He then added "I mean, what good are principles anyway? They don't make you any money. Keeping your word and following your beliefs, well, it's highly overrated.
And somewhere in Redmond, WA, someone is cackling...
But how is a telco monopoly going to get us closer to that end state?
I didn't mean to suggest it would -- I don't want a telco monopoly any more than anyone else does. I was trying to suggest that there was a better way to fight the potential monopoly using the RICO statutes.
The real solution is simple. Run the physical plant of the telcos as a public utility, and sell access to data solutions providers of various stripes. AT&T can compete on a level field with everybody else, and live or die by the quality of their products.
I've been espousing that viewpoint for a while. Take the infrastructure out of the telcos hands; make them work within the confines of a system run by the government. It would level the field and also give other companies a chance to get in the game without having to merge with or acquire their own telco.
I'm not taking credit for breaking up Ma Bell -- I always said it was a bad idea and I've been proven right, this being the latest case. The fact is, the government thought that innovation was being stifled with AT&T holding all the cards, but despite the technology boom created in the wake of its breakup, it's created more chaos than anything. How easy is it to get phone service these days? How's the customer service?
AT&T did not get broken up so much as cloned, and now those clones are threatening to throttle the Internet for their own personal gain.
When I was in high school in the late 60s (yes, I'm THAT old) we knew that pictures were being taken of all of us at the anti-war rallies. For those of us on a stage from time to time, we were pretty darn sure we weren't going to be allowed to run for governor any time soon.
Yes, but those pictures would be placed in a physical file, then dumped in a filing cabinet somewhere, to languish and moulder until someone thought to try and use the data in it for some purpose, where they would have to drag it out, collate and coordinate it with data from god-knows how many other files.
We're talking the use of high-speed computers running efficient data mining algorithms which could potentially sift through billions of pieces of data and track trends in matters of hours, not weeks or months. Not to mention, data would constantly be added, and the trends updated on a daily basis. And you wouldn't be going to any rallies to have this done to you -- it could swept out of your blog or right off your personal MySpace page. And even though you haven't a traitorous bone in your body, these data mining algorithms could link your data to the data gleaned from others and create what amounts to a case that you're party to something you're not.
Think of the recommendations Amazon makes when you purchase something: they track trends in the purchase of items, and make suggestions about other items that others have purchased when they purchased the item you've selected. Now take that and expand it.
It's good to see such huge advances in domestic spying instead of things like stem cell research.
I know it's modded "Funny," but there's a grain fo truth to it. Just how much is getting spent on this? How much money does the Federal government waste on such programs while our schools, our healthcare system, and our veterans go wanting?
If you put a sign in your front yard declaring how much you hate the government, you shouldn't act too surprised when the government reads it.
True... but if you put personal data up on the Internet for everyone to see, hoping to attract like-minded individuals and get your personal ideas and beliefs out into the main stream, you really don't expect the Federal Government to take that information, process, and try to link you to nefarious doings, do you? Mind you, I think it's a poor idea to put too much correct personal information out there, because it's not just government snoops you have to worry about. Still, given the fact that it's easy to string together unrelated information to make a plausible case (prosecutors do this a lot), you have to wonder just how the Feds might misinterpret your information and calim your involvement in something you have nothing to do with. Remember, we interned Japanese-Americans during WWII, not because they were spies, but just because of their Japanese ancestry.
It's a little late to worry about reading the text and contacting your Congressman...
From the article: The debate over the issue now moves to the US Senate where the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will vote on its version of the act in late June. The debate in that chamber is also likely to centre on issues of net neutrality.
It's too late to lobby your Representative, but it's still possible to put pressure on your state Senators.
No, but this could be the start of the GoogleNet; remember, Google's supposedly being buying up dark fiber for a while. Perhaps they saw this coming or at least wanted to be prepared for it.
The Internet has reached the point where it is, essentially, as much of a necessity of modern Western society as the telephone. Therefore, if EVERY telco implements a tiered bandwidth system, there won't be anyone to turn to after they cancel the contract...leaving the consumer high-and-dry without an ISP.
But suppose all the telcos banded together to do this, to set limits and impose tolls -- wouldn't that be a virtual monopoly? More importantly, wouldn't that be collusion, possibly prosecuteable under the RICO racketeering statutes? Perhaps there's more than one way to fight this.
You've probably seen the experiments where users can be conned into giving up their passwords for a chocolate bar or a $1 bill. But this little giveaway took those a step further, working off humans' innate curiosity. Emailed virus writers exploit this same vulnerability, as do phishers and their clever faux Websites. Our credit union client wasn't unique or special. All the technology and filtering and scanning in the world won't address human nature. But it remains the single biggest open door to any company's secrets.
There you have it -- invest in fancy firewalls, make people change their passwords every 90 days, filter email from spam, phish, virii, and trojans, and then sit back and watch as your employees bypass all those lovely defenses and lay your system vulnerable.
I've said it before: there's no use building a wall, firing up the boiling oil, and digging a moat and filling it with sharks if you're going to build an 8-lane superhighway through it. Companies are trying to crack down, but the myriad ways that information can get stolen or transferred from a system are enourmous. USB drives, camera phones, MP3 players -- anything that can store data is a potential point of vulnerability, one which a company will be hard pressed to monitor or control. Couple that with this sudden rash of stolen laptops carrying unencrypted and often sensitive data, and the there's no reason for hackers to work too hard any more, when they can just have data handed to them.
Ok, let's give the alleged thieves the benefit of the doubt. No matter what their story (and isn't it interesting to see how their stories change), it should be quite clear to them now that the Sidekick does not belong to them, and whether purchased from someone or found, they now have an object that has been reported stolen, making them accessories, no matter how you cut it. IANAL, but it doesn't take a shark to smell blood.
What makes this truly outrageous is that it doesn't occur to them that they've been found out. Thanks to Evan's website, everyone and his uncle knows about this:
From the web site:Update #12: June 7th, 7:00 p.m. eastern Sorry for the lack of updates...I answered emails till 1 p.m. and then had to leave to work...But I made it a short day so I could come back and give everyone an update..Wasn't that nice of me:-) Anyways.... I see that I have over 900 emails since 1 p.m. I will try and answer as many as I can. I will also add all the links you sent me to the ones below...I quickly scrolled though and must have counted at least 100-200 new links. I also have received emails from people offering me ISP hosting...As of right now, I should be good. I have unlimited bandwidth with this company...and so far I have not gotten the "digg" effect.(almost 3,200 at least count!). I have also talked to some radio stations. New York's 1010 WINS being one of them. Interviews are being scheduled for this week.
They might have been able to save face once they were "caught," but now it's going to be impossible. What's worse, they're stupid enough to keep using the thing, compounding their trouble!
It goes to show the power of the Internet though; once something is out there, the information is global in minutes. And there are pictures! These folks are not going to be able to hide for a long time... unless they wind up in a penitentiary somewhere.
No, I'm saying Google was in a bit too much of a hurry to blaze a trail into China, and hadn't learned anything from the past fifty years of Chinese history. The Chinese don't need anyone's help to censor things; they were doing it before Google came along, although Google certainly made it more expedient. The Chinese government will continue to have its way unitl some kind of root change happens and the Chinese people get tired of its policies.
The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.
Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.
My basic problem with that whole scenario is that the number of Internet users in China, while growing, is actually a tiny fraction of the population. If you're waiting for Gogole's pullout to plant the seeds of revolution, you'll have to wait a long time for them to sprout. Most Chinese will not miss Google, and I think those that do are not a significant enough number that the Chinese government has to fear them. China will only change when something happens on a fundamental level, one that impacts not just the urban Internet users but the rural poor. Google is in no position to be that catalyst for change.
Why does Slashdot continue to even acknowledge 'studies' performed by the Yankee Group? You think we would have learned our lesson by now...
Cockeyed optimism. There may come a time when they actually have something useful to say. I'm not sure if they are Windows biased, but the fact is they're not a completely independent organization either. Let's face, how easy is it to find a group of people who arent't OS biased, who are at the same time technically proficient and knowledgeable? People have been having Ford vs. Chevy agruments for years, but both still exist.
Helping someone that you know is evil can only be considered evil. Shining the devil's shoes so he looks good when he goes to a party? Evil, baby.
The only caveat to that is defining "evil." It's actually a poor choice of words. What is evil? Evil can be very contextual: I suspect there are people who think gay marriage is "evil" and others who think bible study is "evil" -- it pretty much depends on who you are.
In Google's case, they can't really get away with saying that they had no inkling they'd be helping a totalitarian regime. China's history in the last 50 years is an open book. They rushed in and now they're trying to slink back out, without taking too much damage in the process.
Should you choose your actions based on their effects or on your principles? Ethicists could argue either side of that until you ran out of the room in boredom. Google chose, or tried to choose, the greatest good for the greatest number. We can all guess what rms would have done in their place.
But you have to know, givent the history of China and its government, that you're going to need to sell a part of your soul to operate there. I think it boils down to Google being in too much of a rush to "conquer" China before anyone else did, no doubt driven by financial realities. Yet there comes a point where you have to ask: is our soul worth that much? Do the easy dollars China represents compensate for facilitating the grip of a regime which works very hard to limit its peoples access to information? That's a puzzler when you're one of the largest, if not the largest, purveyors of information in the world.
Google should not have been in such a rush; a better strategy would have been to let Microsoft and Yahoo rush in and get thumped around, then learn from their experiences before diving in themselves. It might have saved them some long-overdue soul-searching.
Speaking in Washington, Sergey Brin, Google's billionaire co-founder, said the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with".
In a hint that Google could adjust its stance in China in the future, he added: "Perhaps now [emphasis mine] the principled approach makes more sense."
So what took you so long Sergey? Why now? Why couldn't you see this was a bad idea from the start? Talk about coming to the party late!
Just how much back-pedalling Google does now should be interesting, as this is no doubt going to cause revenue problems in the long run and a bit of a publicity flap in the short run, though if Google decides to finally stand on its principles and other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo don't follow along, it should regain a lot of standing in many people's eyes. Well, except for the Chinese government's anyway...
The original event, the 26.5 million veteran records, may be old news, but now that has widened to encompass 2.2 million active members of the military, so this is hardly 3-week-old news. What it points to is a systemic problem -- why can't people keep sensitive data safe? The discussions here on Slashdot have gone on and on, with the consensus being that it seems stupid not to encrypt data, given the widespread availability of decent encryption software.
If anything, this is going to prove a blow to the idea of telecommuting and/or working from home. Not to get too far off topic, but companies may now become very leery of sensitive data making it out past their firewalls, especially when it seems their employees can't handle it properly or keep it safe.
Slashdot Mirror
He then added "I mean, what good are principles anyway? They don't make you any money. Keeping your word and following your beliefs, well, it's highly overrated.
And somewhere in Redmond, WA, someone is cackling...
"Look, this works. I have proof."
"I refuse to believe it can work."
Or put another way... "I'll see it when I believe it."
If they can't listen to reason, we'll have to wait for them to die, it seems.
Who said anything about waiting? Perhaps we can facilitate their demise, as it were. [NOTE to NSA -- that's a joke, son!]
Glickman: You are powerful, as the Emperor expected. But you are not a Jedi yet.
Barlow: You'll find I'm full of surprises!
Clash of lightsabers, sparks
Glickman: You don't know the power of the DRM Side! Join me!
Barlow: Never! I'll never join you!
Glickman: It is pointless to resist!
Flamebait? Has everyone lost their sense of humor?
But how is a telco monopoly going to get us closer to that end state?
I didn't mean to suggest it would -- I don't want a telco monopoly any more than anyone else does. I was trying to suggest that there was a better way to fight the potential monopoly using the RICO statutes.
The real solution is simple. Run the physical plant of the telcos as a public utility, and sell access to data solutions providers of various stripes. AT&T can compete on a level field with everybody else, and live or die by the quality of their products.
I've been espousing that viewpoint for a while. Take the infrastructure out of the telcos hands; make them work within the confines of a system run by the government. It would level the field and also give other companies a chance to get in the game without having to merge with or acquire their own telco.
Does anyone still play that?
Yeah, your strategy worked GREAT on AT&T.
I'm not taking credit for breaking up Ma Bell -- I always said it was a bad idea and I've been proven right, this being the latest case. The fact is, the government thought that innovation was being stifled with AT&T holding all the cards, but despite the technology boom created in the wake of its breakup, it's created more chaos than anything. How easy is it to get phone service these days? How's the customer service?
AT&T did not get broken up so much as cloned, and now those clones are threatening to throttle the Internet for their own personal gain.
When I was in high school in the late 60s (yes, I'm THAT old) we knew that pictures were being taken of all of us at the anti-war rallies. For those of us on a stage from time to time, we were pretty darn sure we weren't going to be allowed to run for governor any time soon.
Yes, but those pictures would be placed in a physical file, then dumped in a filing cabinet somewhere, to languish and moulder until someone thought to try and use the data in it for some purpose, where they would have to drag it out, collate and coordinate it with data from god-knows how many other files.
We're talking the use of high-speed computers running efficient data mining algorithms which could potentially sift through billions of pieces of data and track trends in matters of hours, not weeks or months. Not to mention, data would constantly be added, and the trends updated on a daily basis. And you wouldn't be going to any rallies to have this done to you -- it could swept out of your blog or right off your personal MySpace page. And even though you haven't a traitorous bone in your body, these data mining algorithms could link your data to the data gleaned from others and create what amounts to a case that you're party to something you're not.
Think of the recommendations Amazon makes when you purchase something: they track trends in the purchase of items, and make suggestions about other items that others have purchased when they purchased the item you've selected. Now take that and expand it.
It's good to see such huge advances in domestic spying instead of things like stem cell research.
I know it's modded "Funny," but there's a grain fo truth to it. Just how much is getting spent on this? How much money does the Federal government waste on such programs while our schools, our healthcare system, and our veterans go wanting?
If you put a sign in your front yard declaring how much you hate the government, you shouldn't act too surprised when the government reads it.
True... but if you put personal data up on the Internet for everyone to see, hoping to attract like-minded individuals and get your personal ideas and beliefs out into the main stream, you really don't expect the Federal Government to take that information, process, and try to link you to nefarious doings, do you? Mind you, I think it's a poor idea to put too much correct personal information out there, because it's not just government snoops you have to worry about. Still, given the fact that it's easy to string together unrelated information to make a plausible case (prosecutors do this a lot), you have to wonder just how the Feds might misinterpret your information and calim your involvement in something you have nothing to do with. Remember, we interned Japanese-Americans during WWII, not because they were spies, but just because of their Japanese ancestry.
It's a little late to worry about reading the text and contacting your Congressman...
From the article: The debate over the issue now moves to the US Senate where the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will vote on its version of the act in late June. The debate in that chamber is also likely to centre on issues of net neutrality.
It's too late to lobby your Representative, but it's still possible to put pressure on your state Senators.
No, but this could be the start of the GoogleNet; remember, Google's supposedly being buying up dark fiber for a while. Perhaps they saw this coming or at least wanted to be prepared for it.
The Internet has reached the point where it is, essentially, as much of a necessity of modern Western society as the telephone. Therefore, if EVERY telco implements a tiered bandwidth system, there won't be anyone to turn to after they cancel the contract...leaving the consumer high-and-dry without an ISP.
But suppose all the telcos banded together to do this, to set limits and impose tolls -- wouldn't that be a virtual monopoly? More importantly, wouldn't that be collusion, possibly prosecuteable under the RICO racketeering statutes? Perhaps there's more than one way to fight this.
You've probably seen the experiments where users can be conned into giving up their passwords for a chocolate bar or a $1 bill. But this little giveaway took those a step further, working off humans' innate curiosity. Emailed virus writers exploit this same vulnerability, as do phishers and their clever faux Websites. Our credit union client wasn't unique or special. All the technology and filtering and scanning in the world won't address human nature. But it remains the single biggest open door to any company's secrets.
There you have it -- invest in fancy firewalls, make people change their passwords every 90 days, filter email from spam, phish, virii, and trojans, and then sit back and watch as your employees bypass all those lovely defenses and lay your system vulnerable.
I've said it before: there's no use building a wall, firing up the boiling oil, and digging a moat and filling it with sharks if you're going to build an 8-lane superhighway through it. Companies are trying to crack down, but the myriad ways that information can get stolen or transferred from a system are enourmous. USB drives, camera phones, MP3 players -- anything that can store data is a potential point of vulnerability, one which a company will be hard pressed to monitor or control. Couple that with this sudden rash of stolen laptops carrying unencrypted and often sensitive data, and the there's no reason for hackers to work too hard any more, when they can just have data handed to them.
So if anyone has insight as to if google, microsoft, ebay, yahoo and any others have been able to buy any congressman, please tell me
Do you think buying Congressmen would violate Google's "Do no evil" ethos?
Ok, let's give the alleged thieves the benefit of the doubt. No matter what their story (and isn't it interesting to see how their stories change), it should be quite clear to them now that the Sidekick does not belong to them, and whether purchased from someone or found, they now have an object that has been reported stolen, making them accessories, no matter how you cut it. IANAL, but it doesn't take a shark to smell blood.
What makes this truly outrageous is that it doesn't occur to them that they've been found out. Thanks to Evan's website, everyone and his uncle knows about this:
From the web site:Update #12: June 7th, 7:00 p.m. eastern Sorry for the lack of updates...I answered emails till 1 p.m. and then had to leave to work...But I made it a short day so I could come back and give everyone an update..Wasn't that nice of me :-) Anyways.... I see that I have over 900 emails since 1 p.m. I will try and answer as many as I can. I will also add all the links you sent me to the ones below...I quickly scrolled though and must have counted at least 100-200 new links. I also have received emails from people offering me ISP hosting...As of right now, I should be good. I have unlimited bandwidth with this company...and so far I have not gotten the "digg" effect.(almost 3,200 at least count!). I have also talked to some radio stations. New York's 1010 WINS being one of them. Interviews are being scheduled for this week.
They might have been able to save face once they were "caught," but now it's going to be impossible. What's worse, they're stupid enough to keep using the thing, compounding their trouble!
It goes to show the power of the Internet though; once something is out there, the information is global in minutes. And there are pictures! These folks are not going to be able to hide for a long time... unless they wind up in a penitentiary somewhere.
No, I'm saying Google was in a bit too much of a hurry to blaze a trail into China, and hadn't learned anything from the past fifty years of Chinese history. The Chinese don't need anyone's help to censor things; they were doing it before Google came along, although Google certainly made it more expedient. The Chinese government will continue to have its way unitl some kind of root change happens and the Chinese people get tired of its policies.
The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.
Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.
My basic problem with that whole scenario is that the number of Internet users in China, while growing, is actually a tiny fraction of the population. If you're waiting for Gogole's pullout to plant the seeds of revolution, you'll have to wait a long time for them to sprout. Most Chinese will not miss Google, and I think those that do are not a significant enough number that the Chinese government has to fear them. China will only change when something happens on a fundamental level, one that impacts not just the urban Internet users but the rural poor. Google is in no position to be that catalyst for change.
Why does Slashdot continue to even acknowledge 'studies' performed by the Yankee Group? You think we would have learned our lesson by now...
Cockeyed optimism. There may come a time when they actually have something useful to say. I'm not sure if they are Windows biased, but the fact is they're not a completely independent organization either. Let's face, how easy is it to find a group of people who arent't OS biased, who are at the same time technically proficient and knowledgeable? People have been having Ford vs. Chevy agruments for years, but both still exist.
Helping someone that you know is evil can only be considered evil. Shining the devil's shoes so he looks good when he goes to a party? Evil, baby.
The only caveat to that is defining "evil." It's actually a poor choice of words. What is evil? Evil can be very contextual: I suspect there are people who think gay marriage is "evil" and others who think bible study is "evil" -- it pretty much depends on who you are.
In Google's case, they can't really get away with saying that they had no inkling they'd be helping a totalitarian regime. China's history in the last 50 years is an open book. They rushed in and now they're trying to slink back out, without taking too much damage in the process.
Should you choose your actions based on their effects or on your principles? Ethicists could argue either side of that until you ran out of the room in boredom. Google chose, or tried to choose, the greatest good for the greatest number. We can all guess what rms would have done in their place.
But you have to know, givent the history of China and its government, that you're going to need to sell a part of your soul to operate there. I think it boils down to Google being in too much of a rush to "conquer" China before anyone else did, no doubt driven by financial realities. Yet there comes a point where you have to ask: is our soul worth that much? Do the easy dollars China represents compensate for facilitating the grip of a regime which works very hard to limit its peoples access to information? That's a puzzler when you're one of the largest, if not the largest, purveyors of information in the world.
Google should not have been in such a rush; a better strategy would have been to let Microsoft and Yahoo rush in and get thumped around, then learn from their experiences before diving in themselves. It might have saved them some long-overdue soul-searching.
Speaking in Washington, Sergey Brin, Google's billionaire co-founder, said the company, which operates under the motto "do no evil", had adopted "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with".
In a hint that Google could adjust its stance in China in the future, he added: "Perhaps now [emphasis mine] the principled approach makes more sense."
So what took you so long Sergey? Why now? Why couldn't you see this was a bad idea from the start? Talk about coming to the party late!
Just how much back-pedalling Google does now should be interesting, as this is no doubt going to cause revenue problems in the long run and a bit of a publicity flap in the short run, though if Google decides to finally stand on its principles and other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo don't follow along, it should regain a lot of standing in many people's eyes. Well, except for the Chinese government's anyway...
The original event, the 26.5 million veteran records, may be old news, but now that has widened to encompass 2.2 million active members of the military, so this is hardly 3-week-old news. What it points to is a systemic problem -- why can't people keep sensitive data safe? The discussions here on Slashdot have gone on and on, with the consensus being that it seems stupid not to encrypt data, given the widespread availability of decent encryption software.
If anything, this is going to prove a blow to the idea of telecommuting and/or working from home. Not to get too far off topic, but companies may now become very leery of sensitive data making it out past their firewalls, especially when it seems their employees can't handle it properly or keep it safe.