You dislike Google for their actions in China? How can I put this...
Do you support the Iraq war?
No?
I don't either.
Even if you buy into the official justification (I *think* that this is the current one) that we were trying to spread democracy, the war is still a bad idea. You can't "impose" social revolution on people -- they just get ticked off at foreigners coming in and trying to run stuff. They have to decide that they want change themselves.
Similarly, trying to force a revolution in China by trying to directly subvert what the government wants just isn't too likely to succeed. If the people in China become unhappy enough with their lot, they'll do something. Currently, the majority are happy enough with what is going on not to do anything.
What Google did in China was, IMHO, the correct thing to do.
What is going on here is the federal government blatantly attempting to overstep its constitutional limits.
China's social norms state that censorship is okay. There are people that don't like it, but they haven't managed to change those social norms yet. What Google did there may rile those people who live in a culture that has demanded different social norms.
The demand for data from the US government is totally different.
I have, an expectation and a Constitutionally-protected right to not be searched without probable cause. This is something that *our* social norms do include. A group of people in the Bush Administration wants to push for porn filters, and wants to get data about how many returned searches contain porn. There is no crime here. There is no reason whatsoever for Google to give up that data, and some damn good reason for them not to do so (their users want their data to be private, and Google probably doesn't want a prescedent of having to turn over data to anyone that asks).
There is no probable cause here, because there is no crime. It is unfortunate that the Gonzales-led DoJ is the one demanding the data. It confuses many people (including a number of people on Slashdot, clearly), because they think that the DoJ has some kind of right to arbitrarily demand data of people. No; the people working there have no more right to demand that data than any American citizen does, which is zero, except is some specifically-enumerated cases. That generally translates to crime or national security.
Government access to Google's search databases would be catastrophic, and the fact that a demand was even issued is reminiscent of the 1950s. We have a society designed to allow people to read, debate, and discuss things freely. It is *crucial* that the people currently in power not have the ability to prevent citizens from doing this, or they have the ability to quash dissenting ideas from forming. Government access to Google's search data would be truly appalling. It can be used as a blackmail tool ("Sir, how can you run for a district attorney? Did you or did you not search for gay porn on twenty different occasions?"). This is not a sky-is-falling scenario. We know that exactly this does happen when these powers are granted the federal government -- under Hoover, the FBI did exactly this to a number of different people. It can be used to quash the attempt to spread criticism of the government. It can be used to find out what the political opposition is planning.
And there are people *criticizing* Google for fighting this. On Slashdot, none the less. I'm absolutely stunned by this. The only explanation I can think of is that it's low-level trolling from SEO types (who seem to harbour an inexplicable dislike of Google -- if Google didn't make it hard to cheat the system, they wouldn't have jobs).
What kind of paint do you have to be inhaling to be bashing Google for doing this?
I believe that you can probably get a pretty similar effect by using vnc or gnomemeeting (shared desktop access) and IRC (file offering + chat), but MS is bundling things and will probably make it easier to use.
They have have SmartFetch or whatever it's called so it knows what applications you typically use and at what times so it'll preload them into memory making it seem snappier.
I was thinking that something a bit simpler might make a nifty feature for Linux -- track which blocks are usually loaded after which blocks on a block device, and then follow that trail instead of simple read-ahead. I posted about this on Slashdot ages ago.
I guess you could do the same thing at the filesystem level.
I think that the "try to load N at time of day N" might be a little complex to reliably work, though, unless people follow *extremely* predictable usage patterns.
Like most other folks here, I hadn't heard of "Windows Collaboration" before
The "P2P" is peer-to-peer in the original sense of the word, as Microsoft's IPC and printing mechanism is peer-to-peer -- you don't need to specially designate servers. This is not a "P2P filesharing" application in the vein of Gnutella.
It looks like it might be basically NetMeeting (kinda like vnc with an emphasis on multiple-user simultaneous use) but with the ability to text chat and offer files to other people connected. I could see it being quite handy, but I don't think that there's anything that you can't do with an IM application or IRC plus vnc. It might be somewhat more convenient to bundle the above.
If Microsoft wants to make real, technical improvements that would help their market, I've got a great one -- provide a version-control system for Office apps. Let people merge their changes. It's incredibly annoying to have long documents that multiple people cannot work on at once. This is no problem if we're working on a text document or HTML document or LaTeX document or whatever, but you can't work simultaneously on a document in office. Grr.
No, they're quite aware of other voting systems. The existing system is quite stable:
(1) People who understand the existing voting system know that they must *massively* reject the existing system for it to be overturned. A major benefit of democracy is that it is very stable -- people have their opportunity to vent. The existing system allows two parties to retain power, and harshly punishes political activists by removing their voice until they reach a full third of the population. Voting Libertarian just means that you don't have any say at all, because the LP has nowhere near a third of the votes in the US.
(2) Neither D or R parties have any interest in changing the existing voting system, because it makes it very difficult for them to lose power.
None of that makes me want to vote LP in a federal election. The LP is way, way too extreme for me. The only way they are going to gain power is by winning smaller elections and moving up (which will probably force them to be a bit more moderate).
Having actually read the article I discovered that the two morons making the library announcement were county officials in the county dept of "Homeland Security" and were not part of the US Gov't Dept of Homeland Security. Moreover, these two blokes were acting on their own initiative and without approval from their superiors.
See, here's the problem. We have limitations on the power of government for a reason. It's because government badly abuses it when it gets the opportunity -- years of the FBI under Hoover taught us that lesson very well.
Now, lots of people -- possibly even well-meaning people -- in a position to receive increased powers are all for those increased powers. After all, *they* know that they are not going to abuse those powers. Surely, if someone else or someone later on abuses those powers, they'll be smacked down.
The problem is that this logic also justifies authority having unlimited, absolute power.
We already had to go through this very painfully before.
DCI James R. Schlesinger had commissioned a series of reports on past CIA wrongdoing. These reports, known euphemistically as "the Family Jewels", were kept close to the Agency's chest until an article by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times broke the news that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of foreign leaders and kept files on some seven thousand American citizens involved in the peace movement (Operation CHAOS). Congress investigated the CIA in the Senate through the Church committee, named after Chairman Frank Church (D-Idaho) and in the House through the Pike committee, named after Chairman Otis Pike (D-N.Y.); and these investigations led to further embarrassing disclosures. Around the Christmas of 1974/5, another blow was struck by Congress when they blocked covert intervention in Angola.
The CIA was subsequently prohibited from assassinating foreign leaders. Further, the prohibition against domestic spying, which had always been prohibited by the CIA charter, was again to be enforced, with the FBI having sole responsibility for domestic investigation of US citizens.
The FBI had plenty of its own dirty laundry turned up by the Church Committee.
Why go through all this again? We *know* that if you grant unnecessary powers and simply trust that they will not be abused, they *will* be abused. Why on earth did we allow PATRIOT through?
I remember when Microsoft's competitors got a lot of flack for just trailing MS. The times have changed. Most of the listed new features in Vista are MS playing catch-up with the competition:
1. Packet filtering capabilities, per-use administrator rights -- from Linux.
2. Tabs in IE -- from Firefox
3. Eye candy/transparency -- Mac OS X
4. Non-awful search system -- everyone was ahead of MS here
5. Better update system -- still no systemwide yum or apt, but the most abysmal thing about maintaining a Windows box was keeping it up to day, and IE was a piss-poor tool to do so with. See Linux.
6. Looks like MS is bundling the equivalent of rhythmbox/iTunes and gqview into Windows.
7. Parental filtering options -- Okay, I'm not aware of anyone else that bundles this in, so this may be new.
8. Better backups -- Linux's amanda.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration -- I don't yet know enough about what this actually translates to to be able to comment on it.
10. (apparently a wishlist item, not a real feature?)
Gonzales is the Bush family lawer, which is why he got appointed to be Attorney General. You can be quite certain that he's loyal to Bush over anyone else.
Compare to, say, Janet Reno, who worked her way up through the state AG route.
The government is interested in analysing the data as ia relates to unwanted porn coming up in searches.
And what right do they have to this data?
I can't walk up to Google and say "Hey, Google. Gimme all the contents of your database."
Maybe the police can, if they're trying to track a criminal. Maybe the FBI can, if they're worried about "terrorism". The PATRIOT Act gave up a lot for anything related to terrorism.
However, this is strictly to support the interest of a group in the federal government that wants to install pornography filters everywhere. It is not related to law enforcement or national security. The fact that this group is associated with the federal government and that someone else that *also* happens to work with the federal government does, under a different set of conditions, have the ability to demand this data does *not* mean that these filtering advocates have any right to demand data whatsoever.
And you bet your *balls* that it matters to Google's users whether or not their data can just go floating around wherever. I place a great deal of trust in Google not to simply barf out my search history to anyone that asks. If they did, I'd find use of Google unacceptable, and would have to do something like ram things through Tor or use alternate search engines. A search history contains a complete set of everything I researched, read about, or wanted to find out more about for *years*.
So, yes, Google is both in the right and has excellent reason not to turn this data over.
If the federal government wants to pay Google to produce a number that's a percentage of searches that return porn-related hits and Google finds this acceptable, I'd go for that.
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt.
You're a troll or an idiot. The government is subpoenaing Google's data for reasons unrelated to national security, crime, or anything else. Some faction in the GOP wants to promote pornography filters, and wants statistical data to support this view. They have *no* legal basis for demanding this data of Google -- nor, frankly, do I want them to get said data *or* start the precedent of being able to demand this data. It dwarfs the ability to demand library reading lists (which *already* requires a warrant or national security justification).
With the RIAA, a crime had been committed, and Yahoo was asking to not turn over information identifying the offenders (more or less, yes, this is simplified).
In this case, the government has *no* committed crime, and is not trying to track down any criminals. They are simply trying (or at least, this is their justification) to obtain Google's search data to support GOP initiatives to spread pornography filters based on the fact that N% of searches return pornography hits.
My take is that Google is completely in the right. The federal government has absolutely no right to that data, nor do I want them to be able to subpoena it.
As for not being identifiable, give me a break. You surf sites with ads served by people like Doubleclick and Google Ads. Google can match all past searches from your IP or from a machine with any cookies that they've set on your machine. This is not speculation -- they have specifically stated that they have this ability. It's a pretty good bet that a number of sites on the Web have your real name. Maybe it's not a drop-in "Google has a complete database", but it only takes Google + *one* other website you visit that has your personal name, and there's a damned comprehensive list of your thoughts, research, summary of what you're reading about and so forth available to the federal government.
Could that bio *possibly*, given the the number of Congressmen who have been playing with their bios, have been polished to make him look squeaky clean?
I ask because of the choice of words in the WP bio is generally those with positive connotations.
The United States bans toplessness on broadcast TV, unlike, say, the UK.
Should UK companies be allowed to violate these rules and slap bouncing breasts on US broadcast TV? This is an extremely similar case of censorship laws varying between countries.
So, I'm just curious. Do you think that when Cheney was running Haliburton that he acted ethically? Or, if we assume that Congress's use of "ethically" is short for "in US interests", did Haliburton act in US interests?
If not, why was he allowed to be the Vice President by the Republican Party?
Are you saying that the current Chinese regime and the Nazi regime are equivalently evil? If you are then my answer to you is that not only IBM but the whole of the U.S.A had something to have been ashamed of during that period.
I'd say that it's even more important that companies are not countries.
If Congress wants to push for a collapse of the current Chinese regime, great. They have the CIA, VoA, etc.
Corporations are not companies. We build an environment for them specifically in which they are not intended to be confrontational with countries, but to act in a profit-maximization mode and (if the country has designed the rules correctly) is rewarded for promoting the public good.
China has chosen slightly different rules for what is the "public good" than the US has. They don't want criticism of their government available to the typical citizen.
Now, remember that the last time that the *US* regime was scared of being overthrown (by communist ideology) that it took some similar steps to silence those that it percieved as a threat. Currently, the US regime does not have any fears of being overthrown, so it allows a broad range of speech.
At other times, when the US actually felt threatened, it has suppressed free speech via the Sedition Acts. From WP:
In practice, the Espionage Act, as amended by the Sedition Act, was used to persecute individuals or groups who disagreed with presidential or congressional policy. Historically, these types of acts have been suggested and/or passed when a presidential administration or congressional majority has lost general public support and additional, judicial tools are necessary to minimize public dissent. The Sedition Act was the most recent attempt by the United States government to limit "freedom of speech," in-so-much-as that "freedom of speech" related to the criticism of the government, or, more applicably, the political policies of the presidential administration or congressional majority.
The Espionage Act made it a crime to help wartime enemies of the United States, but the Sedition Act made it a crime to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States' form of government.
Socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison under this law.
Does this sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds an awful lot like China today to me.
Now, if Congress wants to push for the collapse of China's government, then it's Congress's job to use the existing tools that we pay for to do so. Hammering companies for not doing their job for them is just stupid. Companies don't have the ability to produce revolution. Google is not the dominant search provider in China, and if you successfully force them to use what influence they have to attack China's government, you will simply drive them out of the market. I'd argue that export of Google's sort services will be one of our more important exports in the future.
I just saw your.sig (so I figure you're one of the GP2X people) and I thought I'd mention this, though it's quite off-topic. I read a bit about the GP2X, and while I was quite interested -- that's a good price point, and is actually a portable system for which it's reasonable to develop -- I don't think I'm going to pick one up.
This was because of two main problems. One is battery life -- I'd much rather be able to shove four AA NiMH batteries in and double battery life at the cost of a little size and weight. Second is that the hardware sounds a little bit immature -- apparently as the batteries get nearly empty, odd things can happen on the system, and suddenly jerking the system can cause resets (at least for a couple of people).
It looked really promising, though, and I'm interested in seeing your next revision.
Internet radio is basically useless without broadband (128kbit mp3s, the standard, cannot be streamed on a 56k connection)
I know that there are some people that enjoy Internet radio, and I've played with it a little bit, but honestly, I don't know anyone that has kept consistently listening to an Internet radio station for years. I'm sure that there are Slashdotters that do so, but I'm suspicious that the number of people sticking with it may be low. I can listen to the song collection on my computer, and things like last.fm do a better job of recommending music that I'd like than Internet radio.
internet video is basically useless without broadband
I never figured out why people like Internet video. When I go to CNN, I find that it's almost always better to read the text with a few chosen video snapshots than to watch the video. They have the same concerned-but-not-overwrought talking heads and so forth. There's just no point in having someone reading my content aloud if I could more rapidly read it.
uploading/downloading is horrible on dial-up, even stuff like windows patches or linux kernal updates can take hours
Mmm...I do agree, but not really because of speed. I found that modem connections drop enough that with software that doesn't understand resuming downloads, it can be tough to download a large file. It's also an issue because a dial-up connection usually is contending with a voice line. However, simply in terms of speed...I never really had a problem batching things up. A steady, reliable 5K per second is not really a problem, at least for most legal content.
bittorrent? I don't think so
Agreed.
gaming? out of the question
This is kinda too bad -- there's no reason that modems need to add about 50ms of latency eacy way, but they do. However, back when I played online games (Team Fortress), I did have many enjoyable games over a modem.
I like my broadband connection, but, honestly, I don't find myself that crippled without it.
Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.
Well, they *could* use IP-based blocking of more than ten tries a day.
In unrelated news, MIT has the entire 18.0.0.0/8 class A subnet...
You must've somehow missed Outlook (the full version, not Express). Evolution has nothing on it.
Evolution lacks layers of modal dialogs (try adding someone to an address book distribution list -- three or four modal dialogs deep in Outlook!), and doesn't get into cycles where it hangs and starts barfing up dialogs about "LDAP Server found more entries than could be returned for your list" as Outlook does. I have absolutely zero idea why people rave about Outlook.
From the article: "A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey.
Poor saps.
I Slashdot with well-defined and concrete goals in mind.
I'm not saying that risk can be ignored. Obviously, a correct evaluation does factor in risk.
My argument is that the costs of risk are over-weighted in a corporation relative to trying to achieve that corporation's goals (but not necessarily relative to the individual's actions).
The "you need this because it's new" argument is broken for a whole different set of reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
You dislike Google for their actions in China? How can I put this...
Do you support the Iraq war?
No?
I don't either.
Even if you buy into the official justification (I *think* that this is the current one) that we were trying to spread democracy, the war is still a bad idea. You can't "impose" social revolution on people -- they just get ticked off at foreigners coming in and trying to run stuff. They have to decide that they want change themselves.
Similarly, trying to force a revolution in China by trying to directly subvert what the government wants just isn't too likely to succeed. If the people in China become unhappy enough with their lot, they'll do something. Currently, the majority are happy enough with what is going on not to do anything.
What Google did in China was, IMHO, the correct thing to do.
What is going on here is the federal government blatantly attempting to overstep its constitutional limits.
China's social norms state that censorship is okay. There are people that don't like it, but they haven't managed to change those social norms yet. What Google did there may rile those people who live in a culture that has demanded different social norms.
The demand for data from the US government is totally different.
I have, an expectation and a Constitutionally-protected right to not be searched without probable cause. This is something that *our* social norms do include. A group of people in the Bush Administration wants to push for porn filters, and wants to get data about how many returned searches contain porn. There is no crime here. There is no reason whatsoever for Google to give up that data, and some damn good reason for them not to do so (their users want their data to be private, and Google probably doesn't want a prescedent of having to turn over data to anyone that asks).
There is no probable cause here, because there is no crime. It is unfortunate that the Gonzales-led DoJ is the one demanding the data. It confuses many people (including a number of people on Slashdot, clearly), because they think that the DoJ has some kind of right to arbitrarily demand data of people. No; the people working there have no more right to demand that data than any American citizen does, which is zero, except is some specifically-enumerated cases. That generally translates to crime or national security.
Government access to Google's search databases would be catastrophic, and the fact that a demand was even issued is reminiscent of the 1950s. We have a society designed to allow people to read, debate, and discuss things freely. It is *crucial* that the people currently in power not have the ability to prevent citizens from doing this, or they have the ability to quash dissenting ideas from forming. Government access to Google's search data would be truly appalling. It can be used as a blackmail tool ("Sir, how can you run for a district attorney? Did you or did you not search for gay porn on twenty different occasions?"). This is not a sky-is-falling scenario. We know that exactly this does happen when these powers are granted the federal government -- under Hoover, the FBI did exactly this to a number of different people. It can be used to quash the attempt to spread criticism of the government. It can be used to find out what the political opposition is planning.
And there are people *criticizing* Google for fighting this. On Slashdot, none the less. I'm absolutely stunned by this. The only explanation I can think of is that it's low-level trolling from SEO types (who seem to harbour an inexplicable dislike of Google -- if Google didn't make it hard to cheat the system, they wouldn't have jobs).
What kind of paint do you have to be inhaling to be bashing Google for doing this?
The difference is that google.cn has a filter. You may not like it, but it's not privacy-invasive.
The US subpeona is to turn over data that users consider private.
I'd consider it a pretty large difference.
I believe that you can probably get a pretty similar effect by using vnc or gnomemeeting (shared desktop access) and IRC (file offering + chat), but MS is bundling things and will probably make it easier to use.
They have have SmartFetch or whatever it's called so it knows what applications you typically use and at what times so it'll preload them into memory making it seem snappier.
I was thinking that something a bit simpler might make a nifty feature for Linux -- track which blocks are usually loaded after which blocks on a block device, and then follow that trail instead of simple read-ahead. I posted about this on Slashdot ages ago.
I guess you could do the same thing at the filesystem level.
I think that the "try to load N at time of day N" might be a little complex to reliably work, though, unless people follow *extremely* predictable usage patterns.
Like most other folks here, I hadn't heard of "Windows Collaboration" before
The "P2P" is peer-to-peer in the original sense of the word, as Microsoft's IPC and printing mechanism is peer-to-peer -- you don't need to specially designate servers. This is not a "P2P filesharing" application in the vein of Gnutella.
It looks like it might be basically NetMeeting (kinda like vnc with an emphasis on multiple-user simultaneous use) but with the ability to text chat and offer files to other people connected. I could see it being quite handy, but I don't think that there's anything that you can't do with an IM application or IRC plus vnc. It might be somewhat more convenient to bundle the above.
If Microsoft wants to make real, technical improvements that would help their market, I've got a great one -- provide a version-control system for Office apps. Let people merge their changes. It's incredibly annoying to have long documents that multiple people cannot work on at once. This is no problem if we're working on a text document or HTML document or LaTeX document or whatever, but you can't work simultaneously on a document in office. Grr.
No, they're quite aware of other voting systems. The existing system is quite stable:
(1) People who understand the existing voting system know that they must *massively* reject the existing system for it to be overturned. A major benefit of democracy is that it is very stable -- people have their opportunity to vent. The existing system allows two parties to retain power, and harshly punishes political activists by removing their voice until they reach a full third of the population. Voting Libertarian just means that you don't have any say at all, because the LP has nowhere near a third of the votes in the US.
(2) Neither D or R parties have any interest in changing the existing voting system, because it makes it very difficult for them to lose power.
None of that makes me want to vote LP in a federal election. The LP is way, way too extreme for me. The only way they are going to gain power is by winning smaller elections and moving up (which will probably force them to be a bit more moderate).
Having actually read the article I discovered that the two morons making the library announcement were county officials in the county dept of "Homeland Security" and were not part of the US Gov't Dept of Homeland Security. Moreover, these two blokes were acting on their own initiative and without approval from their superiors.
See, here's the problem. We have limitations on the power of government for a reason. It's because government badly abuses it when it gets the opportunity -- years of the FBI under Hoover taught us that lesson very well.
Now, lots of people -- possibly even well-meaning people -- in a position to receive increased powers are all for those increased powers. After all, *they* know that they are not going to abuse those powers. Surely, if someone else or someone later on abuses those powers, they'll be smacked down.
The problem is that this logic also justifies authority having unlimited, absolute power.
We already had to go through this very painfully before.
From WP's CIA article:
DCI James R. Schlesinger had commissioned a series of reports on past CIA wrongdoing. These reports, known euphemistically as "the Family Jewels", were kept close to the Agency's chest until an article by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times broke the news that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of foreign leaders and kept files on some seven thousand American citizens involved in the peace movement (Operation CHAOS). Congress investigated the CIA in the Senate through the Church committee, named after Chairman Frank Church (D-Idaho) and in the House through the Pike committee, named after Chairman Otis Pike (D-N.Y.); and these investigations led to further embarrassing disclosures. Around the Christmas of 1974/5, another blow was struck by Congress when they blocked covert intervention in Angola.
The CIA was subsequently prohibited from assassinating foreign leaders. Further, the prohibition against domestic spying, which had always been prohibited by the CIA charter, was again to be enforced, with the FBI having sole responsibility for domestic investigation of US citizens.
The FBI had plenty of its own dirty laundry turned up by the Church Committee.
Why go through all this again? We *know* that if you grant unnecessary powers and simply trust that they will not be abused, they *will* be abused. Why on earth did we allow PATRIOT through?
I remember when Microsoft's competitors got a lot of flack for just trailing MS. The times have changed. Most of the listed new features in Vista are MS playing catch-up with the competition:
1. Packet filtering capabilities, per-use administrator rights -- from Linux.
2. Tabs in IE -- from Firefox
3. Eye candy/transparency -- Mac OS X
4. Non-awful search system -- everyone was ahead of MS here
5. Better update system -- still no systemwide yum or apt, but the most abysmal thing about maintaining a Windows box was keeping it up to day, and IE was a piss-poor tool to do so with. See Linux.
6. Looks like MS is bundling the equivalent of rhythmbox/iTunes and gqview into Windows.
7. Parental filtering options -- Okay, I'm not aware of anyone else that bundles this in, so this may be new.
8. Better backups -- Linux's amanda.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration -- I don't yet know enough about what this actually translates to to be able to comment on it.
10. (apparently a wishlist item, not a real feature?)
Gonzales is the Bush family lawer, which is why he got appointed to be Attorney General. You can be quite certain that he's loyal to Bush over anyone else.
Compare to, say, Janet Reno, who worked her way up through the state AG route.
The government is interested in analysing the data as ia relates to unwanted porn coming up in searches.
And what right do they have to this data?
I can't walk up to Google and say "Hey, Google. Gimme all the contents of your database."
Maybe the police can, if they're trying to track a criminal. Maybe the FBI can, if they're worried about "terrorism". The PATRIOT Act gave up a lot for anything related to terrorism.
However, this is strictly to support the interest of a group in the federal government that wants to install pornography filters everywhere. It is not related to law enforcement or national security. The fact that this group is associated with the federal government and that someone else that *also* happens to work with the federal government does, under a different set of conditions, have the ability to demand this data does *not* mean that these filtering advocates have any right to demand data whatsoever.
And you bet your *balls* that it matters to Google's users whether or not their data can just go floating around wherever. I place a great deal of trust in Google not to simply barf out my search history to anyone that asks. If they did, I'd find use of Google unacceptable, and would have to do something like ram things through Tor or use alternate search engines. A search history contains a complete set of everything I researched, read about, or wanted to find out more about for *years*.
So, yes, Google is both in the right and has excellent reason not to turn this data over.
If the federal government wants to pay Google to produce a number that's a percentage of searches that return porn-related hits and Google finds this acceptable, I'd go for that.
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt.
You're a troll or an idiot. The government is subpoenaing Google's data for reasons unrelated to national security, crime, or anything else. Some faction in the GOP wants to promote pornography filters, and wants statistical data to support this view. They have *no* legal basis for demanding this data of Google -- nor, frankly, do I want them to get said data *or* start the precedent of being able to demand this data. It dwarfs the ability to demand library reading lists (which *already* requires a warrant or national security justification).
But there is a difference.
With the RIAA, a crime had been committed, and Yahoo was asking to not turn over information identifying the offenders (more or less, yes, this is simplified).
In this case, the government has *no* committed crime, and is not trying to track down any criminals. They are simply trying (or at least, this is their justification) to obtain Google's search data to support GOP initiatives to spread pornography filters based on the fact that N% of searches return pornography hits.
My take is that Google is completely in the right. The federal government has absolutely no right to that data, nor do I want them to be able to subpoena it.
As for not being identifiable, give me a break. You surf sites with ads served by people like Doubleclick and Google Ads. Google can match all past searches from your IP or from a machine with any cookies that they've set on your machine. This is not speculation -- they have specifically stated that they have this ability. It's a pretty good bet that a number of sites on the Web have your real name. Maybe it's not a drop-in "Google has a complete database", but it only takes Google + *one* other website you visit that has your personal name, and there's a damned comprehensive list of your thoughts, research, summary of what you're reading about and so forth available to the federal government.
I don't think that this is a very good thing.
Could that bio *possibly*, given the the number of Congressmen who have been playing with their bios, have been polished to make him look squeaky clean?
I ask because of the choice of words in the WP bio is generally those with positive connotations.
An even closer analogy:
The United States bans toplessness on broadcast TV, unlike, say, the UK.
Should UK companies be allowed to violate these rules and slap bouncing breasts on US broadcast TV? This is an extremely similar case of censorship laws varying between countries.
So, I'm just curious. Do you think that when Cheney was running Haliburton that he acted ethically? Or, if we assume that Congress's use of "ethically" is short for "in US interests", did Haliburton act in US interests?
If not, why was he allowed to be the Vice President by the Republican Party?
Just a thought.
Are you saying that the current Chinese regime and the Nazi regime are equivalently evil? If you are then my answer to you is that not only IBM but the whole of the U.S.A had something to have been ashamed of during that period.
I'd say that it's even more important that companies are not countries.
If Congress wants to push for a collapse of the current Chinese regime, great. They have the CIA, VoA, etc.
Corporations are not companies. We build an environment for them specifically in which they are not intended to be confrontational with countries, but to act in a profit-maximization mode and (if the country has designed the rules correctly) is rewarded for promoting the public good.
China has chosen slightly different rules for what is the "public good" than the US has. They don't want criticism of their government available to the typical citizen.
Now, remember that the last time that the *US* regime was scared of being overthrown (by communist ideology) that it took some similar steps to silence those that it percieved as a threat. Currently, the US regime does not have any fears of being overthrown, so it allows a broad range of speech.
At other times, when the US actually felt threatened, it has suppressed free speech via the Sedition Acts. From WP:
In practice, the Espionage Act, as amended by the Sedition Act, was used to persecute individuals or groups who disagreed with presidential or congressional policy. Historically, these types of acts have been suggested and/or passed when a presidential administration or congressional majority has lost general public support and additional, judicial tools are necessary to minimize public dissent. The Sedition Act was the most recent attempt by the United States government to limit "freedom of speech," in-so-much-as that "freedom of speech" related to the criticism of the government, or, more applicably, the political policies of the presidential administration or congressional majority.
The Espionage Act made it a crime to help wartime enemies of the United States, but the Sedition Act made it a crime to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States' form of government.
Socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison under this law.
Does this sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds an awful lot like China today to me.
Now, if Congress wants to push for the collapse of China's government, then it's Congress's job to use the existing tools that we pay for to do so. Hammering companies for not doing their job for them is just stupid. Companies don't have the ability to produce revolution. Google is not the dominant search provider in China, and if you successfully force them to use what influence they have to attack China's government, you will simply drive them out of the market. I'd argue that export of Google's sort services will be one of our more important exports in the future.
I just saw your .sig (so I figure you're one of the GP2X people) and I thought I'd mention this, though it's quite off-topic. I read a bit about the GP2X, and while I was quite interested -- that's a good price point, and is actually a portable system for which it's reasonable to develop -- I don't think I'm going to pick one up.
This was because of two main problems. One is battery life -- I'd much rather be able to shove four AA NiMH batteries in and double battery life at the cost of a little size and weight. Second is that the hardware sounds a little bit immature -- apparently as the batteries get nearly empty, odd things can happen on the system, and suddenly jerking the system can cause resets (at least for a couple of people).
It looked really promising, though, and I'm interested in seeing your next revision.
Internet radio is basically useless without broadband (128kbit mp3s, the standard, cannot be streamed on a 56k connection)
I know that there are some people that enjoy Internet radio, and I've played with it a little bit, but honestly, I don't know anyone that has kept consistently listening to an Internet radio station for years. I'm sure that there are Slashdotters that do so, but I'm suspicious that the number of people sticking with it may be low. I can listen to the song collection on my computer, and things like last.fm do a better job of recommending music that I'd like than Internet radio.
internet video is basically useless without broadband
I never figured out why people like Internet video. When I go to CNN, I find that it's almost always better to read the text with a few chosen video snapshots than to watch the video. They have the same concerned-but-not-overwrought talking heads and so forth. There's just no point in having someone reading my content aloud if I could more rapidly read it.
uploading/downloading is horrible on dial-up, even stuff like windows patches or linux kernal updates can take hours
Mmm...I do agree, but not really because of speed. I found that modem connections drop enough that with software that doesn't understand resuming downloads, it can be tough to download a large file. It's also an issue because a dial-up connection usually is contending with a voice line. However, simply in terms of speed...I never really had a problem batching things up. A steady, reliable 5K per second is not really a problem, at least for most legal content.
bittorrent? I don't think so
Agreed.
gaming? out of the question
This is kinda too bad -- there's no reason that modems need to add about 50ms of latency eacy way, but they do. However, back when I played online games (Team Fortress), I did have many enjoyable games over a modem.
I like my broadband connection, but, honestly, I don't find myself that crippled without it.
due to 500k flash files needed just to navigate around.
Actually, that makes things less workable for broadband users as well -- it just cripples broadband users *less* than modem users.
When I have the option of a "lite" but fully functional version of a site or one bogged down with Flash, it's a pretty easy choice to make.
Existing search engines that have a similar scheme only allow you to win on your first ten searches per day, or something along those lines, in order to prevent automated searching abuses.
Well, they *could* use IP-based blocking of more than ten tries a day.
In unrelated news, MIT has the entire 18.0.0.0/8 class A subnet...
Plato's Cave...
Excellent reference, sir.
You must've somehow missed Outlook (the full version, not Express). Evolution has nothing on it.
Evolution lacks layers of modal dialogs (try adding someone to an address book distribution list -- three or four modal dialogs deep in Outlook!), and doesn't get into cycles where it hangs and starts barfing up dialogs about "LDAP Server found more entries than could be returned for your list" as Outlook does. I have absolutely zero idea why people rave about Outlook.
That being said, I use mutt.
From the article: "A survey of 1,931 Internet users conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project in late November and December 2005 found 30 percent of respondents said they went online "for no particular reason" on the previous day. That was up from 21 percent in a November 2004 survey.
Poor saps.
I Slashdot with well-defined and concrete goals in mind.
I'm not saying that risk can be ignored. Obviously, a correct evaluation does factor in risk.
My argument is that the costs of risk are over-weighted in a corporation relative to trying to achieve that corporation's goals (but not necessarily relative to the individual's actions).
The "you need this because it's new" argument is broken for a whole different set of reasons.