It all depends on whether that $20/mo includes the data plan, or if the laptop only contains a 3G modem. If it does include the data plan, you're essentially getting a free notebook with the purchase of the data plan, which isn't too bad in itself.
I'm happy to subsidize the services that Google offers me by granting them anonymized access to my data. I use Google Voice. I know that they're mining my voicemails to improve their speech-recognition algorithms; I'm fine with that. They're offering me a service for free that Verizon wants to charge me about $10/mo for - free unlimited texting, alongside a visual voicemail inbox. I understand the tradeoff, and I think it's a pretty fair deal.
This simply seems like an overreaction to me. You can block all of the messages that this system is capable of receiving except those that are only sent out in the case of a national emergency, and you're perfectly free to ignore those. Could such a system be abused? Certainly. They could send out mandatory terror alert warnings every hour on the hour. They almost certainly won't.
As for the price, this system is proposed as a matter of public safety; do you feel as strongly about your lack of freedom to purchase a car without seatbelts or airbags? Do you understand why you're not free to choose to purchase a car without these extra features? A car without these features would be cheaper to manufacture; however, as a society, we have decided that the benefit of mandating public safety is worth the negligible cost.
Yeah, that Make comment is about right. I could probably throw one of these together given an arduino, an afternoon, and a handful of IR sensors. Not exactly groundbreaking...
Doesn't work in the sun, for one thing. For another, it's necessarily going to be pretty bulky; it's not suitable for mobile applications. Since your finger has to interrupt the beam, there will necessarily be a ridge around the outside of your viewing area, which will attract dirt and grime, which will interrupt the IR beams. The resolution is exactly equal to the number of IR senors that you stack around the outside of the thing; it doesn't exactly scale well.
It's not exactly ground-breaking tech. It's simple enough to be suitable for an undergraduate project, but the applications in industry are extremely limited.
I'm curious, why are you so opposed to receiving messages about emergency conditions in your area? Is there a pragmatic reason that you don't want to receive earthquake warnings, or are you just opposed to this in particular because you think that you should oppose the government in general?
Absolutely. But you know, I'm okay with being used. If Google's going to give me free stuff so that they can collect information about my use habits, well, I've still got free stuff. I know that Google Voice is data-mining my voice mails to train their speech-recognition system. I'm okay with that; in return, I'm getting a visual voicemail inbox where Verizon wants to charge me $5/mo for an inferior service. Fair deal.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. You're right, of course, about the recording industry being willing to throw a higher percentage of their revenue towards lawsuits than Google; however, I don't think Google's going to just back down on this one. They are heavily invested in seeing "the cloud" take off, and a music locker is an important first step towards not only the technical aspect of this, but also the more-difficult behavior-shifting aspect of it. Google wants to kill your PC, replace it with an Andriod, and shift all of the heavy-lifting (storage, processing, etc.) to their cloud servers. If they can convince the average user that it's easier/more beneficial to store their music in a locker and stream it on-demand, they're taking a big first-step towards that goal.
While the recording industry is going to piss and moan about what Google's doing here, I'd be astonished if Google was doing anything outright illegal. They're not stupid; they've got their own lawyers looking over their shoulders. The deals that Google failed to produce were more in line with offering new content for purchase, rather than the rights to stream music that a user already has legitimate rights to.
You're overestimating the music industry; while I'm sure that no one wants a long, drawn out lawsuit, Google sees about twice as much revenue than the entire recording industry*. (Plus, they've got a business model that doesn't revolve around suing their users.) I'm not sure that the RIAA's lawyers would be too eager to sue Google; it's easy to arm-twist a $2000 settlement out of a college kid, and if one or two of them do end up going to court, the RIAA can certainly outlast any private individual. However, suing someone bigger than you, who has an experienced in-house legal team, is a whole different ballgame.
* Gotta back up my claims. For the sake of this argument, "the record industry" doesn't contain indie labels; they are too fragmented to coordinate their power. That leaves us with: Sony Music Entertainment: $1.33 billion Universal Music Group: $6.14 billion Warner Music Group: $3.49 billion EMI: $1.65 billion
versus Google: $29.32 billion
(all values USD, anual revenue, as listed on Wikipedia)
That's okay, though; the judge is letting Oracle decide which shoulder to try to prove that Google stabbed, and the penalty in this case is the same for one shoulder or two. Oracle gets to choose their bloodiest shoulder, and it stand to reason that if they're incapable of proving that it was Google who stabbed them there, they couldn't have successfully argued that Google stabbed them anywhere. (Because, again, Oracle gets to choose their strongest case to work on.)
Or, something like that. Maybe Google hit Oracle with a car, if that would help this analogy...
This has happened; I changed my salt, not my algorithm, and set out to change my password everywhere else, as well. It's probably not too terrible to change your passwords every so often anyways. I guess that I have to remember two eight-character salts; the current, and the previous. I don't do this terribly often, maybe once every 6 months or so. If I go a year without accessing a service, I either simply abandon the account (in the case of webmail, BBS, etc), or go through the process of account-recovery. (In the unlikely case that I don't access an important site, like a bank, in a given year.)
It's not a perfect system, I'll grant you that. However, it uses a simple mnemonic system that isn't any more complicated to use than the simplest software-based solution out there, and it doesn't have any of the common failure cases common to the software solutions out there. (Lost databases, stolen databases.) It's certainly not for everyone, or every situation - I use PasswordSafe and a shared.psafe file when I need to share passwords within a group, or store a whole lot of passwords - but I've found that it's a great system for my own personal use.
I believe that he is responding to a sibling, rather than a parent:
I'd like to think that this has come about due to someone at Sony saying that the act was done by "an anonymous hacker" being misunderstood as "an Anonymous hacker".
I believe he is responding to a sibling, rather than a parent:
I'd like to think that this has come about due to someone at Sony saying that the act was done by "an anonymous hacker" being misunderstood as "an Anonymous hacker".
No, that's pretty out there. Assuming government involvement introduces several unnecessary logical leaps, along with even more unanswered questions. Also, it presumes that the public at large both know and care about this. (They don't.) Anonymous are basically a gang of hackers. (Civilly-disobedient hackers, if you must, but still.) They break the law; that's kind of their thing. If the FBI wanted to go after them, they would - they already have all of the legal justification they need.
While the DDOS-attack does seem like it was very likely Anonymous, the credit breach doesn't quite seem their style. Anonymous tends to be in it to make Sony look bad - if they had stolen 100 million PSN accounts, I'd expect to see 100 million PSN accounts up on The Pirate Bay pretty quick. I'd expect a statement bragging about how easy it was, how lax Sony's security was. I wouldn't expect for-profit identity theft. Stealing credit card info seems a step or two above "doing it for the lulz."
I could be wrong. It would definitely be wrong to put Anonymous above suspicion; they have a motive and and the ability. It just doesn't seem like their MO.
This brings up some interesting questions about the Anonymous collective. If some Serbian hacker who wanted credit cards, and does not participate in any of the IRC/BBS/etc that "Anonymous" hangs out in, claims to be Anonymous, is he? Do you need to hold any of the (loosely defined) common values that Anonymous tends to, in order to be properly considered Anonymous?
I understand that the implication in this case, however, is that some members of Anonymous are claiming that this was done by a person or group who would not self-identify as Anonymous; rather, this person or group merely wants to make it look like the loose-collective "Anonymous" performed the hack in order to shift attention away from themselves and towards others who would self-identify as Anonymous.
Or you could use the same password-salt on multiple sites, with a unique, easy-to-remember base for each site. For example, my base could be "RjZg#sl1", which would produce RjZslshg#sl1 for slashdot, RjZgglg#sl1 for gmail, RjZtwttrg#sl1 for twitter, etc.
You need to memorize eight characters, and one process (remove consonants from service name), and you've got a secure, unique password for each website. It's not perfect - if someone is specifically targeting you, and gets two or three of your passwords in cleartext, they have a good chance at guessing your others, but it's probably more secure than storing your passwords written down somewhere, even encoded.
So, do you think that these researchers are trying for an Ig Noble Award, or that it's pure coincidence that the primary application of their research is teaching computers to laugh at dirty jokes?
I'd sure be nice if politicians were this concerned with passing legislature that their constituents supported all of the time, instead of only during election season.
While your advise is helpful in the very loosest definition of the term, I don't think it demonstrates quite the nuanced understanding of the United States legal system that I'd hope that our Supreme Court justices would hold. There is legal precedence that it is unconscionable to use your position as the provider of a necessary good or service (such as food, shelter, a means of transportation) to insert clauses that offer a vastly imbalanced consideration into a contract. Many would argue that telephone service is necessary in the modern world on the same level that transportation is, and that the telecom industry was abusing its position of power to insert unconscionable terms into standard telephone contracts.
However, I suppose "just don't sign any predatory contracts" is valid legal advice as well. I'm glad that you brought up this point!
The dispute is whether you're able to sign away your right to sue. There is a term in contract law called Unconscionability, which basically prevents one party from abusing their superior bargaining power to write provisions into the contract that overwhelmingly favor their own interests. There are certain things that you cannot be pressured into signing away, and, until recently, the right to a class action lawsuit was among them.
Seriously? Mark out the parts of your phone contract that you don't like? You just don't get a phone, then. AT&T absolutely, positively, will not budge on this.
I assume you mean that if everyone did it, the phone companies would have to play ball. So instead of having a justice system that makes just decisions, you merely propose enacting a significant change in the lifestyle of every person within the United States? This won't happen. I'm truly sorry; it would be wonderful if it did, but it is an unrealistic expectation. We have to make decisions based on the world that we live in, not the world we wish we lived in.
Slashdot Mirror
It all depends on whether that $20/mo includes the data plan, or if the laptop only contains a 3G modem. If it does include the data plan, you're essentially getting a free notebook with the purchase of the data plan, which isn't too bad in itself.
I'm happy to subsidize the services that Google offers me by granting them anonymized access to my data. I use Google Voice. I know that they're mining my voicemails to improve their speech-recognition algorithms; I'm fine with that. They're offering me a service for free that Verizon wants to charge me about $10/mo for - free unlimited texting, alongside a visual voicemail inbox. I understand the tradeoff, and I think it's a pretty fair deal.
This simply seems like an overreaction to me. You can block all of the messages that this system is capable of receiving except those that are only sent out in the case of a national emergency, and you're perfectly free to ignore those. Could such a system be abused? Certainly. They could send out mandatory terror alert warnings every hour on the hour. They almost certainly won't.
As for the price, this system is proposed as a matter of public safety; do you feel as strongly about your lack of freedom to purchase a car without seatbelts or airbags? Do you understand why you're not free to choose to purchase a car without these extra features? A car without these features would be cheaper to manufacture; however, as a society, we have decided that the benefit of mandating public safety is worth the negligible cost.
Yeah, that Make comment is about right. I could probably throw one of these together given an arduino, an afternoon, and a handful of IR sensors. Not exactly groundbreaking...
Doesn't work in the sun, for one thing. For another, it's necessarily going to be pretty bulky; it's not suitable for mobile applications. Since your finger has to interrupt the beam, there will necessarily be a ridge around the outside of your viewing area, which will attract dirt and grime, which will interrupt the IR beams. The resolution is exactly equal to the number of IR senors that you stack around the outside of the thing; it doesn't exactly scale well.
It's not exactly ground-breaking tech. It's simple enough to be suitable for an undergraduate project, but the applications in industry are extremely limited.
No, of course not. Your cell provider already sends you alerts that you're not being charged for; why would this be any different?
I'm curious, why are you so opposed to receiving messages about emergency conditions in your area? Is there a pragmatic reason that you don't want to receive earthquake warnings, or are you just opposed to this in particular because you think that you should oppose the government in general?
Absolutely. But you know, I'm okay with being used. If Google's going to give me free stuff so that they can collect information about my use habits, well, I've still got free stuff. I know that Google Voice is data-mining my voice mails to train their speech-recognition system. I'm okay with that; in return, I'm getting a visual voicemail inbox where Verizon wants to charge me $5/mo for an inferior service. Fair deal.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. You're right, of course, about the recording industry being willing to throw a higher percentage of their revenue towards lawsuits than Google; however, I don't think Google's going to just back down on this one. They are heavily invested in seeing "the cloud" take off, and a music locker is an important first step towards not only the technical aspect of this, but also the more-difficult behavior-shifting aspect of it. Google wants to kill your PC, replace it with an Andriod, and shift all of the heavy-lifting (storage, processing, etc.) to their cloud servers. If they can convince the average user that it's easier/more beneficial to store their music in a locker and stream it on-demand, they're taking a big first-step towards that goal.
While the recording industry is going to piss and moan about what Google's doing here, I'd be astonished if Google was doing anything outright illegal. They're not stupid; they've got their own lawyers looking over their shoulders. The deals that Google failed to produce were more in line with offering new content for purchase, rather than the rights to stream music that a user already has legitimate rights to.
You're overestimating the music industry; while I'm sure that no one wants a long, drawn out lawsuit, Google sees about twice as much revenue than the entire recording industry*. (Plus, they've got a business model that doesn't revolve around suing their users.) I'm not sure that the RIAA's lawyers would be too eager to sue Google; it's easy to arm-twist a $2000 settlement out of a college kid, and if one or two of them do end up going to court, the RIAA can certainly outlast any private individual. However, suing someone bigger than you, who has an experienced in-house legal team, is a whole different ballgame.
* Gotta back up my claims. For the sake of this argument, "the record industry" doesn't contain indie labels; they are too fragmented to coordinate their power. That leaves us with:
Sony Music Entertainment: $1.33 billion
Universal Music Group: $6.14 billion
Warner Music Group: $3.49 billion
EMI: $1.65 billion
versus
Google: $29.32 billion
(all values USD, anual revenue, as listed on Wikipedia)
That's okay, though; the judge is letting Oracle decide which shoulder to try to prove that Google stabbed, and the penalty in this case is the same for one shoulder or two. Oracle gets to choose their bloodiest shoulder, and it stand to reason that if they're incapable of proving that it was Google who stabbed them there, they couldn't have successfully argued that Google stabbed them anywhere. (Because, again, Oracle gets to choose their strongest case to work on.)
Or, something like that. Maybe Google hit Oracle with a car, if that would help this analogy...
This has happened; I changed my salt, not my algorithm, and set out to change my password everywhere else, as well. It's probably not too terrible to change your passwords every so often anyways. I guess that I have to remember two eight-character salts; the current, and the previous. I don't do this terribly often, maybe once every 6 months or so. If I go a year without accessing a service, I either simply abandon the account (in the case of webmail, BBS, etc), or go through the process of account-recovery. (In the unlikely case that I don't access an important site, like a bank, in a given year.)
It's not a perfect system, I'll grant you that. However, it uses a simple mnemonic system that isn't any more complicated to use than the simplest software-based solution out there, and it doesn't have any of the common failure cases common to the software solutions out there. (Lost databases, stolen databases.) It's certainly not for everyone, or every situation - I use PasswordSafe and a shared .psafe file when I need to share passwords within a group, or store a whole lot of passwords - but I've found that it's a great system for my own personal use.
I'd like to think that this has come about due to someone at Sony saying that the act was done by "an anonymous hacker" being misunderstood as "an Anonymous hacker".
Much like I just responded to the wrong post. Apologies. =(
I'd like to think that this has come about due to someone at Sony saying that the act was done by "an anonymous hacker" being misunderstood as "an Anonymous hacker".
No, that's pretty out there. Assuming government involvement introduces several unnecessary logical leaps, along with even more unanswered questions. Also, it presumes that the public at large both know and care about this. (They don't.) Anonymous are basically a gang of hackers. (Civilly-disobedient hackers, if you must, but still.) They break the law; that's kind of their thing. If the FBI wanted to go after them, they would - they already have all of the legal justification they need.
While the DDOS-attack does seem like it was very likely Anonymous, the credit breach doesn't quite seem their style. Anonymous tends to be in it to make Sony look bad - if they had stolen 100 million PSN accounts, I'd expect to see 100 million PSN accounts up on The Pirate Bay pretty quick. I'd expect a statement bragging about how easy it was, how lax Sony's security was. I wouldn't expect for-profit identity theft. Stealing credit card info seems a step or two above "doing it for the lulz."
I could be wrong. It would definitely be wrong to put Anonymous above suspicion; they have a motive and and the ability. It just doesn't seem like their MO.
This brings up some interesting questions about the Anonymous collective. If some Serbian hacker who wanted credit cards, and does not participate in any of the IRC/BBS/etc that "Anonymous" hangs out in, claims to be Anonymous, is he? Do you need to hold any of the (loosely defined) common values that Anonymous tends to, in order to be properly considered Anonymous?
I understand that the implication in this case, however, is that some members of Anonymous are claiming that this was done by a person or group who would not self-identify as Anonymous; rather, this person or group merely wants to make it look like the loose-collective "Anonymous" performed the hack in order to shift attention away from themselves and towards others who would self-identify as Anonymous.
Or you could use the same password-salt on multiple sites, with a unique, easy-to-remember base for each site. For example, my base could be "RjZg#sl1", which would produce RjZslshg#sl1 for slashdot, RjZgglg#sl1 for gmail, RjZtwttrg#sl1 for twitter, etc.
You need to memorize eight characters, and one process (remove consonants from service name), and you've got a secure, unique password for each website. It's not perfect - if someone is specifically targeting you, and gets two or three of your passwords in cleartext, they have a good chance at guessing your others, but it's probably more secure than storing your passwords written down somewhere, even encoded.
This sounds like a solution looking for a cause to me.
Who wants to bet that the manufacturers of the odometer-attachment technology is the one who helped draft the bill?
So, do you think that these researchers are trying for an Ig Noble Award, or that it's pure coincidence that the primary application of their research is teaching computers to laugh at dirty jokes?
I'd sure be nice if politicians were this concerned with passing legislature that their constituents supported all of the time, instead of only during election season.
While your advise is helpful in the very loosest definition of the term, I don't think it demonstrates quite the nuanced understanding of the United States legal system that I'd hope that our Supreme Court justices would hold. There is legal precedence that it is unconscionable to use your position as the provider of a necessary good or service (such as food, shelter, a means of transportation) to insert clauses that offer a vastly imbalanced consideration into a contract. Many would argue that telephone service is necessary in the modern world on the same level that transportation is, and that the telecom industry was abusing its position of power to insert unconscionable terms into standard telephone contracts.
However, I suppose "just don't sign any predatory contracts" is valid legal advice as well. I'm glad that you brought up this point!
The dispute is whether you're able to sign away your right to sue. There is a term in contract law called Unconscionability, which basically prevents one party from abusing their superior bargaining power to write provisions into the contract that overwhelmingly favor their own interests. There are certain things that you cannot be pressured into signing away, and, until recently, the right to a class action lawsuit was among them.
Seriously? Mark out the parts of your phone contract that you don't like? You just don't get a phone, then. AT&T absolutely, positively, will not budge on this.
I assume you mean that if everyone did it, the phone companies would have to play ball. So instead of having a justice system that makes just decisions, you merely propose enacting a significant change in the lifestyle of every person within the United States? This won't happen. I'm truly sorry; it would be wonderful if it did, but it is an unrealistic expectation. We have to make decisions based on the world that we live in, not the world we wish we lived in.