The problem I have with your CEO's response is this:
if we have indeed mistakenly been sent a claim by YouTube's Content ID system and are inaccurately claiming a video...we'll release it.
He's treating it like a one-off. The claims so far are that the bird song was "reviewed" - if it was reviewed by a human then this should never have happened. Humans make mistakes, but confusing a bird song for a human performance is beyond the range of reasonable human error - suggesting a process where the human has been removed. Something we absolutely know happens with the big-time members of the MAFIAA in their over-zealous pursuit of pirates because they have admitted it in court in more than one case.
So the real problem here is the process and simply "releasing" one falsely claimed video is to miss the forest for the trees. The only satisfactory response is to explain what happened and then to take steps to make sure that it never happens again.
Well, there is at least one other country on the continent with "Africa" in the name. But just how many people who live outside of the USA call themselves "americans" -- not americanos, americans -- versus how many people outside of SA call themselves "africans?" No one using the term "american" is even referring to a continent in the first place. The problem here is nothing more than fauxrage.
(a) terrible because the name of France does not include the word "europe"
(b) a strawman because using short form of a country's name does not in any way shape or form mean that the residents "consider themselves exclusive resides of the continent"
That's why I said "substantial features and functionality". The vast majority of what a PS3 is is not the Other OS feature.
Except to the people who actually used it, to them it was pretty freaking substantial. It is entirely plausible to expect that the users of that (and other removed features like SACD playback) purchased their PS3's precisely because of those features and that such features constituted a significant portion of their usage of their PS3's.
You're buying a license to a particular feature set and level of functionality. I have no doubt that the people who actually paid money have a legal case if the update took away substantial features and functionality.
Sony already won that in court when some people sued over the removal of the ability to boot linux.
Lots of restraunts get their soda carbonation tanks refilled from the same places the guys who refill paintball tanks get their large tanks filled. Same thing with the guys who homebrew beer. From the reading I did, the only difference in grades of co2 has to do with the container - medical grade requires a certain kind of lining on all the tanks and hoses. Otherwise nada.
You can buy an adapter for your sodastream to use a regular paintball tank or even a larger 5 to 20 lb co2 tank. Check out co2doctor.com - I haven't ordered anything from them but have been thinking about getting a 10lb tank for my primo since I go through a paintball tank about once a week.
As for syrups, I've tried that Mio "water enhancer" stuff too but really my personal goal is to go straight water so I'm better off not finding something that tastes good.
Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?
FWIW I've been working on a serious diet-soda addiction. As in diet soda was my primary source of fluids every day of the week.
I bought a "Primo Flavorstation" from Loews - it lets you carbonate tap water. They want you to buy syrups as a make-your-own-soda thing. But I've found that simply carbonated water does it for me about 90% of the time (and all of the syrups I've tried taste like shit).
There is another brand out there - Sodastream. But sodastream sucks because they booby-trap their co2 tanks to force you to buy refils from them at ~$25 a tank (and their new units have half-size tanks too). The Primo takes standard paintball tanks, so you can refill the cansister for about $3 at almost any sports store (I use the sports authority that is just down the block from me). Primo also wants to sell you $25 refills, but they don't try to force you - only give you BS about "food grade" co2, which is no different from any other kind of non-medical co2.
I'm a very boring person with very little to hide and no inherent desire for privacy. I see no way in which I'm personally harmed by the data I know people are collecting.. if I had the option to opt out or opt in, I'd probably still let them collect the data.
The problems start the day you become not boring. You never know when you will become a person of interest. Run for office, start a succesful business, date a girl wtih a pyscho-ex, save a kid's life in some dramatic way, whatever. It may not even be under your control - you might just cross paths with the wrong guy - a wrong place, wrong time sort of thing.
However it happens, if it ever happens, you can be sure that all that boring information will suddenly become extremely interesting to some people, people who will dig through as much of it as they can get their hands on looking for any thing they can possibly use to harm, or at least get leverage on, you or your family. Maybe all your boring details will still be just as boring, but you really can't predict what a motivated person or organization will be able to come up with given years of historical details about you.
Most people never will become a person of interest. But those who do, will be screwed.
Unnamed Democrat: Rick, you are anti-science. Rick: You're anti-science!
I've noticed this pattern in politics - those legitimately accused frequently try to turn the very same charges around and use them on their own accuser. It is a weird sort of symmetry.
My favorite example is also a typical extreme conservative view and it goes something like this:
Liberals are such hypocrites, they preach tolerance but they won't tolerate my hatred!
I use mailinator all the time, it is fantasticly useful. Sometimes I encounter a website that won't accept mailinator addresses, some even go to the effort of tracking the alternate domains he uses and blocking them too. I find mailinator so useful that when a website refuses mailionator addresses, I just won't use that website.
The Mailinator Man's blog is also pretty good, the guy is articulate and has a knack for talking about interesting architectural stuff. This latest entry is just another in a great series, if you like this sort of stuff and haven't read his previous entries you should take the time to read through them.
Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out. Healthy ? Of course not.
Surely it depends on what is actually being burnt and inhaled. Normal cigarette smoke has things like formaldahyde, benzene, ammonia and acetone - all known carcinogens while normal pot smoke does not. What's ironic here is that your default position is what I heard from all source of authority, until just recently.
There is even a recent medical study indicating that moderate, chronic pot smoking increases lung capacity compared to tobacco-smokers and non-smokers alike:
I don't know if Apple will succeed with 'driverless printing', but if they do then every platform will benefit. Sometimes moving forward means letting go of some of the past.
If they do succeed, chances are they will wall it off with patents. Look at their iphone patent war bullshit - one of their main attack patents is "slide to unlock" wtf?
The most important rule taught, is if you have a lot of money, you can do whatever you want regardless of rules. What a surprise that life lesson comes from a 1%er billionaire.
I'm pretty sure that the intent was to make sure the kid and/or parent has immediate and measurable "skin in the game" and they naively went with cash fines because that was a simple and obvious means to that end. But, as you pointed out, it has unintended consequences and on the next iteration they could probably do better.
I think it was the freakonmics guys who showed that cash rewards for desired results in school worked pretty well too - that might be a better way to go as it would indirectly teach that those who do right get paid instead of those who have money can do wrong with impunity.
Fine, but don't complain when you vote for someone who is campaining for stuff you don't like and them implements said policies once elected.
(A) Only the politics-as-a-team-sport tools ever have 100% agreement with any candidate (B) I damn well can complain about the parts I don't like - just because you choose the lesser evil doesn't mean you have to like the evil part
(A) The enemy of good is perfect. (B) He's never going to win anyway, so voting for him does not mean you risk him implementing the stuff you don't like (C) Even if he did win, chances are he couldn't implement the stuff you don't like - Bush was anti-abortion too and look what he did about it - nada.
(Personally, I refuse to vote for either party, but I know that it's a vain hope that my vote will make any difference.)
If enough people voted their conscience instead of for a team all of our votes would start to make a difference again.
We don't actually have to win an election in order to affect politics - all it takes is enough voters to scare the big-team parties into thinking they need to adopt some of the platforms of the parties of conscience. It is the marginal risk that can make the difference - e.g. if the democrats had wised up and adopted more of the Green party platform many of those people who voted for Ralph Nader would have voted for Gore instead. The democrats ignored the risk of losing a couple of percent of the voters and it lost them the election. The republican ass-kissing of the tea-party is an example of them having learned the Ralph Nader lesson.
They're acting exactly as if caught red-handed. They've been a professional PR organization in controversial fields and a hostile environment for decades and they can't spin this? Hmm.
They are used to playing offense, not defense. I don't think it is a stretch to assume they have been caught off guard and, being humans, have reacted imperfectly under the stress of unexpected events.
You mean the Do Not Track list which is practically unenforceable?
As best I can tell "Do Not Track" headers in the browser are there for legal purposes. If we ever get the chance to sue for unauthorized tracking having the browser explicitly inform the tracker's website that they should not be tracking this user will probably be helpful in court. It may even be that the threat of such ends up being enough to make trackers obey the header.
But either way, it seems like an attempt to leverage the legal system for us little guys rather than a straight-forward engineering method of preventing tracking.
Your argument leads to the conclusion that the data hole always exists even in a hypothetically perfectly secure system.
Not always - could always exist. It is not reasonable to act on hypotheticals. But once evidence of a hole is discovered you have to decide what actions you are going to take in response.
Put another way, do you change your online banking passwords every time a new security patch comes down the line?
Depends on the circumstances - if the patch fixes something particularly glaring then yes I probably would. All security is a trade off between cost and risk reduction.
Regardless of any moralizing, what the guy did ended up demonstrating just how low the bar was to exploit facebook's security problems. That's a net benefit to facebook because it gave them an empirical risk evaluation.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with your CEO's response is this:
if we have indeed mistakenly been sent a claim by YouTube's Content ID system and are inaccurately claiming a video...we'll release it.
He's treating it like a one-off. The claims so far are that the bird song was "reviewed" - if it was reviewed by a human then this should never have happened. Humans make mistakes, but confusing a bird song for a human performance is beyond the range of reasonable human error - suggesting a process where the human has been removed. Something we absolutely know happens with the big-time members of the MAFIAA in their over-zealous pursuit of pirates because they have admitted it in court in more than one case.
So the real problem here is the process and simply "releasing" one falsely claimed video is to miss the forest for the trees. The only satisfactory response is to explain what happened and then to take steps to make sure that it never happens again.
Well, there is at least one other country on the continent with "Africa" in the name. But just how many people who live outside of the USA call themselves "americans" -- not americanos, americans -- versus how many people outside of SA call themselves "africans?" No one using the term "american" is even referring to a continent in the first place. The problem here is nothing more than fauxrage.
Your point is (a) terrible and (b) a strawman:
(a) terrible because the name of France does not include the word "europe"
(b) a strawman because using short form of a country's name does not in any way shape or form mean that the residents "consider themselves exclusive resides of the continent"
Show me one other country in the world with the word "America" in its name and then you'll get some sympathy.
That's why I said "substantial features and functionality". The vast majority of what a PS3 is is not the Other OS feature.
Except to the people who actually used it, to them it was pretty freaking substantial. It is entirely plausible to expect that the users of that (and other removed features like SACD playback) purchased their PS3's precisely because of those features and that such features constituted a significant portion of their usage of their PS3's.
You're buying a license to a particular feature set and level of functionality. I have no doubt that the people who actually paid money have a legal case if the update took away substantial features and functionality.
Sony already won that in court when some people sued over the removal of the ability to boot linux.
The DRM acronym lends itself quite well to a similar redefinition:
Digital Restrictions Management
Lots of restraunts get their soda carbonation tanks refilled from the same places the guys who refill paintball tanks get their large tanks filled. Same thing with the guys who homebrew beer. From the reading I did, the only difference in grades of co2 has to do with the container - medical grade requires a certain kind of lining on all the tanks and hoses. Otherwise nada.
You can buy an adapter for your sodastream to use a regular paintball tank or even a larger 5 to 20 lb co2 tank. Check out co2doctor.com - I haven't ordered anything from them but have been thinking about getting a 10lb tank for my primo since I go through a paintball tank about once a week.
As for syrups, I've tried that Mio "water enhancer" stuff too but really my personal goal is to go straight water so I'm better off not finding something that tastes good.
Psychological addiction was unaffected of course. Sit at computer, sip energy drink, right?
FWIW I've been working on a serious diet-soda addiction. As in diet soda was my primary source of fluids every day of the week.
I bought a "Primo Flavorstation" from Loews - it lets you carbonate tap water. They want you to buy syrups as a make-your-own-soda thing. But I've found that simply carbonated water does it for me about 90% of the time (and all of the syrups I've tried taste like shit).
There is another brand out there - Sodastream. But sodastream sucks because they booby-trap their co2 tanks to force you to buy refils from them at ~$25 a tank (and their new units have half-size tanks too). The Primo takes standard paintball tanks, so you can refill the cansister for about $3 at almost any sports store (I use the sports authority that is just down the block from me). Primo also wants to sell you $25 refills, but they don't try to force you - only give you BS about "food grade" co2, which is no different from any other kind of non-medical co2.
I'm a very boring person with very little to hide and no inherent desire for privacy. I see no way in which I'm personally harmed by the data I know people are collecting.. if I had the option to opt out or opt in, I'd probably still let them collect the data.
The problems start the day you become not boring. You never know when you will become a person of interest. Run for office, start a succesful business, date a girl wtih a pyscho-ex, save a kid's life in some dramatic way, whatever. It may not even be under your control - you might just cross paths with the wrong guy - a wrong place, wrong time sort of thing.
However it happens, if it ever happens, you can be sure that all that boring information will suddenly become extremely interesting to some people, people who will dig through as much of it as they can get their hands on looking for any thing they can possibly use to harm, or at least get leverage on, you or your family. Maybe all your boring details will still be just as boring, but you really can't predict what a motivated person or organization will be able to come up with given years of historical details about you.
Most people never will become a person of interest.
But those who do, will be screwed.
FWIW, I'm a Christian who believes in both creation and evolution.
FWIW, that is also roughly the position of the Catholic Church and has been for decades.
Santorum is a catholic but seems to be very much in the intelligent design camp.
Doesn't this whole situation seem childish?
Unnamed Democrat: Rick, you are anti-science.
Rick: You're anti-science!
I've noticed this pattern in politics - those legitimately accused frequently try to turn the very same charges around and use them on their own accuser. It is a weird sort of symmetry.
My favorite example is also a typical extreme conservative view and it goes something like this:
Liberals are such hypocrites, they preach tolerance but they won't tolerate my hatred!
I use mailinator all the time, it is fantasticly useful. Sometimes I encounter a website that won't accept mailinator addresses, some even go to the effort of tracking the alternate domains he uses and blocking them too. I find mailinator so useful that when a website refuses mailionator addresses, I just won't use that website.
The Mailinator Man's blog is also pretty good, the guy is articulate and has a knack for talking about interesting architectural stuff. This latest entry is just another in a great series, if you like this sort of stuff and haven't read his previous entries you should take the time to read through them.
Even today I heard someone claim that smoking pot does not have worse health effects than tobacco smoke (think about it : no filters on the sigarettes -> you're actually inhaling burning leaves directly into your lungs which will never again come out. Healthy ? Of course not.
Surely it depends on what is actually being burnt and inhaled. Normal cigarette smoke has things like formaldahyde, benzene, ammonia and acetone - all known carcinogens while normal pot smoke does not. What's ironic here is that your default position is what I heard from all source of authority, until just recently.
There is even a recent medical study indicating that moderate, chronic pot smoking increases lung capacity compared to tobacco-smokers and non-smokers alike:
http://pulmccm.org/main/2012/asthma-review/infrequent-pot-smokers-have-better-lung-function-than-non-tokers-jama/
And FWIW, I've never used an illegal drug in my life, not even once. I don't have a dog in the "pot is better for you" fight.
I don't know if Apple will succeed with 'driverless printing', but if they do then every platform will benefit. Sometimes moving forward means letting go of some of the past.
If they do succeed, chances are they will wall it off with patents.
Look at their iphone patent war bullshit - one of their main attack patents is "slide to unlock" wtf?
The most important rule taught, is if you have a lot of money, you can do whatever you want regardless of rules. What a surprise that life lesson comes from a 1%er billionaire.
I'm pretty sure that the intent was to make sure the kid and/or parent has immediate and measurable "skin in the game" and they naively went with cash fines because that was a simple and obvious means to that end. But, as you pointed out, it has unintended consequences and on the next iteration they could probably do better.
I think it was the freakonmics guys who showed that cash rewards for desired results in school worked pretty well too - that might be a better way to go as it would indirectly teach that those who do right get paid instead of those who have money can do wrong with impunity.
Fine, but don't complain when you vote for someone who is campaining for stuff you don't like and them implements said policies once elected.
(A) Only the politics-as-a-team-sport tools ever have 100% agreement with any candidate
(B) I damn well can complain about the parts I don't like - just because you choose the lesser evil doesn't mean you have to like the evil part
(A) The enemy of good is perfect.
(B) He's never going to win anyway, so voting for him does not mean you risk him implementing the stuff you don't like
(C) Even if he did win, chances are he couldn't implement the stuff you don't like - Bush was anti-abortion too and look what he did about it - nada.
(Personally, I refuse to vote for either party, but I know that it's a vain hope that my vote will make any difference.)
If enough people voted their conscience instead of for a team all of our votes would start to make a difference again.
We don't actually have to win an election in order to affect politics - all it takes is enough voters to scare the big-team parties into thinking they need to adopt some of the platforms of the parties of conscience. It is the marginal risk that can make the difference - e.g. if the democrats had wised up and adopted more of the Green party platform many of those people who voted for Ralph Nader would have voted for Gore instead. The democrats ignored the risk of losing a couple of percent of the voters and it lost them the election. The republican ass-kissing of the tea-party is an example of them having learned the Ralph Nader lesson.
Colbert so nailed that one with, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
They're acting exactly as if caught red-handed. They've been a professional PR organization in controversial fields and a hostile environment for decades and they can't spin this? Hmm.
They are used to playing offense, not defense. I don't think it is a stretch to assume they have been caught off guard and, being humans, have reacted imperfectly under the stress of unexpected events.
You mean the Do Not Track list which is practically unenforceable?
As best I can tell "Do Not Track" headers in the browser are there for legal purposes. If we ever get the chance to sue for unauthorized tracking having the browser explicitly inform the tracker's website that they should not be tracking this user will probably be helpful in court. It may even be that the threat of such ends up being enough to make trackers obey the header.
But either way, it seems like an attempt to leverage the legal system for us little guys rather than a straight-forward engineering method of preventing tracking.
He wasn't a white-hat hacker though. He invasively changed their systems and acquired sensitive data, storing it externally.
That may be your definition, it apparently was not Yahoo's definition.
Your argument leads to the conclusion that the data hole always exists even in a hypothetically perfectly secure system.
Not always - could always exist. It is not reasonable to act on hypotheticals. But once evidence of a hole is discovered you have to decide what actions you are going to take in response.
Put another way, do you change your online banking passwords every time a new security patch comes down the line?
Depends on the circumstances - if the patch fixes something particularly glaring then yes I probably would. All security is a trade off between cost and risk reduction.
Regardless of any moralizing, what the guy did ended up demonstrating just how low the bar was to exploit facebook's security problems. That's a net benefit to facebook because it gave them an empirical risk evaluation.
+1 funny dude