour, though. That's pretty powerful.
That is an entirely stupid analogy, since people have obvious reasons to expect privacy when behind their own walls.
I am behind my own walls. I plug in the little box my telephone company sent me and my computer can connect to the Internet Explorer. I'm not broadcasting anything; I'm not a radio station. I'm just using the wireless. Why shouldn't I expect privacy? After all, I'm in my own home.
Remember that most people don't hold a degree in computer science and aren't likely to be informed about the technical details of wireless networking and related security standards. It's also not reasonable to expect everyone to learn all that. Random people being able to listen in on their WLAN traffic is unintuitive to most people unlike with a radio where it's obvious that they're broadcasting.
Unless you expect everyone to be an expert on everything you can't expect everyone to be an expert on wireless data transmission security measures. So you can either argue that nobody should have privacy, that only the knowledgeable should have privacy (actually the same as the first one as everyone has to ensure their privacy themselves) or that everyone should have privacy even if they don't have the technical skills to ensure it themselves.
In other terms: If you want to use computers, why on Earth would you not have a degree in computer science?
Remember that most people use technology without really knowing how it works because it would be un unrealistic burden to expect them to know. Let's take home security: Few people have effective home security; someone knowledgeable can relatively easily enter even without having to cause any damage. But trespass is illegal even if you don't break or steal anything. Why? The home owner should have known about the state of the art in home security and invested accordingly.
It's unreasonable to expect everyone to be an expert on everything. Thus we have laws that punish certain behaviors even if those behaviors could be prevented by experts. In certain jurisdictions it was decided that privacy extends to data sent over unencrypted wireless LANs because it was unreasonable to expect every citizen to be knowledgeable about wireless networking security procedures. I find this reasonable as otherwise we could argue against a lot of laws that protect people who aren't knowledgeable about a certain topic.
A case can be made for intercepting the data but what about storing it? Google collected and kept the data. They'd be in a lot less hot water if they had made efforts to get rid of the payload data as quickly as possible.
And no, they can't argue that they didn't know it's illegal to store this kind of data in certain countries. They have plenty of lawyers they should have consulted and listened to prior to starting a large-scale data collection campaign in another country.
You mean you're recording a movie, and a naked person walks past the spot you're recording, and you accidentally record it, and then you store it for several months, and the German government finds out and wants to know what you recorded because it might infringe on privacy laws, and only after probing do you admit that you filmed the naked person, so you apologize and offer to delete what you've recorded, and then five governments intervene?
Because that's how it happened. With a lot of naked persons.
Of course many people here argue that negligience means you go scot-free because hey, you didn't mean it. And if anyone else involved hasn't acted in a way appropriate for a safety professional you also go scot-free because hey, they had it coming. At least they argue that if you're Google.
Except that the capturing software they used was an off-the-shelf (or rather off-the-repository) program that can be configured to either log the payload data or not. The configuration of the software was definitely a central thing done by someone technical and the decision on what to do with the collected data afterwards also was.
Even if the payload data were in some way neccessary (perhaps because extracting SSIDs in realtime is beyond the abilities of affordable systems) Google could have tossed it as soon as the SSIDs were extracted. They didn't, which was a matter of policy.
The only communication difficulties were between the lawyers and whoever was in charge: The lawyers were either not consulted on possible legal issues or not listened to. And that's negligience.
Their motivations may be considered but for determining whether or not they are liable for breaking the law it's not. If you run a red light and are caught it doesn't matter what your motivation was unless a real emergency neccessitated the act - you're guilty of running a red light. Google collected data the law prohibits them from collecting, thus they are liable. What they intended to do with the data may influence the verdict but it doesn't change the fact that they broke the law.
So, no, it's not EXACTLY what happened. The 'gather data' phase lasted a long time, didn't it? Did no one see that the payloads were there? Is Google's QA so asleep-at-the-wheel that it wasn't discovered for such a long time? Because it came out in a blog, rather than in a release, Google blew the entire matter from a PR perspective, too.
Exactly. Either Google can argue that it took them months to figure out the privacy laws of the countries they were operating in and they weren't smart enough to check in advance (making one wary of using their services, which might contain similar mistakes) or they argue that they are so technically inept that they didn't realize they had way more data on their hands than neccessary to represent SSIDs and signal strengths (which again makes one wary because that raises the question of how broken their products might be). Or they could argue that they don't give a shit about local law until it becomes a PR problem at which point they have admitted that "do no evil" is a thing of the past.
This is Google. These people have excellent computer scientists and excellent lawyers. At some point someone decided not to listen to one of those groups and now it's biting them in the ass.
Yet they only intended to collect ESSIDs. Essentially they used off-the-tarball software and didn't flip the "record everything" switch off after they were done testing their equipment, then publicly disclosed the situation when it was discovered.
They could have acted worse but they should have made sure their equipment does what they want it to do in the first place. Google was being negligient here and European law does see negligience in the treatment of other people's data as something bad.