For example: Years ago it was found that Apple stored location data unencrypted "on its devices". No, they didn't. Their software stored location data on the user's device. Unaccessible to Apple. (And since the data originally came _from Apple_, all the nutters who claimed that Apple put the data there for some nefarious purpose were just nutters. If Apple wanted to keep track of this data, they would have made a copy on their servers).
You can of course store lots of your data on Apple's servers, but that's not "personal data" where some privacy policy applies, it's "my f***ing data and none of your f***ing business". And then there is the data that any normal business would gather about you, that represents your interaction with the company.
1) Yes, all Apple devices now prompt for an AppleID when you first turn them on. There is a 'Skip' button that you apparently completely missed, though. It is not a hidden button.
Just saying: And it is a very, very useful feature indeed. You enter your Apple ID, start downloading stuff, and very soon your new device is set up exactly like the previous one, with all the apps that you had, calendar, contacts, email, and so on and so on.
Yeah, like Apple would forgo an opportunity to earn money, simply because they also earn money elsewhere. They may not be desperate to make money from the data they collect, but they would be stupid (in the "maximum shareholder value" frame of reference) not to benefit from it as much as possible.
They would be stupid. Abusing your data is not part of their business. It would be very hard to turn this into profit, and Google is probably better at it:-) On the other hand, the price they would have to pay in lost hardware sales because of damaged reputation would outweigh any of those profits.
On an iOS device go to Settings->Privacy->Advertising and there is a setting labelled "Limit Ad Tracking" which you can enable or disable.
I don't think Facebook or Google offer that.
Google was actually fined for using two separate hacks, when to get around the user's privacy settings in Internet Explorer, and a different one to get around the settings in Safari.
Why not? Seems to me that CEOs are basically celebrities. They don't directly generate anything that is worth what they are paid. It's their name that gets other people excited and gets the money flowing. Keeping it secret doesn't make a whole lot of sense if the only reason they're considering Elop is to make the stock price go up. "Elop!?! WOW!!! I KNOW THAT NAME, BUY BUY BUY!!! I hear he's already made more money for MS than the outgoing CEO did!!!"
The CEO sets the direction that the company takes. That's the important thing. The execution may be more or less good, but the important thing is the right direction. Take Windows 8. A beautifully executed step in the wrong direction. It wouldn't have mattered if the result was slightly better or slightly less good, as long as they had created something that the customers actually want and want to pay for.
It's surprising to me that Apple didn't provide more detail. Others do.
Here's what Apple does:
Australia: Exact numbers.
Brazil: Exact numbers.
China: Exact numbers. ...
UK: Exact numbers.
USA: Sorry, we can only say "Between 0 and 1000"
That's all the information that you need to know as a citizen about what's going on. The richest company in the world is not allowed to tell you exact numbers. What else is there to know?
Similarly, they could be taking an interesting approach with regards to Section 215 requests. Legally they're not allowed to even state that they've received any, so the claim that they've given could be a lie. However, if it isn't, if any future reports omit any mention of the number of Section 215 requests, it would be safe to assume that they have received one.
Lying would be illegal (misleading shareholders and all that stuff). And if they are clever, they wouldn't just leave out any mention of Section 215 requests, they would write something like "in our previous report we said that we hadn't received any Section 215 requests".
It wouldn't matter if users just followed best practices for password selection.
It still matters. First, badly chosen passwords are made _obvious_ to hackers; when two or three or a dozen people choose the same password that's a high probability that the password was bad in the first place. And second, losing 30 million passwords makes brute force worthwhile. If you have an algorithm that would crack one password in 30 years on average, it will find passwords in a set of 30 million at a rate of one every minute.
Am I the only one wondering why he didn't just give them the wrong password? If it doesn't work, they can't prove he lied about it, he can claim that someone must have tried to change it or hacked into it or something.
Oh yes, he can claim that. And they will believe that.
An employee's MEMORIES are not the property of the company!
If you set up things so that the company will be damaged if you conveniently forget things, and then you forget things are refuse to tell them, you'll be in trouble. Your memories are not their property, but causing damage is causing damage.
This is subtly different. In my eyes, once the employee has been fired, they are really under no obligation to help their now ex-employer with much of anything. Of course, having a password in your head and a key in your pocket are different things, the company has the burden of due diligence to be sure you turn in the key, security badge, whatever before you walk out the door. If they don't have a password, that's their own fault. The key and lock equivalent would be I get home, having just been fired, and all the keys, security badges, whatever I have should (morally and legally) be shredded, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
That argument is idiotic. They asked him to hand over passwords while employed, and he refused. That's an offence worth being fired for. And it causes damage, so he deserved being told to pay the damage and to go to jail for it.
So he refused. What is the company supposed to do? Employ him and pay him money while taking him to court to make him hand over the passwords?
When this went down, it was not reported that he refused to turn over the passwords. He refused to hand over the password to unauthorized individuals and in unauthorized ways.
He refused to hand over the password to people who were full authorised but in his opinion couldn't be trusted. He refused to hand over the keys in a way that was insecure, but then didn't make any effort to hand over the keys in a secure way, which would have been his duty (because at the time he _was_ employed and _was_ asked by someone who was authorised).
They may be entitled to the passwords but for me to tell them the passwords or to listen them asking for them is work and I no longer work for them. They should have implemented a policy at the time (during my employment) whereby such things were recorded.
So you took one of the cars in the company's car pool and used it permanently for your personal use. You refuse to give it to employees who need it, and anyone you had no right to take it for yourself in the first place. The company asks you to return it. You refuse. You get fired, the company asks you to return it.
Now you say that refuse to return the car because returning the car is work and you have been fired, so you don't work for them anymore?
h.264 relies heavily on the pixels in all previous frames. Incorrectly decoded pixels will be visible on many frames that are following. What's worse, they will start moving around and spreading.
The German parliament wants to interview him. The current discussion is wether he can come to Germany to do so. And maybe even stay here. There are rumors there may be a legal loophole to not extradite him to the US if he sets foot on German turf. There is a slim majority for that in the German parliament.
Whistleblowing on illegal activities of the US government seems to be illegal in the USA. Whistleblowing on illegal activities of the German government may well be illegal in Germany, I don't know. I'm quite sure that whistleblowing on illegal activities of the US government is not illegal in Germany.
You can only get extradited from Germany for things that are illegal according to German law. So that would be the loophole. If the USA doesn't accept that, then surely they will have to extradite anyone to Germany who has been spying on German politicians.
New moons and full moons have essentially the same tides, because the tidal force is quadrupolar.
You are wrong. At new moon, moon and sun are almost in a straight line, so the force of moon and sun are added up. At full moon, moon and sun are in opposite directions, so their forces subtract.
The lovely image that your link shows demonstrates that there is a tide at the side pointing to the moon, and on the other side. Totally true, that's why we have high tide every twelve hours. Still, the side pointing to the moon has a slightly higher tide because it is closer. And a big influence is that the moon doesn't go in a circle around earth, but in ellipse.
So the highest tide happens when the moon on its ellipsoidal path around earth is closest to the earth, on the side that points to the moon, if it coincides with a new moon.
One solution would be to buy out Blackberry (RIM) which is part of the consortium. That should get them rights to the patents. Blackberry's market cap (cost of all shares at current market price) is only 4.2 billion.
Depends on the contract terms. For example, if I bought some software with a contract that says I can use it on every computer in my company (for a company with three employees), then Google couldn't expect to have the right to use that software on all their gazillions of computers if they buy my company.
I presume it's not, but that should be illegal collusion and an anti-trust violation.
Explain why it would be illegal? The primary goal of each of these companies would be to avoid being sued if someone else buys these patents. The secondary goal would be to make a bit of money. The primary goal of not being sued can be achieved just fine if you are in a consortium, and it is a lot cheaper. The four alternatives would have been: 1. Apple pays the whole $4.5bn, Microsoft, Sony, RIM must fear to be sued. 2. Microsoft pays the whole $4.5bn, Apple, Sony, RIM must fear to be sued and so on.
And you need to consider that they actually paid $4.5 bn. Let's assume you can make $2.25 bn by suing others. At that point, buying the patents costs $2.25bn, not buying them also costs $2.25bn. Everyone knew that the auction winners would sue the others. Google obviously believed that at $4.5bn, buying the patents and winning some patent suits is more expensive than not buying and losing some patent suits.
I think it might have been illegal collusion if Google had joined as well, and they all together had told Nortel "looks like there are no other bidders, so we'll pay you $500 million".
I just noticed that mentioning any patent suits that Google starts, or patent suits that they inherited from Motorola, is considered "trolling". I think that's because Google is a force for good and every Google patent suit is therefore good, while any patent suit against Google must be evil.
Those who can, innovate.
Those who can't, litigate.
Then there are the ones like Google, who bought Motorola to sue Microsoft for four billion dollars, and get their ass handed back to them. So what do those who can't litigate do?
..but a good deal of the flag points were given for gathering OS, service pack, browser, mail and PDF program/version information -- which I'm going to guess was a probably a given at Apple.
... and at GE nobody knew what OS, service pack, browser, mail and PDF program they were using... That's why the score is so low!
If those are the complete results that was a pretty short and piss poor competition. If "We got the browser and OS" is social engineering then my apache logs are 1337 hax0rz. This article must be a click farm because it sure doesn't have any actual content. The real news here is "slashdot editors drunk at work, approve spam"
I wonder if they found out what browser and OS are used at Apple and at Microsoft...
The reason that the result of signed integer overflow and underflow are not defined is because the C standard does not require that the machine be two's complement. Same for 1 31 and the negative of INT_MIN being undefined. When was the last time that you used a machine whose integer format was one's complement?
No, for that all that would be required is to call it "unspecified result". Unspecified result is much weaker than undefined behaviour, it means a valid integer is produced as the result, but doesn't say which one, and doesn't even say it has to be consistent.
But integer overflow can also create hardware exceptions or raise signals. That's why it is undefined behaviour.
Isn't VP9 supposed to be unencumbered by patents anyways?
Yes, but not usable without a license. Do you seriously think Google would be behind a codec that can be used freely by Microsoft and Apple? That's the whole purpose of VP9: Create a codec that will cause trouble for their competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
For example: Years ago it was found that Apple stored location data unencrypted "on its devices". No, they didn't. Their software stored location data on the user's device. Unaccessible to Apple. (And since the data originally came _from Apple_, all the nutters who claimed that Apple put the data there for some nefarious purpose were just nutters. If Apple wanted to keep track of this data, they would have made a copy on their servers).
You can of course store lots of your data on Apple's servers, but that's not "personal data" where some privacy policy applies, it's "my f***ing data and none of your f***ing business". And then there is the data that any normal business would gather about you, that represents your interaction with the company.
1) Yes, all Apple devices now prompt for an AppleID when you first turn them on. There is a 'Skip' button that you apparently completely missed, though. It is not a hidden button.
Just saying: And it is a very, very useful feature indeed. You enter your Apple ID, start downloading stuff, and very soon your new device is set up exactly like the previous one, with all the apps that you had, calendar, contacts, email, and so on and so on.
Yeah, like Apple would forgo an opportunity to earn money, simply because they also earn money elsewhere. They may not be desperate to make money from the data they collect, but they would be stupid (in the "maximum shareholder value" frame of reference) not to benefit from it as much as possible.
They would be stupid. Abusing your data is not part of their business. It would be very hard to turn this into profit, and Google is probably better at it :-) On the other hand, the price they would have to pay in lost hardware sales because of damaged reputation would outweigh any of those profits.
On an iOS device go to Settings->Privacy->Advertising and there is a setting labelled "Limit Ad Tracking" which you can enable or disable.
I don't think Facebook or Google offer that.
Google was actually fined for using two separate hacks, when to get around the user's privacy settings in Internet Explorer, and a different one to get around the settings in Safari.
Why not? Seems to me that CEOs are basically celebrities. They don't directly generate anything that is worth what they are paid. It's their name that gets other people excited and gets the money flowing. Keeping it secret doesn't make a whole lot of sense if the only reason they're considering Elop is to make the stock price go up. "Elop!?! WOW!!! I KNOW THAT NAME, BUY BUY BUY!!! I hear he's already made more money for MS than the outgoing CEO did!!!"
The CEO sets the direction that the company takes. That's the important thing. The execution may be more or less good, but the important thing is the right direction. Take Windows 8. A beautifully executed step in the wrong direction. It wouldn't have mattered if the result was slightly better or slightly less good, as long as they had created something that the customers actually want and want to pay for.
It's surprising to me that Apple didn't provide more detail. Others do.
Here's what Apple does:
...
Australia: Exact numbers.
Brazil: Exact numbers.
China: Exact numbers.
UK: Exact numbers.
USA: Sorry, we can only say "Between 0 and 1000"
That's all the information that you need to know as a citizen about what's going on. The richest company in the world is not allowed to tell you exact numbers. What else is there to know?
Similarly, they could be taking an interesting approach with regards to Section 215 requests. Legally they're not allowed to even state that they've received any, so the claim that they've given could be a lie. However, if it isn't, if any future reports omit any mention of the number of Section 215 requests, it would be safe to assume that they have received one.
Lying would be illegal (misleading shareholders and all that stuff). And if they are clever, they wouldn't just leave out any mention of Section 215 requests, they would write something like "in our previous report we said that we hadn't received any Section 215 requests".
What is Apple attempting to achieve by releasing a non-transparent transparency report?
Maybe you should write to your senator and complain. Maybe everybody should do that. Maybe that's what Apple tries to achieve.
It wouldn't matter if users just followed best practices for password selection.
It still matters. First, badly chosen passwords are made _obvious_ to hackers; when two or three or a dozen people choose the same password that's a high probability that the password was bad in the first place. And second, losing 30 million passwords makes brute force worthwhile. If you have an algorithm that would crack one password in 30 years on average, it will find passwords in a set of 30 million at a rate of one every minute.
Am I the only one wondering why he didn't just give them the wrong password? If it doesn't work, they can't prove he lied about it, he can claim that someone must have tried to change it or hacked into it or something.
Oh yes, he can claim that. And they will believe that.
An employee's MEMORIES are not the property of the company!
If you set up things so that the company will be damaged if you conveniently forget things, and then you forget things are refuse to tell them, you'll be in trouble. Your memories are not their property, but causing damage is causing damage.
This is subtly different. In my eyes, once the employee has been fired, they are really under no obligation to help their now ex-employer with much of anything. Of course, having a password in your head and a key in your pocket are different things, the company has the burden of due diligence to be sure you turn in the key, security badge, whatever before you walk out the door. If they don't have a password, that's their own fault. The key and lock equivalent would be I get home, having just been fired, and all the keys, security badges, whatever I have should (morally and legally) be shredded, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
That argument is idiotic. They asked him to hand over passwords while employed, and he refused. That's an offence worth being fired for. And it causes damage, so he deserved being told to pay the damage and to go to jail for it.
So he refused. What is the company supposed to do? Employ him and pay him money while taking him to court to make him hand over the passwords?
When this went down, it was not reported that he refused to turn over the passwords. He refused to hand over the password to unauthorized individuals and in unauthorized ways.
He refused to hand over the password to people who were full authorised but in his opinion couldn't be trusted. He refused to hand over the keys in a way that was insecure, but then didn't make any effort to hand over the keys in a secure way, which would have been his duty (because at the time he _was_ employed and _was_ asked by someone who was authorised).
They may be entitled to the passwords but for me to tell them the passwords or to listen them asking for them is work and I no longer work for them. They should have implemented a policy at the time (during my employment) whereby such things were recorded.
So you took one of the cars in the company's car pool and used it permanently for your personal use. You refuse to give it to employees who need it, and anyone you had no right to take it for yourself in the first place. The company asks you to return it. You refuse. You get fired, the company asks you to return it.
Now you say that refuse to return the car because returning the car is work and you have been fired, so you don't work for them anymore?
h.264 relies heavily on the pixels in all previous frames. Incorrectly decoded pixels will be visible on many frames that are following. What's worse, they will start moving around and spreading.
The German parliament wants to interview him. The current discussion is wether he can come to Germany to do so. And maybe even stay here. There are rumors there may be a legal loophole to not extradite him to the US if he sets foot on German turf. There is a slim majority for that in the German parliament.
Whistleblowing on illegal activities of the US government seems to be illegal in the USA. Whistleblowing on illegal activities of the German government may well be illegal in Germany, I don't know. I'm quite sure that whistleblowing on illegal activities of the US government is not illegal in Germany.
You can only get extradited from Germany for things that are illegal according to German law. So that would be the loophole. If the USA doesn't accept that, then surely they will have to extradite anyone to Germany who has been spying on German politicians.
New moons and full moons have essentially the same tides, because the tidal force is quadrupolar.
You are wrong. At new moon, moon and sun are almost in a straight line, so the force of moon and sun are added up. At full moon, moon and sun are in opposite directions, so their forces subtract.
The lovely image that your link shows demonstrates that there is a tide at the side pointing to the moon, and on the other side. Totally true, that's why we have high tide every twelve hours. Still, the side pointing to the moon has a slightly higher tide because it is closer. And a big influence is that the moon doesn't go in a circle around earth, but in ellipse.
So the highest tide happens when the moon on its ellipsoidal path around earth is closest to the earth, on the side that points to the moon, if it coincides with a new moon.
One solution would be to buy out Blackberry (RIM) which is part of the consortium. That should get them rights to the patents. Blackberry's market cap (cost of all shares at current market price) is only 4.2 billion.
Depends on the contract terms. For example, if I bought some software with a contract that says I can use it on every computer in my company (for a company with three employees), then Google couldn't expect to have the right to use that software on all their gazillions of computers if they buy my company.
I presume it's not, but that should be illegal collusion and an anti-trust violation.
Explain why it would be illegal? The primary goal of each of these companies would be to avoid being sued if someone else buys these patents. The secondary goal would be to make a bit of money. The primary goal of not being sued can be achieved just fine if you are in a consortium, and it is a lot cheaper. The four alternatives would have been: 1. Apple pays the whole $4.5bn, Microsoft, Sony, RIM must fear to be sued. 2. Microsoft pays the whole $4.5bn, Apple, Sony, RIM must fear to be sued and so on.
And you need to consider that they actually paid $4.5 bn. Let's assume you can make $2.25 bn by suing others. At that point, buying the patents costs $2.25bn, not buying them also costs $2.25bn. Everyone knew that the auction winners would sue the others. Google obviously believed that at $4.5bn, buying the patents and winning some patent suits is more expensive than not buying and losing some patent suits.
I think it might have been illegal collusion if Google had joined as well, and they all together had told Nortel "looks like there are no other bidders, so we'll pay you $500 million".
I just noticed that mentioning any patent suits that Google starts, or patent suits that they inherited from Motorola, is considered "trolling". I think that's because Google is a force for good and every Google patent suit is therefore good, while any patent suit against Google must be evil.
Those who can, innovate. Those who can't, litigate.
Then there are the ones like Google, who bought Motorola to sue Microsoft for four billion dollars, and get their ass handed back to them. So what do those who can't litigate do?
..but a good deal of the flag points were given for gathering OS, service pack, browser, mail and PDF program/version information -- which I'm going to guess was a probably a given at Apple.
... and at GE nobody knew what OS, service pack, browser, mail and PDF program they were using... That's why the score is so low!
If those are the complete results that was a pretty short and piss poor competition. If "We got the browser and OS" is social engineering then my apache logs are 1337 hax0rz. This article must be a click farm because it sure doesn't have any actual content. The real news here is "slashdot editors drunk at work, approve spam"
I wonder if they found out what browser and OS are used at Apple and at Microsoft...
The reason that the result of signed integer overflow and underflow are not defined is because the C standard does not require that the machine be two's complement. Same for 1 31 and the negative of INT_MIN being undefined. When was the last time that you used a machine whose integer format was one's complement?
No, for that all that would be required is to call it "unspecified result". Unspecified result is much weaker than undefined behaviour, it means a valid integer is produced as the result, but doesn't say which one, and doesn't even say it has to be consistent.
But integer overflow can also create hardware exceptions or raise signals. That's why it is undefined behaviour.
Isn't VP9 supposed to be unencumbered by patents anyways?
Yes, but not usable without a license. Do you seriously think Google would be behind a codec that can be used freely by Microsoft and Apple? That's the whole purpose of VP9: Create a codec that will cause trouble for their competitors.