Re:Can we trust google with our "secrets"?
on
Can We Trust Google?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well...
Not associating your search requests to an ability to identify and track was the way of search engines in "the days of yore". (which in internet standard time means less than a decade ago). Now a days the ability to track searching and spending habits on the web is exactly what makes companies like Google worth so much because it's how they target ads. Ads based on what you search for. And if a computer program is taking cycles to figure out what on line purchases go best with a search for "Teri Hatcher swimsuit malfunction" you can bet a programmer wants to make sure it's coming back with the right results, which means logging it somewhere.
As much as we all have loved them we need to accept that the glory days of the internet being a warm protective cloak of anonymity are coming to an end, much in the way that "mundane less adventurous settlers" made law enforcement tame the wild west. Our mundane settlers are arriving, and they don't like that those guys get to wander around without fences and rules and nice tidy guarantees of safety. Profiteers are arriving and learning that selling fences (firewalls) , cattle brands (DRM) , even making people show papers at the coach stop (electronic ID tracking) make money.
But anybody suggesting that the hospital is at fault here for not securing systems , or even worse that the ad company is at fault for paying for it's affiliate program is attempting to do nothing more than find an excuse for this anti-social behavior.
The people who chose to execute the attack and created it are at fault, simple and done right there.
The analogies explaining this are too many to count, my favorite would be that by that standard I would be to blame if someone came in through my window and shot me in order to steal my TV, with my accomplice being the pawn shop he will sell the TV to. Poor misunderstood burglur.
I am a big fan of computational historics and all, so I wonder if we'll manage to eventually build a lego difference or analytical engine to do what Babbage and Ada Lovelace died bankrupt trying to do....
The same reason we give everything names, to make it easier to remember.
Can anyone rattle off the IP address for www.yahoo.com? (wait.. around here.. bad question...)
But you get the point. We as humans name everything in order to keep better mental reference and remember it. They could have called it the Apple portable media player , but they came up with iPod. And people remember it.
I think that here in the geek world we so commonly have to reference things by numbers that we forget that names are for people who aren't quite as numerically attuned as us.
Now, do they go overboard sometimes? Yes, they try to name things to grab attention and be "sexy" and "something catchy". My opinion is to take some moderately unique word or phrase found in the signature or output and use that. It's what was done and its still done a good bit of the time.
The problem then is how do you control who is and isn't on a "mature" server? It's like trying to make sure only people who RP are on RP servers. Virtually impossible to regulate.
THe problem with this is that if they say they are truly equal to letting groups for guilds who'se tolerances may offend the moral/religious/whatever beliefs of another group is that by allowing it you allow fun like:
A white christian centric group who is "white pride" friendly.
I think Blizzard is trying to play the middle of the road by saying none of any of the potentially offensive topics as guild themes rather than need to play morality police with which are and arent offensive and to who.
I am someone who has run a dual monitor rig for most of the last 7 years. Dating back to the "well, if you upgrade to windows 2000 it will support multi monitors off the bat".
My genres of choice have been MMORPG's and RTS for the most part with a few flight sims. My current crack is WoW. My real goal would be as mentioned, to have all my inventory, minimaps, guild/area/whatever chat windows and some buttons and controls over on the right monitor, while I have the 3d redering "world view" on the left monitor. Of all things only ONE game has accomidated this so far:
Horizons
Yeah.. you heard me.. Horizons.. yes THAT Horizons. It's a sad thing in my world. For an MMORPG to support this they need a few key things:
a) The ability to make the game window the real full screen size instead of the full size of one screen. At one point in time WoW could do this, but now when you're in windowed mode it insists on only allowing you aspect ratio that follow the one screen hight:width ratio.
b) The ability to move all aspects of the game UI to the other monitor or wherever you want. WoW has this functionality through third party UI modifications.
c) MOST IMPORTANTLY It needs the ability to unhinge the 3d world redering window from the main window and resize it as the users need. Horizons had this, it was glorious. WoW does not yet. It has a functionality similar to this, but it still doesn't get there due to the aspect ratio limitations that the UI seems to enforce on you. Not to mention you have to do it all through a scripting language (lua/xml) which doesn't make for a smooth user interface for the non geek.
So they're going to usher in a new age of trust on the internet by bundling several products together in one suite. Yeah, that's a winner, just ask Netscape.
In all seriousness, the only thing this is ushering in is a new age in which you have to put all your trust in one software vendor to do everything you need security wise correctly.
The question then becomes if/when will the investing and financial world will see "free choice Friday" as "day with everybody working different projects few of which will be financially viable". If that happens, then it's "well they're wasting 20% of the work week on employee chosen activities".
A part of the reason for the irrationally high P/E ratio that Google trades at is the rate at which they have been able to grow and show sustained growth.
If that growth rate slows to that or a more "normal" company then yes the price will tumble as the numbers will dictate that it is not wise to bet on growth to continue at that pace in the future. This is not Wall Street being stupid and not valuing Google as much as it is Wall Street realizing that maybe they were too optimistic that Google represented the second coming of the dot com boom. If Google continues to behave more like a regular business in relation to growth rate and earnings expect it's stock price to come back down out of the stratosphere over the next year or two.
Also, Google is starting to get into the "throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks" model of new projects. Probably because they have oodles of cash sitting around and they need to do something with it. Unless those start bringing in profits traditional investors will start losing faith in the company, and that spells lower stock prices.
"Soft-tongue" - This will allow code to adaptively eat bugs in software. MS has been rumored to be in talks to buy this technology outright. Unfortunately it will also be unsightly enough to creep out your significant other. (which means it will fit in with most other MS software)
"Chameleo-browser" - A new plugin for firefox which will allow porn pages, when seen from a distance to blend in with spreadsheets and become unnoticable.
** Note - In response to these advances the LOST (Lizard Open Source Team) has chosen to patent their genetic makeup to prevent futher abuses of their technology. NTP will be handling the patents.
They're both about the same size, relative to the full blown iPods. They're both about the same durability (it takes a lot to break a nano...) And the cost difference of $80 is almost nothing for gadget addicted geeks and quasi-geeks.
Especially if they can come out with an upgradable 1g nano for around $150.
I'll buy the validity of congress pushing on technology companies about how they handle themselves in China when they also push on Wal-Mart.
Then we can watch the prices of half the goods we buy there shoot up by 20-40% because they can't buy from cheaper Chinese manufacturers. Won't that be fun?
Morale of story? If you're going to punish the goose, punish the gander too. And while you're at it beat on some cel phone carrying pidgeons who are getting too angsty in their blogs.
You had no idea? You don't live in the US, do you? The predominant export of the US legal system are law suits basied in a 50/50 mix od stupidity and greed.
I can say from personal experience I played in a band for years and hearing degredation from loud music is not something to laugh at, you should use the sign language for "HA" instead.
You can sue McDonalds for hot coffee you spill on yourself, why not sue Apple for loud music you deafen yourelf with?
They'd just release the product like this and slowly fix bugs, all the while calling it a beta. A beta which of course would last for YEARS (see news.google.com for reference).
And the people here would be hailing this as the next great browser. Sometimes the sheer hipocracy of some posters here amazes me beyond rational response.
Here is a not to far fetched scenario.
a) Newspapers pay AP or Reuters for news feeds.
b) Newspapers use this information, adding in advertisements to make money back.
c) Google News builds it's "composite" newspaper without paying for the news , or paying the person providing the content.
d) This harms the revenue stream of the newspaper (this is the part they still need to prove)
e) Newspaper goes out of business
f) Google loses amount of content.
The real kicker here would be if the courts rule that since google doesnt advertise on the news page it's not making money off them so it's fair use. Then at some point what happens when Google needs to start turning revenue streams on from all these projects (look at http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c7108d38-929e-11da-977b-0 000779e2340.html for why) and puts some discreet ads in the news page. Does the court revisit and change rulings if Google is making money off them?
Doesn't the post office have the right to inspect and open any package it suspects of breaking the law of it's use? And it's the only body responsible for deciding what to open adn what not to open.
AT&T also have the right to inspect any package (in this case conversation) passing through it's network that it suspects of breaking the law?
What is to stop them from simply using the NSA to determine what to monitor? Or allowing the NSA to be their monitoring branch?
I think the golden rule here is if you want a conversation to be private, dont use an unencrypted public means of transmission. Just like e-mail.
On the front of the EFF and it's lawsuit frenzy. I also agree that it dilutes the legal power of the EFF to go after cases which are going to be "hail marys" to win. The reason he is if they lose this case it ALSO sets a precedent which AT&T and the NSA can use in the future.
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003.
Does this mean no Win2k support for it?
And how about (just to annoy people) Mac support? heh
The entire show is built around a plot device which is the PERFECT MMO instancing device.
New content is simply added as new dialing sequences they dicovered to go to a different planet
The only drawback I see would be limiting is skills, basically everybody is military infantry with a mix of some secondary skills. I wonder if they'll have a Symbiote bearing warrior style class with a power staff... heh
Slashdot Mirror
Not associating your search requests to an ability to identify and track was the way of search engines in "the days of yore". (which in internet standard time means less than a decade ago). Now a days the ability to track searching and spending habits on the web is exactly what makes companies like Google worth so much because it's how they target ads. Ads based on what you search for. And if a computer program is taking cycles to figure out what on line purchases go best with a search for "Teri Hatcher swimsuit malfunction" you can bet a programmer wants to make sure it's coming back with the right results, which means logging it somewhere.
As much as we all have loved them we need to accept that the glory days of the internet being a warm protective cloak of anonymity are coming to an end, much in the way that "mundane less adventurous settlers" made law enforcement tame the wild west. Our mundane settlers are arriving, and they don't like that those guys get to wander around without fences and rules and nice tidy guarantees of safety. Profiteers are arriving and learning that selling fences (firewalls) , cattle brands (DRM) , even making people show papers at the coach stop (electronic ID tracking) make money.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one...
The people who chose to execute the attack and created it are at fault, simple and done right there.
The analogies explaining this are too many to count, my favorite would be that by that standard I would be to blame if someone came in through my window and shot me in order to steal my TV, with my accomplice being the pawn shop he will sell the TV to. Poor misunderstood burglur.
It's Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (and the woman for whom the Ada language was named)
Win at the track betting on the ponies!
Can anyone rattle off the IP address for www.yahoo.com? (wait.. around here.. bad question...)
But you get the point. We as humans name everything in order to keep better mental reference and remember it. They could have called it the Apple portable media player , but they came up with iPod. And people remember it.
I think that here in the geek world we so commonly have to reference things by numbers that we forget that names are for people who aren't quite as numerically attuned as us.
Now, do they go overboard sometimes? Yes, they try to name things to grab attention and be "sexy" and "something catchy". My opinion is to take some moderately unique word or phrase found in the signature or output and use that. It's what was done and its still done a good bit of the time.
The problem then is how do you control who is and isn't on a "mature" server? It's like trying to make sure only people who RP are on RP servers. Virtually impossible to regulate.
A white christian centric group who is "white pride" friendly.
I think Blizzard is trying to play the middle of the road by saying none of any of the potentially offensive topics as guild themes rather than need to play morality police with which are and arent offensive and to who.
http://www.go-l.com/monitors/index.htm
My genres of choice have been MMORPG's and RTS for the most part with a few flight sims. My current crack is WoW. My real goal would be as mentioned, to have all my inventory, minimaps, guild/area/whatever chat windows and some buttons and controls over on the right monitor, while I have the 3d redering "world view" on the left monitor. Of all things only ONE game has accomidated this so far:
Horizons
Yeah.. you heard me.. Horizons.. yes THAT Horizons. It's a sad thing in my world. For an MMORPG to support this they need a few key things:
a) The ability to make the game window the real full screen size instead of the full size of one screen. At one point in time WoW could do this, but now when you're in windowed mode it insists on only allowing you aspect ratio that follow the one screen hight:width ratio.
b) The ability to move all aspects of the game UI to the other monitor or wherever you want. WoW has this functionality through third party UI modifications.
c) MOST IMPORTANTLY It needs the ability to unhinge the 3d world redering window from the main window and resize it as the users need. Horizons had this, it was glorious. WoW does not yet. It has a functionality similar to this, but it still doesn't get there due to the aspect ratio limitations that the UI seems to enforce on you. Not to mention you have to do it all through a scripting language (lua/xml) which doesn't make for a smooth user interface for the non geek.
Just my $.02 USD on the matter.
So they're going to usher in a new age of trust on the internet by bundling several products together in one suite. Yeah, that's a winner, just ask Netscape. In all seriousness, the only thing this is ushering in is a new age in which you have to put all your trust in one software vendor to do everything you need security wise correctly.
The question then becomes if/when will the investing and financial world will see "free choice Friday" as "day with everybody working different projects few of which will be financially viable". If that happens, then it's "well they're wasting 20% of the work week on employee chosen activities".
If that growth rate slows to that or a more "normal" company then yes the price will tumble as the numbers will dictate that it is not wise to bet on growth to continue at that pace in the future. This is not Wall Street being stupid and not valuing Google as much as it is Wall Street realizing that maybe they were too optimistic that Google represented the second coming of the dot com boom. If Google continues to behave more like a regular business in relation to growth rate and earnings expect it's stock price to come back down out of the stratosphere over the next year or two.
Also, Google is starting to get into the "throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks" model of new projects. Probably because they have oodles of cash sitting around and they need to do something with it. Unless those start bringing in profits traditional investors will start losing faith in the company, and that spells lower stock prices.
"Chameleo-browser" - A new plugin for firefox which will allow porn pages, when seen from a distance to blend in with spreadsheets and become unnoticable.
** Note - In response to these advances the LOST (Lizard Open Source Team) has chosen to patent their genetic makeup to prevent futher abuses of their technology. NTP will be handling the patents.
Especially if they can come out with an upgradable 1g nano for around $150.
Then we can watch the prices of half the goods we buy there shoot up by 20-40% because they can't buy from cheaper Chinese manufacturers. Won't that be fun?
Morale of story? If you're going to punish the goose, punish the gander too. And while you're at it beat on some cel phone carrying pidgeons who are getting too angsty in their blogs.
Prep yourself for your flamebait mod-down sir ;)
You had no idea? You don't live in the US, do you? The predominant export of the US legal system are law suits basied in a 50/50 mix od stupidity and greed.
You can sue McDonalds for hot coffee you spill on yourself, why not sue Apple for loud music you deafen yourelf with?
Or am I once again off my rocker?
They'd just release the product like this and slowly fix bugs, all the while calling it a beta. A beta which of course would last for YEARS (see news.google.com for reference). And the people here would be hailing this as the next great browser. Sometimes the sheer hipocracy of some posters here amazes me beyond rational response.
a) Newspapers pay AP or Reuters for news feeds.
b) Newspapers use this information, adding in advertisements to make money back.
c) Google News builds it's "composite" newspaper without paying for the news , or paying the person providing the content.
d) This harms the revenue stream of the newspaper (this is the part they still need to prove)
e) Newspaper goes out of business
f) Google loses amount of content.
The real kicker here would be if the courts rule that since google doesnt advertise on the news page it's not making money off them so it's fair use. Then at some point what happens when Google needs to start turning revenue streams on from all these projects (look at http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c7108d38-929e-11da-977b-0 000779e2340.html for why) and puts some discreet ads in the news page. Does the court revisit and change rulings if Google is making money off them?
AT&T also have the right to inspect any package (in this case conversation) passing through it's network that it suspects of breaking the law?
What is to stop them from simply using the NSA to determine what to monitor? Or allowing the NSA to be their monitoring branch?
I think the golden rule here is if you want a conversation to be private, dont use an unencrypted public means of transmission. Just like e-mail.
On the front of the EFF and it's lawsuit frenzy. I also agree that it dilutes the legal power of the EFF to go after cases which are going to be "hail marys" to win. The reason he is if they lose this case it ALSO sets a precedent which AT&T and the NSA can use in the future.
Does this mean no Win2k support for it?
And how about (just to annoy people) Mac support? heh
And your source for this amazingly fixed width denial? I would say you should cite your references or be considered meaningles rabble.
New content is simply added as new dialing sequences they dicovered to go to a different planet
The only drawback I see would be limiting is skills, basically everybody is military infantry with a mix of some secondary skills. I wonder if they'll have a Symbiote bearing warrior style class with a power staff... heh
"Must get moose and squirrel, Boing Boing is a moosey/squirrey sound"