It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.
And, while I don't have a link at hand, I recall a case a couple years ago where the government was pursuing charges that a large corp's email retention practices were a deliberate form of destruction of evidence - despite all of the lawyerly sign-offs and standardised corporate practices verbiage. I wish I did have a link because I'd like to know how that case turned out.
You could literally confiscate every dime the wealthy earned last year, and still be nowhere near closing our yearly deficits.
You could easily repeat a stupid and easily debunked lie over and over, and find millions of suckers who believe it.
I first heard Anne Coulter say it a couple of days ago and it struck me as one of those technically true, but utterly irrelevant, slogans politicians pay PR firms to come up with.
The only way I can see it being true is if it is taken literally - confiscate everything the "wealthy" earned, but all of the other taxes we currently collect from the middle class -- those don't count.
Yeah, I considered including the "and take advantage of the circumstances" part. I actually wrote and then erased "and the balls to exploit the situation" because I felt it would only muddy my point which was that no matter how big your balls, you can't get anywhere without the luck part too. After all, the world is jammed packed full of people with giant balls who are still failures.
I used to think like you do. I believed that it is every man for themselves and that money in the bank was the only way to assure my freedom.
But now that I have a ton of money in the bank and am effectively retired and can do as I please, I am not so sure. I am the richest person I know. Everybody else I know still puts in the 9-to-5 (or often 8 to 7 and sometimes weekends) grind.
I don't think it is feasible to expect everyone, or even a simple majority, to achieve what I have achieved. Maybe its because, looking back, I can see that ~90% of my success is due to nothing more than being in the right place and the right time while only 10% is due to my own fortitude. Few people will ever be lucky enough to find themselves in similarly favourable circumstances.
So while I am still strongly in favour of some the things you wrote, like a competitive market for healthcare. I am not so sure that a go it alone approach is ever going to be successful given the array of forces organised against the modern peon.
The Tamil Tigers killed the Indian Prime Minister, Sri Lankan President, sunk the SLNS Sagarawardena and blew up the Sri Lankan central bank killing 90+ and injuring 1400+, all with suicide bombers, some of them women.
In 2010 Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his private plane in to the IRS offices in Austin.
If Israel wants to survive.... I hope they are going to realize that this is not the way to get there. They have stopped 200 activists this one time.
If anything, this was a step backwards. These people weren't violent. They were protesters. Israelis like to claim that they are the only democracy in the middle east but democracy requires freedom of speech in order to function.
These people were a threat to the status quo, not to peace.
and the fact is, a lot of people in these countries see us in the same light as the horrible dictators that have abused them for so long...
According to a survey from about a year ago, something like 90% of afghanis in the most war-torn provinces don't know about 9-11 and 40% think the reason the US is in their country is to destroy islam.
Its ridiculous just how badly we've failed to make our case to the people over there.
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item? An adult who earnestly still believes in Santa is pretty much in the same boat.
"The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive." -- Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
We can't accurate project what future government revenues or budgets will look like.
However, if it gets to the point where the US government can't honor that debt it means the entire country is really, really screwed anyway. So much so that SS solvency will be one of more minor problems of the day.
There are literally millions of people who work for the police in the UK so to quote a figure of 800 incidents over three years suddenly seems pretty insignificant.... like the first investigation into phone tapping scandal which found little only 'isolated cases' and only 2 people involved when clearly it turns out over 4000 cases and potentially,
Why don't you think the 800 cases aren't just the tip of the iceberg in the same way the phone tapping investigation turned out to be? After all cops have a hell of a lot more solidarity among themselves than reporters do and thus much less incentive to rat out another cop.
Anyone caught looking things up for personal reasons are sacked and sometimes prosecuted.
The problem is in the catching. It is completely impractical to check all of those audit logs unless something else happens to bring a person under investigation. As long as they keep their nose clean and stay away from looking up any "high profile" information like celebrities or major public crimes no one will even look at their audit trail much less put in all of the effort to determine if each search was legitimate. Misuse of the database is essentially unpoliceable.
Are you saying that GA is tracking users between sites and that data is being used to inform the advertising?
Of course it is. To think otherwise is naive at best. Google's sole business model is to provide services in exchange for targeted advertising. They aren't going to give away the GA service for free any more than they give anything else away for free.
What Microsoft is saying is that it isn't hard, and that they can do it. They are basically mocking the guys who said it was indestructible, and, to put it kindly, saying that "they suck". This is Microsoft throwing down the gauntlet and saying, "we are better than you." Who knows, maybe they are.
The proof's in the pudding. Until they actually do take it down, its all just trash talk.
It doesn't help that its a lawyer doing the trash talking either, it seems all too common for people with law-centric world views to be completely out of sync with a world that operates on the principles of physics.
(and no-one has ever effectively explained to me how this information could be used against me anyway (or especially "why" it would be)
You are making the classic mistake of assuming that just because you can't currently think of a way your personal information can be used maliciously that it will never be used that way. The problem with thinking that way is that it is open ended, people are constantly looking for new ways to exploit information on the net. Once you've put your information out there, you can never get your privacy back no matter how strongly you may change your mind.
Here's just one example of how the information you just provided might be used to do you harm:
XBox SWATing - You can be sure that no one in that household ever even considered they might be "doxed" and then attacked that way.
Read their privacy statement, because you sound like an idiot, they dont keep ip addresses for years on end.
They might as well.
Google "scrubs" the last octet of the IP address after 9 months and erases cookie tracking information after 18 months. So 172.16.20.5 becomes 172.16.20.XXX, but it is trivial to cross-reference the "scrubbed" ip address with other info like cookies and frequently used websites to uniquely identify a user in google's records indefinitely.
You alos dont have a profile just from having a Youtube account.
This appears to be true but google has done an absolutely piss-poor job of communicating that. They have such a gigantic set of ever changing "products" that you can't blame a casual user for having no freaking clue what a "google profile" and given the name, it sure sounds like it could be just another name for a centralised google account, like what they forced all youtube users to convert to a couple of months ago.
It's as bad as people saying they don't want to use Facebook because, gasp, "they" will learn about you. I worked as a marketing database analyst - they have known about you for years. For pennies I could buy demographic data (per household)
As a marketing database analyst you ought to understand that Facebook's gargantuan valuation is due entirely to their ability to "learn about you." It is the company's sole source of income. If facebook's data collection really was no more egregious than current practices there is absolutely no way wall-street would be drowning in their own drool over the company.
No, its a non-sense statement-- information has no power of cognition, and thus cannot want anything
If you can't grasp the fundamental truth of that statement you'll never be able to have a meaningful discussion of its implications. I suspect that your dogged focus on secrecy for secrecy's sake rather than the validity of the secrecy in the first place is rooted in the same lack of sophistication.
But bouncing light off the Mona Lisa doesn't require digital signal processing it just occurs.
What do you think your brain does with data that comes in via the optic nerves? Just because it's done with synapses doesn't make it any less signal processing.
And honestly, I would not call the "need for information to be free" a deeper ethical rule.
Your phraseology betrays your bias. There is no "need for information to be free" - that "information wants to be free" is an observation of fact not an imperative.
Furthermore the debate has no more to do with the fact that information "wants" to be free than the fact that round wheels "want" to roll has to do with the debate on speeding.
So the question becomes, if the law of the land has absolutely no say in your mind as to how one should behave, where DO you derive your standards from?
Your question suggests you think the law of the land does significantly define morality. The reverse is the only sane belief, that the law of the land should be defined by morality.
Yes, a chilling effect on company shills from using public resources to help their business and hurt their competitors. In the end, no big loss.
Uh, no. The term "chilling effect" refers to self-censorship of speech beyond the parameters of the original case for fear that those parameters will be extended to cover additional speech.
For example, the chilling effect in this case could apply to competitors (who are frequently domain experts) who simply correct information rather than delete it. One man's correction can be be another man's censorship and if that second man is particularly litigious then the truth doesn't really matter because simply defending oneself in court is frequently too much of a burden on its own.
Personally, I think the correct action in this case would have been to revert the edit and be done with it.
In mexico we require ID and put some ink on the persons thumb. it's kinda hard to remove. no impossible by any means, but I'm sure someone could come up with something harder to remove, that would last for a few days.
Skip the ID part and you've still covered 99% of whatever problem actually exists. One man, one vote after all.
I'm confused, if Chrome doesn't do ad-blocking then what's this? Are you saying that AdBlock for chrome is different in some significant way? If yes, please provide a citation.
Check out Ghostery for Chrome. It doesn't work reliably - reload a web page multiple times and it will block only a random subset of all the web-bugs on that page. The developers attribute it to a deficiency in Chrome's API and, last I checked, there was no expected fix from Google.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.
It's been an open secret for well over a decade now that email retention policies are purely legal dodges. There is no other reason to automatically delete such massive stores of institutional memory except for the possible legal threat they may pose. It isn't like email storage requirements are a practical limitation - any company with terabytes of email is going to have an IT budget so large that those costs will be lost in the noise.
And, while I don't have a link at hand, I recall a case a couple years ago where the government was pursuing charges that a large corp's email retention practices were a deliberate form of destruction of evidence - despite all of the lawyerly sign-offs and standardised corporate practices verbiage. I wish I did have a link because I'd like to know how that case turned out.
You could literally confiscate every dime the wealthy earned last year, and still be nowhere near closing our yearly deficits.
You could easily repeat a stupid and easily debunked lie over and over, and find millions of suckers who believe it.
I first heard Anne Coulter say it a couple of days ago and it struck me as one of those technically true, but utterly irrelevant, slogans politicians pay PR firms to come up with.
The only way I can see it being true is if it is taken literally - confiscate everything the "wealthy" earned, but all of the other taxes we currently collect from the middle class -- those don't count.
Yeah, I considered including the "and take advantage of the circumstances" part. I actually wrote and then erased "and the balls to exploit the situation" because I felt it would only muddy my point which was that no matter how big your balls, you can't get anywhere without the luck part too. After all, the world is jammed packed full of people with giant balls who are still failures.
I used to think like you do. I believed that it is every man for themselves and that money in the bank was the only way to assure my freedom.
But now that I have a ton of money in the bank and am effectively retired and can do as I please, I am not so sure. I am the richest person I know. Everybody else I know still puts in the 9-to-5 (or often 8 to 7 and sometimes weekends) grind.
I don't think it is feasible to expect everyone, or even a simple majority, to achieve what I have achieved. Maybe its because, looking back, I can see that ~90% of my success is due to nothing more than being in the right place and the right time while only 10% is due to my own fortitude. Few people will ever be lucky enough to find themselves in similarly favourable circumstances.
So while I am still strongly in favour of some the things you wrote, like a competitive market for healthcare. I am not so sure that a go it alone approach is ever going to be successful given the array of forces organised against the modern peon.
Show me the non islamic suicide bomber.
The Tamil Tigers killed the Indian Prime Minister, Sri Lankan President, sunk the SLNS Sagarawardena and blew up the Sri Lankan central bank killing 90+ and injuring 1400+, all with suicide bombers, some of them women.
In 2010 Andrew Joseph Stack III flew his private plane in to the IRS offices in Austin.
If Israel wants to survive.... I hope they are going to realize that this is not the way to get there. They have stopped 200 activists this one time.
If anything, this was a step backwards. These people weren't violent. They were protesters. Israelis like to claim that they are the only democracy in the middle east but democracy requires freedom of speech in order to function.
These people were a threat to the status quo, not to peace.
and the fact is, a lot of people in these countries see us in the same light as the horrible dictators that have abused them for so long...
According to a survey from about a year ago, something like 90% of afghanis in the most war-torn provinces don't know about 9-11 and 40% think the reason the US is in their country is to destroy islam.
Its ridiculous just how badly we've failed to make our case to the people over there.
But when you really get down to it - is faith any different than believing in any other supernatural item? An adult who earnestly still believes in Santa is pretty much in the same boat.
"The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive."
-- Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
We can't accurate project what future government revenues or budgets will look like.
However, if it gets to the point where the US government can't honor that debt it means the entire country is really, really screwed anyway. So much so that SS solvency will be one of more minor problems of the day.
Even if it is, so what? It's not the end of the world.
Precisely. The world will still be here no matter how drastically the climate changes.
The only question is how badly are we gonna fuck ourselves in the process.
There are literally millions of people who work for the police in the UK so to quote a figure of 800 incidents over three years suddenly seems pretty insignificant. ...
like the first investigation into phone tapping scandal which found little only 'isolated cases' and only 2 people involved when clearly it turns out over 4000 cases and potentially,
Why don't you think the 800 cases aren't just the tip of the iceberg in the same way the phone tapping investigation turned out to be? After all cops have a hell of a lot more solidarity among themselves than reporters do and thus much less incentive to rat out another cop.
Anyone caught looking things up for personal reasons are sacked and sometimes prosecuted.
The problem is in the catching. It is completely impractical to check all of those audit logs unless something else happens to bring a person under investigation. As long as they keep their nose clean and stay away from looking up any "high profile" information like celebrities or major public crimes no one will even look at their audit trail much less put in all of the effort to determine if each search was legitimate. Misuse of the database is essentially unpoliceable.
Are you saying that GA is tracking users between sites and that data is being used to inform the advertising?
Of course it is. To think otherwise is naive at best. Google's sole business model is to provide services in exchange for targeted advertising. They aren't going to give away the GA service for free any more than they give anything else away for free.
What Microsoft is saying is that it isn't hard, and that they can do it. They are basically mocking the guys who said it was indestructible, and, to put it kindly, saying that "they suck". This is Microsoft throwing down the gauntlet and saying, "we are better than you." Who knows, maybe they are.
The proof's in the pudding. Until they actually do take it down, its all just trash talk.
It doesn't help that its a lawyer doing the trash talking either, it seems all too common for people with law-centric world views to be completely out of sync with a world that operates on the principles of physics.
Since when does 2 out of 5 count as 'most'? Other than Comcast and Cablevision, which ones are owned by or own media companies?
A cable television network is a media company. They may not create the media but they directly charge for and profit from its distribution.
(and no-one has ever effectively explained to me how this information could be used against me anyway (or especially "why" it would be)
You are making the classic mistake of assuming that just because you can't currently think of a way your personal information can be used maliciously that it will never be used that way. The problem with thinking that way is that it is open ended, people are constantly looking for new ways to exploit information on the net. Once you've put your information out there, you can never get your privacy back no matter how strongly you may change your mind.
Here's just one example of how the information you just provided might be used to do you harm:
XBox SWATing - You can be sure that no one in that household ever even considered they might be "doxed" and then attacked that way.
Read their privacy statement, because you sound like an idiot, they dont keep ip addresses for years on end.
They might as well.
Google "scrubs" the last octet of the IP address after 9 months and erases cookie tracking information after 18 months. So 172.16.20.5 becomes 172.16.20.XXX, but it is trivial to cross-reference the "scrubbed" ip address with other info like cookies and frequently used websites to uniquely identify a user in google's records indefinitely.
You alos dont have a profile just from having a Youtube account.
This appears to be true but google has done an absolutely piss-poor job of communicating that. They have such a gigantic set of ever changing "products" that you can't blame a casual user for having no freaking clue what a "google profile" and given the name, it sure sounds like it could be just another name for a centralised google account, like what they forced all youtube users to convert to a couple of months ago.
Copyright does not apply to information.
Of course it does. What you probably mean is that you can't copyright facts.
So I can't tell anyone that you drive a Toyota or tell them where you work without getting your permission first. Great idea.
Not on a wholesale level, no. And yes it is a great idea. It's called Informational Self-Determination.
It's as bad as people saying they don't want to use Facebook because, gasp, "they" will learn about you. I worked as a marketing database analyst - they have known about you for years. For pennies I could buy demographic data (per household)
As a marketing database analyst you ought to understand that Facebook's gargantuan valuation is due entirely to their ability to "learn about you." It is the company's sole source of income. If facebook's data collection really was no more egregious than current practices there is absolutely no way wall-street would be drowning in their own drool over the company.
No, its a non-sense statement-- information has no power of cognition, and thus cannot want anything
If you can't grasp the fundamental truth of that statement you'll never be able to have a meaningful discussion of its implications. I suspect that your dogged focus on secrecy for secrecy's sake rather than the validity of the secrecy in the first place is rooted in the same lack of sophistication.
But bouncing light off the Mona Lisa doesn't require digital signal processing it just occurs.
What do you think your brain does with data that comes in via the optic nerves? Just because it's done with synapses doesn't make it any less signal processing.
And honestly, I would not call the "need for information to be free" a deeper ethical rule.
Your phraseology betrays your bias. There is no "need for information to be free" - that "information wants to be free" is an observation of fact not an imperative.
Furthermore the debate has no more to do with the fact that information "wants" to be free than the fact that round wheels "want" to roll has to do with the debate on speeding.
So the question becomes, if the law of the land has absolutely no say in your mind as to how one should behave, where DO you derive your standards from?
Your question suggests you think the law of the land does significantly define morality. The reverse is the only sane belief, that the law of the land should be defined by morality.
but until then I dont see any reason to get giddy because someone broke laws and saw fit to play the data-vigilante.
This is just your vision of how things should be? Oh, ok then.
As if the imprimatur of law has an ounce of weight when it comes to morality.
Yes, a chilling effect on company shills from using public resources to help their business and hurt their competitors. In the end, no big loss.
Uh, no. The term "chilling effect" refers to self-censorship of speech beyond the parameters of the original case for fear that those parameters will be extended to cover additional speech.
For example, the chilling effect in this case could apply to competitors (who are frequently domain experts) who simply correct information rather than delete it. One man's correction can be be another man's censorship and if that second man is particularly litigious then the truth doesn't really matter because simply defending oneself in court is frequently too much of a burden on its own.
Personally, I think the correct action in this case would have been to revert the edit and be done with it.
In mexico we require ID and put some ink on the persons thumb. it's kinda hard to remove. no impossible by any means, but I'm sure someone could come up with something harder to remove, that would last for a few days.
Skip the ID part and you've still covered 99% of whatever problem actually exists. One man, one vote after all.
I'm confused, if Chrome doesn't do ad-blocking then what's this? Are you saying that AdBlock for chrome is different in some significant way? If yes, please provide a citation.
Check out Ghostery for Chrome. It doesn't work reliably - reload a web page multiple times and it will block only a random subset of all the web-bugs on that page. The developers attribute it to a deficiency in Chrome's API and, last I checked, there was no expected fix from Google.