See, the problem with that (and pretty much any other digital=real life analogy) is that if I take your bike for a ride, you can't use it any more, and will most definitely notice that it's gone.
If I take your wifi, you can still use it, and unless I'm downloading movies or running a server, you most likely won't notice anything different.
Trying to fix the bike analogy is an exercise in futility, but I'll try anyway. First of all, your bike isn't any ordinary bike, it's a magical, electric bike. The magic makes it so that if anyone tries to steal it, the bike instantly creates an identical copy of it for that person to have, leaving your original bike untouched. The bikes are powered by a battery that is shared amongst the bike and all its copies, but any bike that's standing still recharges the communal battery.
Now, in this case, you're (almost) no worse off if a bunch of people "steal" your bike. The only disadvantages are:
1. If a bunch of people are using your bike all the time, you'll notice your bike's battery wears out quicker (internet is slower)
2. If someone is using your bike to go up hills all the time, the same thing will happen
3. If someone commits a crime on your bike (maybe they were desperate), you may well get pinned, if they can trace the serial number and such back to you.
Oh, and if you look in the manual for your bike, or ask a friend who has the same kind of bike (since in this analogy they're pretty ubiquitous), either will help you find the button to disable this functionality, or set it up with a passcode before anyone can grab a copy, so you can let your friends and family use it.
In this scenario, I don't see a problem. I'd buy a bike, and hey, if my neighbors wanted to use it on occasion, that's fine with me, it's not hurting me any. If it starts to be problematic, I'll put a passcode on it.
I could go further - viruses and such=damage, but then you would also have an infinite free supply of Rust-Eze and new tires (virus scan and such).
To partially copy-paste from a previous post, I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool. The spool also had barcodes everwhere for machine-scanning, as well as the people-readable (and verifiable) totals.
Sounds like what you're asking for. Given, it's not a Mini-ATX hooked to a server, but that is terribly impractical. I worked in a polling place in some church where we had a total of about 80 voters come through in 14 hours. Setting up a server would have been completely impractical. Other than that, it seems your requirements have been met - the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
As for cost, they were small, self-contained touchscreen units - I think I remember hearing them being in the price range of about $6k or so per unit. Expensive, yes, but not unusually exorbient. This is the government, after all.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have finally gotten them right.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
I granted that there are problems, and that it's not foolproof. I don't know what you mean by the "serial number problem," other than the fact that the votes are in order on the tape. But neither are paper ballots. I was actually in a very small polling place, where a total of 5 voters used the AVU. If I cared in the least, I could tell you exactly how each person voted. Heck, one old lady's granddaughter said, "You want to vote for Clinton, right? Yeah, there you go, push that button..."
My point is that the whole "people are going to hax0rz the boxen and put viruses that are going to change all the votes to Clinton" argument wouldn't happen, at least with these machines. Yes, the classic problems of corrupt officials and small polling places being loosely monitored (mine sure was, if I sat there looking over their shoulder, posting the results as each voter voted to my blog, nobody would have batted an eye) still exist. But it's no worse than with paper ballots.
There will always be ways to find out who voted what, no matter what method you use. The main FUD with e-voting is viruses and hacking, and the paper trail is the solution to it.
I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool.
I don't see how that is any less secure and worse than traditional paper ballots - it seems, in fact, much better to me. The voter gets visual confirmation of their vote, there are no chads of any sort to worry about, the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have gotten them right. Yes, there could be viruses and crap, but I don't see how any virus could get around the visual confirmation by the voter. The only way I can see that it would cause problems is if it tweaked the results enough that there was no suspicion, so that no manual recount would take place - no worse than any other system.
I call FUD on the e-vote-phobia, at least in King County. The system is well-designed and works as well if not better than the traditional paper methods.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
This clause only applies to their Distributable Code. Unless you can show that that that means anything you write, this is all FUD. And yes, FOSSies are also guilty of FUD. Sorry all. Microsoft isn't exactly the friendliest company ever, but you're going to have to find another tree to bark up.
I do not know how many CSC PHD's that just read the linux kernel, and are amoung the smartest people I have met out there.
I've read this sentence a dozen times, and it still doesn't make sense. It's really trying to, I can tell, and I have a vague idea of what it's trying to say...but it just isn't quite working.
I hear this all the time, and while it's true - it's not the distro's fault - it's not an excuse. Most manufacturers just aren't going to support something that has a 1% market share when they get hardly anything for it. It's just a fundamental problem with open-source - it's all grassroots, so we have to do things ourselves. But don't blame the companies, because they're not doing anything wrong - as much as you would like them to have a soft part in their corporate heart for open-source, very few companies do, and most that do have an ulterior motive (we are the niche market they're aiming for, for instance). It's not a fault on their part - for most companies, it just doesn't make sense.
If we want driver support in Linux, we're going to have to do it the same way we do everything else - do it ourselves.
Why did they work to make sure Picasa works flawlessly (almost) under WINE? Sounds to me like they're just building favor among the geek community. It's great PR - they've been taking some hits recently, so it's time to get some pro-Google news on/. and the like.
...and Tim Kring (that's the creator of the show) admitted it and pledged to fix it. Which he did, if you watched the end of the second season. Of course, the dialog is still ridiculous, but it always has been...it wouldn't quite be Heroes without an occasional West-ism.
The article is about a box with Linux preinstalled. Therefore, the user experience is exactly the same - plug it in, check your e-mail and what have you. And as for real installation...have you ever *tried* to setup XP from scratch? It's a nightmare! Horrid partition utilities, random driver install keys...give me my Ubuntu!
Really?
Any cracker worth his salt will have a boot disk or two at hand, especially if he's gained physical access to a machine. Cracking a Windows machine is trivial - I've reset the password on a few boxes myself for those that have forgotten their passwords, and it was dead simple, believe it or not...
Give the guys a break...they at least started it with the Star Wars theme. And the fireworks were almost in sync for the first few seconds! That gets them some credit...right?
There's no channel to change with web-based TV shows. Sure, you can alt-tab to another browser window, but once the ad is done, you'd have to task-switch your brain back away from whatever it was you were doing to distract yourself from the ad. It just doesn't have the same feel-good feeling of repeatedly pounding a dinky little worn-down button on the remote.
First of all, this is/. - you Ctrl-tab to another tab. Heck, you do that even if you're using the latest version of IE. Secondly, since when is watching another channel not "task-switching" your brain away from whatever you were watching, and distracting yourself?
This is the most ridiculous argument I've seen in a while - here's what you're proposing: TV
1. Whatever you're actively watching switches to commercial
2. You switch to another channel, ignore the commercials, and wait for your show to come back on, occupying yourself with whatever happens to be on the other channels
3. Flip back to whatever you were actively watching when it comes back on Web-based shows
1. Whatever you're actively watching switches to commercial
2. You switch to another tab, ignore the commercials, and wait for your show to come back on, occupying yourself with whatever happens to be on the other tabs
3. Tab back to whatever you were actively watching when it comes back on
I see one reason you might think it's different. Perhaps the web supposedly requires more engagement than idle TV watching? No - the web is the ultimate in surface browsing just-because-I'm-bored (is there any *other* reason you read/.?). I'd say the web is *better* - you can tell when your commercial is done by the sound, you can easily actually get something done while waiting if you so desire (not catch some meaningless snippet of a show) - I don't see *any* advantage of TV over web in this particular instance.
Most of the time you have to install and often configure it which is (and lets be honest) can be more difficult than Windows or Mac OS.
I am being honest, and a few months ago I installed Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.10, both from CD's, onto a fresh hard drive. Now, I'm a realist and don't hesitate to point out Linux's problems, but the Ubuntu install went a whole heck of a lot easier than the XP install. XP was ugly (text-based initial install? What is this, Debian?) and required way too much driver hunting (initially, I had no sound, 256-color 800x600 resolution, and no wireless, maybe even no LAN). Ubuntu was GUI all the way, came up with a decent resolution, and recognized my wireless and sound right off. All I had to do was install 915resolution for my widescreen laptop - although if I remember right, that may have not been necessary this time around. Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is improving, and the "hard-to-install" myth is falling apart. If you haven't done an install recently, I'd give it a shot. And the myth that Windows XP is all flowers and rainbows to install isn't true either - if you actually install XP, not just do the little configuration-on-first-bootup routine on a computer with XP preinstalled, it's ugly.
No, even better - install Ubuntu (or your distro of choice) in a VM inside of the copy of XP/Vista that's being monitored. That'd leave about one extra (on top of all the crapware) program installed/running, total. At the end of three months, collect your Vista disk and do as you please with it.
Does this strategy protect the Facebook users' data from being seen by non-Facebook users at the Facebook API level? By this, I mean that Joe Internet User cannot see my data on the Facebook application, and that Facebook is held liable for this, not the application developer? If this cannot be guaranteed, it looks like I might be removing most of my applications, no matter how useful they may be. I trust Facebook a whole lot more than I trust individual people.
Um, no. The other replies are woefully errant and FUD. From the announcement (login may be required?):
Of course, we're concerned about our users' privacy, and so the only user-specific data available on public canvas pages will be first name and profile picture (and then only if the user's profile picture is already publicly searchable). But you, the application developer, need not worry; FBML tags will automatically handle privacy rules for you.
So no. And no, I as a FB developer can't get to the data anyway. It works like this:
I write code to do my normal FB app, as if it's logged in.
Someone accesses my canvas page from outside of Facebook.
Any reference to personal data on the page is scrubbed out, except for a) first name and b) profile picture*
*Available only if the user hasn't disabled public searchability of themselves
As a dev, I can't get any extra data outside of the "garden" of being logged in (see ** below). It's entirely done on FB's side, I don't (and can't) change anything on my end to make private data more available to non-logged-in instances.
I'm pretty sure there is a lot more info out there for a lot of us that first name and a picture. And if you're interested in privacy, you've already got the picture disabled, because otherwise it could show up with a google search.
So I call FUD. For anyone who is remotely concerned with privacy, the data miners get...your first name. Whoop-de-do. And if you're not concerned? They get a picture. Definitely going to be able to steal your credit card info now! I can run your first name through my picture-to-last-name-database and find you!!!!
Sure, Facebook has made some missteps, but they've done a good job of responding when there is an upswell of legitimate protest.
This protest is illegitimate and misinformed, and this feature provides little to no privacy risk.
To summarize: The nasty hax0rs get your first name and, if you don't care about privacy, your picture. And no, there is no way that a dev can give you that information.**
**Okay, they could cache the information from logged in sessions in their db and then present it to you, but that would be a) against the TOS and b) stupid, since only cached data would be available, and if you *really* wanted it, you could just create a FB account. You can argue obscure ways that they could present the data, but in the end, there are a lot easier ways, and this provides no additional security breach.
For everyone's information ("CDMA doesn't have SIM cards!!11eleven!"), a recent development is the R-UIM card, which evidently can work as either a CDMA R-UIM card, or a GSM card. However, it seems that it is only for personal information, you can't just swap them out:
"*Enables users to program personal information once and roam between CDMA and GSM networks with a multimode device"
It seems that the RUIM card may work as a SIM card: http://www.china.org.cn/english/BAT/109251.htm
Does anyone have any better info on this?
Slashdot Mirror
See, the problem with that (and pretty much any other digital=real life analogy) is that if I take your bike for a ride, you can't use it any more, and will most definitely notice that it's gone.
If I take your wifi, you can still use it, and unless I'm downloading movies or running a server, you most likely won't notice anything different.
Trying to fix the bike analogy is an exercise in futility, but I'll try anyway. First of all, your bike isn't any ordinary bike, it's a magical, electric bike. The magic makes it so that if anyone tries to steal it, the bike instantly creates an identical copy of it for that person to have, leaving your original bike untouched. The bikes are powered by a battery that is shared amongst the bike and all its copies, but any bike that's standing still recharges the communal battery.
Now, in this case, you're (almost) no worse off if a bunch of people "steal" your bike. The only disadvantages are:
1. If a bunch of people are using your bike all the time, you'll notice your bike's battery wears out quicker (internet is slower)
2. If someone is using your bike to go up hills all the time, the same thing will happen
3. If someone commits a crime on your bike (maybe they were desperate), you may well get pinned, if they can trace the serial number and such back to you.
Oh, and if you look in the manual for your bike, or ask a friend who has the same kind of bike (since in this analogy they're pretty ubiquitous), either will help you find the button to disable this functionality, or set it up with a passcode before anyone can grab a copy, so you can let your friends and family use it.
In this scenario, I don't see a problem. I'd buy a bike, and hey, if my neighbors wanted to use it on occasion, that's fine with me, it's not hurting me any. If it starts to be problematic, I'll put a passcode on it.
I could go further - viruses and such=damage, but then you would also have an infinite free supply of Rust-Eze and new tires (virus scan and such).
---stupidfilter--------screwingupmyasciiart-----------makesmeangry--------grr------/\/-----=O <--Joke
/\
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\/
You
For the textually challenged, perhaps a diagram would help.
And mods...insightful? Really? Two of you?
To partially copy-paste from a previous post, I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool. The spool also had barcodes everwhere for machine-scanning, as well as the people-readable (and verifiable) totals.
Sounds like what you're asking for. Given, it's not a Mini-ATX hooked to a server, but that is terribly impractical. I worked in a polling place in some church where we had a total of about 80 voters come through in 14 hours. Setting up a server would have been completely impractical. Other than that, it seems your requirements have been met - the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
As for cost, they were small, self-contained touchscreen units - I think I remember hearing them being in the price range of about $6k or so per unit. Expensive, yes, but not unusually exorbient. This is the government, after all.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have finally gotten them right.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
I granted that there are problems, and that it's not foolproof. I don't know what you mean by the "serial number problem," other than the fact that the votes are in order on the tape. But neither are paper ballots. I was actually in a very small polling place, where a total of 5 voters used the AVU. If I cared in the least, I could tell you exactly how each person voted. Heck, one old lady's granddaughter said, "You want to vote for Clinton, right? Yeah, there you go, push that button..."
My point is that the whole "people are going to hax0rz the boxen and put viruses that are going to change all the votes to Clinton" argument wouldn't happen, at least with these machines. Yes, the classic problems of corrupt officials and small polling places being loosely monitored (mine sure was, if I sat there looking over their shoulder, posting the results as each voter voted to my blog, nobody would have batted an eye) still exist. But it's no worse than with paper ballots.
There will always be ways to find out who voted what, no matter what method you use. The main FUD with e-voting is viruses and hacking, and the paper trail is the solution to it.
I live in Seattle, which is in King County, evidently the 12th largest county in the nation according to their FAQ site. I worked the AVU (Assisted Voting Unit) for the primaries this year. It was a Diebold Accuvote TSx (direct link to PDF). It has a printer and a sealed spool, and the voting works like this:
1. Voter makes their selections on the screen and hits the "Next" button (or whatever it is)
2. The printer prints a printout of what they voted on all the candidates and any issues, scrolling it up into a window
3. The voter looks at the paper ribbon through the window, confirming that what they voted for actually showed up right
4. The voter hits the "cast ballot" button, and the paper that they were looking at through the window gets sucked up into a spool with two security seals on it.
5. After all is said and done, the spool gets put in a bag and gets taken to some central place, in a car with more than one person in it, from different parties, if possible.
If there is anything at all wrong with the vote, the ballot is scrapped and the voter re-votes. This scrapped vote is also recorded and taken up into the spool.
I don't see how that is any less secure and worse than traditional paper ballots - it seems, in fact, much better to me. The voter gets visual confirmation of their vote, there are no chads of any sort to worry about, the exact same paper that the voter looked at gets sucked up into a tamper-proof* spool, which is transported as securely as any voting records to a central storage place. If there is any question of the vote, the spools are taken out, un-sealed, and counted - every record having been visually verified by the voter who cast it.
I knew there were problems with the earlier systems not having printers and such, but they seem to have gotten them right. Yes, there could be viruses and crap, but I don't see how any virus could get around the visual confirmation by the voter. The only way I can see that it would cause problems is if it tweaked the results enough that there was no suspicion, so that no manual recount would take place - no worse than any other system.
I call FUD on the e-vote-phobia, at least in King County. The system is well-designed and works as well if not better than the traditional paper methods.
*Reasonably tamper-resistant, anyway - Secured by a VOID-type sticker (that leaves behind crap) and a plastic, one-way clip similar in concept (but more foolproof) than a zip tie, both with ID numbers that are recorded in multiple places, with multiple people watching and signing to verify. Yes, this can break down at the individual level, but so can any system - if you've got corrupt officials, no system can keep them from throwing things.
I was wondering what liquid crystal displays had to do with ugliness. They're actually kind of in the middle, between CRT's and plasma...
This clause only applies to their Distributable Code. Unless you can show that that that means anything you write, this is all FUD. And yes, FOSSies are also guilty of FUD. Sorry all. Microsoft isn't exactly the friendliest company ever, but you're going to have to find another tree to bark up.
I've read this sentence a dozen times, and it still doesn't make sense. It's really trying to, I can tell, and I have a vague idea of what it's trying to say...but it just isn't quite working.
...until Netcraft confirms it. Long live silicon!
I hear this all the time, and while it's true - it's not the distro's fault - it's not an excuse. Most manufacturers just aren't going to support something that has a 1% market share when they get hardly anything for it.
It's just a fundamental problem with open-source - it's all grassroots, so we have to do things ourselves. But don't blame the companies, because they're not doing anything wrong - as much as you would like them to have a soft part in their corporate heart for open-source, very few companies do, and most that do have an ulterior motive (we are the niche market they're aiming for, for instance). It's not a fault on their part - for most companies, it just doesn't make sense.
If we want driver support in Linux, we're going to have to do it the same way we do everything else - do it ourselves.
Ever hear of groupthink? There is a single dominating opinion, and it involves:
1. Microsoft is evil
2. Google is not evil*
3. Patents are evil
Approximately in that order, so when 2) and 3) clash, 2) wins out. See how simple it is?
*Well...this one's complicated. But in any case, they're better than Microsoft.
Why did they work to make sure Picasa works flawlessly (almost) under WINE? Sounds to me like they're just building favor among the geek community. It's great PR - they've been taking some hits recently, so it's time to get some pro-Google news on /. and the like.
...and Tim Kring (that's the creator of the show) admitted it and pledged to fix it. Which he did, if you watched the end of the second season.
Of course, the dialog is still ridiculous, but it always has been...it wouldn't quite be Heroes without an occasional West-ism.
Captcha: Testicles
Hmm...it sucked what again?
The article is about a box with Linux preinstalled. Therefore, the user experience is exactly the same - plug it in, check your e-mail and what have you.
And as for real installation...have you ever *tried* to setup XP from scratch? It's a nightmare! Horrid partition utilities, random driver install keys...give me my Ubuntu!
Really?
Any cracker worth his salt will have a boot disk or two at hand, especially if he's gained physical access to a machine. Cracking a Windows machine is trivial - I've reset the password on a few boxes myself for those that have forgotten their passwords, and it was dead simple, believe it or not...
Give the guys a break...they at least started it with the Star Wars theme. And the fireworks were almost in sync for the first few seconds! That gets them some credit...right?
This is the most ridiculous argument I've seen in a while - here's what you're proposing:
TV
1. Whatever you're actively watching switches to commercial
2. You switch to another channel, ignore the commercials, and wait for your show to come back on, occupying yourself with whatever happens to be on the other channels
3. Flip back to whatever you were actively watching when it comes back on
Web-based shows
1. Whatever you're actively watching switches to commercial
2. You switch to another tab, ignore the commercials, and wait for your show to come back on, occupying yourself with whatever happens to be on the other tabs
3. Tab back to whatever you were actively watching when it comes back on
I see one reason you might think it's different. Perhaps the web supposedly requires more engagement than idle TV watching? No - the web is the ultimate in surface browsing just-because-I'm-bored (is there any *other* reason you read
Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is improving, and the "hard-to-install" myth is falling apart. If you haven't done an install recently, I'd give it a shot. And the myth that Windows XP is all flowers and rainbows to install isn't true either - if you actually install XP, not just do the little configuration-on-first-bootup routine on a computer with XP preinstalled, it's ugly.
No, even better - install Ubuntu (or your distro of choice) in a VM inside of the copy of XP/Vista that's being monitored. That'd leave about one extra (on top of all the crapware) program installed/running, total. At the end of three months, collect your Vista disk and do as you please with it.
This looks shopped. I can tell by some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
- I write code to do my normal FB app, as if it's logged in.
- Someone accesses my canvas page from outside of Facebook.
- Any reference to personal data on the page is scrubbed out, except for a) first name and b) profile picture*
*Available only if the user hasn't disabled public searchability of themselvesAs a dev, I can't get any extra data outside of the "garden" of being logged in (see ** below). It's entirely done on FB's side, I don't (and can't) change anything on my end to make private data more available to non-logged-in instances.
I'm pretty sure there is a lot more info out there for a lot of us that first name and a picture. And if you're interested in privacy, you've already got the picture disabled, because otherwise it could show up with a google search.
So I call FUD. For anyone who is remotely concerned with privacy, the data miners get...your first name. Whoop-de-do. And if you're not concerned? They get a picture. Definitely going to be able to steal your credit card info now! I can run your first name through my picture-to-last-name-database and find you!!!!
Sure, Facebook has made some missteps, but they've done a good job of responding when there is an upswell of legitimate protest.
This protest is illegitimate and misinformed, and this feature provides little to no privacy risk.
To summarize: The nasty hax0rs get your first name and, if you don't care about privacy, your picture. And no, there is no way that a dev can give you that information.**
**Okay, they could cache the information from logged in sessions in their db and then present it to you, but that would be a) against the TOS and b) stupid, since only cached data would be available, and if you *really* wanted it, you could just create a FB account. You can argue obscure ways that they could present the data, but in the end, there are a lot easier ways, and this provides no additional security breach.
Of course, I don't have mod points any more...maybe it's just because it's 3AM, but that's one of the funniest things I've read on /. in a while.
http://xkcd.com/16/
*sigh*
For everyone's information ("CDMA doesn't have SIM cards!!11eleven!"), a recent development is the R-UIM card, which evidently can work as either a CDMA R-UIM card, or a GSM card. However, it seems that it is only for personal information, you can't just swap them out:
"*Enables users to program personal information once and roam between CDMA and GSM networks with a multimode device"
It seems that the RUIM card may work as a SIM card:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/BAT/109251.htm
Does anyone have any better info on this?