I think the original "by mistake" explanation they gave is a load of cr%p. How is it even possible to "collect WiFi information by mistake"? You have to install appropriate hardware and software, run it and then place the results to some sort of a database. Basic though it may be, someone had to do this, do this on all Google street view vehicles and keep it running. We are talking an effort of multiple people. There is absolutely nothing about it that's a mistake. Now that they've been caught - they are resorting to bold faced lies.
Didn't have much trust in Google until now, but this has gone beyond anything acceptable.
There is a reason these replies appear on every such news article - they are exactly the right ones:) I know, it must be boring to have 2 + 2 = 4 every time, but that's what it is and will continue to be.
Specifically to your "reply" - no, this alleged device will most certainly not help alleviate poverty in any way (unless you consider any potential scam earnings:) ). There is absolutely no way at this point for any useful technology to end in the right hands in Africa. Of course closeted geeks that never seen what's going on there would not know that.
Dropping this container in the middle of Africa is a good way to establish a new cargo cult.
Seriously, though - why are these people so intent on providing Internet access to countries and people that need many more basic things in life first (including proper hygiene, medical care, food, clothing, development of civic society, business, infrastructure, etc etc). Providing internet without these other things results in proliferation of "Nigerian scams" and very little else.
:) And abolition of private property too. I know, I am from one of those places:) We are talking about what's possible (perhaps remotely), not communist utopias.
My point needs no answer:) It is simply an observation.
That said, I would like this thread to be stored for posterity. One day, when copyright is abolished and private companies are free to take all the open source code they want, put it in proprietary software and resell it - I would be interested in revisiting the topic;) (Though none of us will probably live that long)
new Mickey Mouse cartoons are pumped out by Disney all the time. by the same token, if we expect Mickey Mouse to "expire" a certain number of years from initial creation, so will the Linux kernel and once that happens - all of it, no matter what new development is happening, will be in public domain.
Fine with me, I license my code under BSD license when I have to.
The vehemently anti-copyright stance of Slashdot is, in my view, not entirely thought through. Remember - GPL (or any other software license) is a *copyright*, protected and upheld by the same laws that protect music distributors and the like. From the point of view of the law MPAA, RIAA and FSF aren't really that different (yes, some do it for money, while others for fame, "principles" and/or a bit less money). Undermining copyright protections will not be "selective", though you may wish it were. If music or movies become trivial to copy against wishes of their authors or "copyright holders", so will the software under GPL.
There is an accepted mathematical (and computer) notation for it. Please use that - there is no need to resort to the equivalent of emoticons.
As an aside, why does every possible potential fraction of a unit need it's own prefix? Unless it is widely used to warrant a prefix, using a numeric power is just fine. Somehow I doubt these units will be common enough for anyone to even remember. SI is really going overboard on this, taking an idea to absurdity.
Apple is 90% marketing hype and 10% reality. It is the best proof that shiny objects properly promoted sell for a lot of money whether or not they have a merit to do so.
Apple builds useful devices, but so do tons of other companies. The difference is - Apple is amazing at hitting all the right notes with the right people.
So to continue the analogy, to me Apple looks more like a shill salesman, driving his silver "look at my midlife crisis" roadster while his thinning hair is combed over and firmly glued to cover a bald spot.:)
In the meantime, they keep promoting closed, proprietary and severely limited one way network "consumer terminals" (devices whose primary purpose is to shove predefined content at consumer, more like TV than to facilitate user creativity more like a computer).
OS X is a nice operating system if you like UNIX API and shell and don't mind some internal clunkiness (poor memory management, weird process states). That's all I care about as a developer. The rest is just snake oil.
This is clearly *not* global warming or "rising seas" but old boring "erosion" (I know, not fun). Consider this - less than 30 years ago India could sent paratroopers to this island's "rocky shores" (sic). Seas were rising 2mm per year until 2000 and 5mm per year thereafter, so we are talking about a rise of 2*20 + 5 * 10 = 90 mm , less than 10cm, or for those US-residents - about 3.5 inches.
I am sorry, but something smells fishy here - a place can't be 3.5 inches above water surface and have "rocky shores" which paratroopers can walk on. Consider that a tidal range in those parts is at least a few feet, so those 3.5 inches would have to completely disappear under water once or twice a day. That would make this land a "shoal" by any maritime definition.
If this island no longer exists it is because it has been washed away, as these things often occur, especially in river deltas - perhaps after a cyclone or hurricane. Nothing to see here, move along.
To summarize - I don't see how the "trust system" has any meaning. I don't actually know anyone at those 160+ companies and I sure as hell don't *trust* any one of them, not as far as I can throw them.
In fact, I don't really trust anyone:) and based on that - see no reason that my SSL connection is more or less safe whether the cert for counterparty is signed by a "good" or "bad" CA. Frankly, I trust my bank or Google mail even less than a CA - so what exactly is there to protect?
If you never had a chance to look at a root CA list in your browser - now may be the time. Open advanced encryption preferences and look at certificate list. These are, normally, all the CAs that your browser trusts to sign certificates for other sites (or for other signers and so on and so forth). Now - do you know who they are? FWIW I have never heard of most of these names, and have no reason to trust them or anything they do. The names that I know don't exactly give me the "warm and fuzzy" feeling. Equifax - the company that violates my privacy by enabling extraneous information collection, keeps bogus information on my credit report and is notoriously impossible to deal with? I won't trust them any further than I can throw them.
So China's another CA - big deal. Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn. My browser will gladly accept certificates from anyone for all I care and the entire concept of "trust" is meaningless if I don't *really* trust these guys.
These X-ray backscatter machines are fairly easy to defeat, imho. All the bad guy needs is a pouch (say, a fake belly) on his body made from material that scatters Xray just like human body does (say, animal leather with a backing of some foil - I am sure smarter people can come up with a better idea), nicely fitted to body contour. Think one of those "fat suits" they use for make-up in movies.
Put anything you need inside and go right in. Then who cares if your genitalia is or isn't blurred.
In fact, I am quite curious what the next step would be once these machines are so defeated.
Strength of a chosen password is a function of information it protects. I am sure most users follow this rule even without specifically identifying it. In this sense, services like Rockyou are at the very bottom - the only reason users select a password for such a service is because it requires them to. I would bet that if it let users have an optopn of not having a password at all - they would gladly do so.
While I don't have a sample to prove this, it would be interesting to compare these to passwords selected for a major email provider (gmail, yahoo) and an online banking service. I would bet that (even without any specific controls and limits on characters used) these would be quite a bit more complicated, proportionately. I.e. somewhat more difficult to guess for the email, depending on how important the particular mailbox is to its owner, and quite complex for a bank account.
In any case, this selection of users is hardly a random sample and drawing any general conclusions based on it would be premature to say the least.
Ad-words have nothing to do with data retention. They show you ads based on the current keywords you enter. While there is some targeting, Adwords and similar services would work just fine without it. So there is no need to keep any information about anyone's online habits, searches etc. in order to present relevant ads and make money. This is purely a strawman argument.
US may be taking a back seat in science, but what is described in the article has nothing to do with that.
Russian space agency needs money very much like NASA. The proposal to shoot down an asteroid (which, according to recent calculations is not an imminent threat) is made primarily to raise their profile, and perhaps get some cash. It certainly helps that the cause is "you will die unless you pay". If you read the original russian announcement you'd notice that they "will need 100s of millions of dollars" and they hope US and European partners will bring some dough to the table:)
I am somewhat familiar with a state of Russian science, and while it may be that over countries are going ahead of US - Russia is not one of them. Real science in Russia is, unfortunately, taking a backseat to populist crackpottery (such as controlling the clouds or making machines that cure all diseases with "magnetism" and other such things bordering on mysticism) that is in style with the new rich, who are ready to pay for it.
If slashdot was ran by people without (obvious) agenda, perhaps the headline could read: "Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Claims To Be Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing".
Other than that - all is well, though I am ready to bet that either there was more to this story or less. I.e. either he actually did something, for example being a douche and claiming he is a famous sci-fi writer and has a right to cross borders without being searched, certainly his hysterical blog post lends credence to this idea), or perhaps he wasn't beaten and left "half naked" (did the border guards seize his clothes?).
In any case,there is definitely additional information that needs to come to light, and it'd be nice if slashdot did not claim a post of offended party to be statement of fact.
This is certainly NOT the case with Russian. While alphabets are different, and majority of Russians do NOT speak a foreign language, acceptance of latin alphabet is high (nearly universal). There is absolutely no issue with using latin-based URLs or addresses and very little drive to change that.
Trying to remove universal access and Babylonize the internet under the fairly flimsy pretext of internationalization seems a very misplaced effort to me.
Imagine what would happen if instead of converging on the same "arabic" numerals, each country would keep using a different counting/numeric system? Domain names are no different - they are NOT general purpose words and they should be built using one universal approach.
Now those countries, organizations and businesses that wish to become inaccessible to most of the world (except the native speakers of their own language) can finally do so as easily as possible. Create their own little Internet reservations and stay there:)
As long as my software (such as Firefox) obligingly converts these IDN urls into the dash-hex notation making them obviously unreadable, I am ok with that.
Disclaimer: I am a native of non-English speaking country. I am sure a few of my countrymen will use this feature based on misplaced patriotism. I am also sure that vast majority will ignore it just like they ignore potential to use non-latin domain names that exists right now.
I think this ruling is just fine as long as they extend analogy with the physical world further. I.e. if e-mail and information stored on the 3rd party servers are not "private", then e-mails and information stored locally on servers in my home should be protected by the 4th amendment.
As long as that's the way they read the law (applying "home" boundaries literally rather than as a way to define a set of "things that belong to a person") - fine with me. It's not upholding the spirit of the amendment but rather only the letter, but that's better than nothing I suppose.
Clearly 4 in a *million* must be a very very small number, not like 1 in 250000 - which has thousands on the right-hand side, so that can't be good.
In an attempt to make a new probability "less scary" the authors (or summary writers) also commit a specific error - there is only ONE asteroid so any probability related to it is ALWAYS 1 in something. It can never be 4 in something because there is only once chance of collision.
We have GPX - it is widely adopted, supported by multiple devices and extremely extensible. Why not add extension to GPX and make your data more compatible with existing software? Instead they create another incompatible "standard", slap an "open source" moniker on it and here we go - another incompatible "technology".
Slashdot Mirror
I think the original "by mistake" explanation they gave is a load of cr%p. How is it even possible to "collect WiFi information by mistake"? You have to install appropriate hardware and software, run it and then place the results to some sort of a database. Basic though it may be, someone had to do this, do this on all Google street view vehicles and keep it running. We are talking an effort of multiple people. There is absolutely nothing about it that's a mistake.
Now that they've been caught - they are resorting to bold faced lies.
Didn't have much trust in Google until now, but this has gone beyond anything acceptable.
There is a reason these replies appear on every such news article - they are exactly the right ones :) I know, it must be boring to have 2 + 2 = 4 every time, but that's what it is and will continue to be.
Specifically to your "reply" - no, this alleged device will most certainly not help alleviate poverty in any way (unless you consider any potential scam earnings :) ). There is absolutely no way at this point for any useful technology to end in the right hands in Africa. Of course closeted geeks that never seen what's going on there would not know that.
Dropping this container in the middle of Africa is a good way to establish a new cargo cult.
Seriously, though - why are these people so intent on providing Internet access to countries and people that need many more basic things in life first (including proper hygiene, medical care, food, clothing, development of civic society, business, infrastructure, etc etc). Providing internet without these other things results in proliferation of "Nigerian scams" and very little else.
:) And abolition of private property too. I know, I am from one of those places :) We are talking about what's possible (perhaps remotely), not communist utopias.
My point needs no answer :) It is simply an observation.
That said, I would like this thread to be stored for posterity. One day, when copyright is abolished and private companies are free to take all the open source code they want, put it in proprietary software and resell it - I would be interested in revisiting the topic ;) (Though none of us will probably live that long)
new Mickey Mouse cartoons are pumped out by Disney all the time. by the same token, if we expect Mickey Mouse to "expire" a certain number of years from initial creation, so will the Linux kernel and once that happens - all of it, no matter what new development is happening, will be in public domain.
Fine with me, I license my code under BSD license when I have to.
The vehemently anti-copyright stance of Slashdot is, in my view, not entirely thought through. Remember - GPL (or any other software license) is a *copyright*, protected and upheld by the same laws that protect music distributors and the like. From the point of view of the law MPAA, RIAA and FSF aren't really that different (yes, some do it for money, while others for fame, "principles" and/or a bit less money). Undermining copyright protections will not be "selective", though you may wish it were. If music or movies become trivial to copy against wishes of their authors or "copyright holders", so will the software under GPL.
Just something for you to think about.
There is an accepted mathematical (and computer) notation for it. Please use that - there is no need to resort to the equivalent of emoticons.
As an aside, why does every possible potential fraction of a unit need it's own prefix? Unless it is widely used to warrant a prefix, using a numeric power is just fine. Somehow I doubt these units will be common enough for anyone to even remember. SI is really going overboard on this, taking an idea to absurdity.
Steve has some powerful coolaid, I tell you what.
Apple is 90% marketing hype and 10% reality. It is the best proof that shiny objects properly promoted sell for a lot of money whether or not they have a merit to do so.
Apple builds useful devices, but so do tons of other companies. The difference is - Apple is amazing at hitting all the right notes with the right people.
So to continue the analogy, to me Apple looks more like a shill salesman, driving his silver "look at my midlife crisis" roadster while his thinning hair is combed over and firmly glued to cover a bald spot. :)
In the meantime, they keep promoting closed, proprietary and severely limited one way network "consumer terminals" (devices whose primary purpose is to shove predefined content at consumer, more like TV than to facilitate user creativity more like a computer).
OS X is a nice operating system if you like UNIX API and shell and don't mind some internal clunkiness (poor memory management, weird process states). That's all I care about as a developer. The rest is just snake oil.
This is clearly *not* global warming or "rising seas" but old boring "erosion" (I know, not fun).
Consider this - less than 30 years ago India could sent paratroopers to this island's "rocky shores" (sic).
Seas were rising 2mm per year until 2000 and 5mm per year thereafter, so we are talking about a rise of 2*20 + 5 * 10 = 90 mm , less than 10cm, or for those US-residents - about 3.5 inches.
I am sorry, but something smells fishy here - a place can't be 3.5 inches above water surface and have "rocky shores" which paratroopers can walk on. Consider that a tidal range in those parts is at least a few feet, so those 3.5 inches would have to completely disappear under water once or twice a day. That would make this land a "shoal" by any maritime definition.
If this island no longer exists it is because it has been washed away, as these things often occur, especially in river deltas - perhaps after a cyclone or hurricane. Nothing to see here, move along.
Here is a link to my own reply previously: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1534366&cid=31004066
To summarize - I don't see how the "trust system" has any meaning. I don't actually know anyone at those 160+ companies and I sure as hell don't *trust* any one of them, not as far as I can throw them.
In fact, I don't really trust anyone :) and based on that - see no reason that my SSL connection is more or less safe whether the cert for counterparty is signed by a "good" or "bad" CA. Frankly, I trust my bank or Google mail even less than a CA - so what exactly is there to protect?
If you never had a chance to look at a root CA list in your browser - now may be the time. Open advanced encryption preferences and look at certificate list. These are, normally, all the CAs that your browser trusts to sign certificates for other sites (or for other signers and so on and so forth). Now - do you know who they are?
FWIW I have never heard of most of these names, and have no reason to trust them or anything they do. The names that I know don't exactly give me the "warm and fuzzy" feeling. Equifax - the company that violates my privacy by enabling extraneous information collection, keeps bogus information on my credit report and is notoriously impossible to deal with? I won't trust them any further than I can throw them.
So China's another CA - big deal. Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn. My browser will gladly accept certificates from anyone for all I care and the entire concept of "trust" is meaningless if I don't *really* trust these guys.
The CA is dead, let it go.
These X-ray backscatter machines are fairly easy to defeat, imho. All the bad guy needs is a pouch (say, a fake belly) on his body made from material that scatters Xray just like human body does (say, animal leather with a backing of some foil - I am sure smarter people can come up with a better idea), nicely fitted to body contour. Think one of those "fat suits" they use for make-up in movies.
Put anything you need inside and go right in. Then who cares if your genitalia is or isn't blurred.
In fact, I am quite curious what the next step would be once these machines are so defeated.
Strength of a chosen password is a function of information it protects. I am sure most users follow this rule even without specifically identifying it.
In this sense, services like Rockyou are at the very bottom - the only reason users select a password for such a service is because it requires them to. I would bet that if it let users have an optopn of not having a password at all - they would gladly do so.
While I don't have a sample to prove this, it would be interesting to compare these to passwords selected for a major email provider (gmail, yahoo) and an online banking service. I would bet that (even without any specific controls and limits on characters used) these would be quite a bit more complicated, proportionately. I.e. somewhat more difficult to guess for the email, depending on how important the particular mailbox is to its owner, and quite complex for a bank account.
In any case, this selection of users is hardly a random sample and drawing any general conclusions based on it would be premature to say the least.
Ad-words have nothing to do with data retention. They show you ads based on the current keywords you enter. While there is some targeting, Adwords and similar services would work just fine without it.
So there is no need to keep any information about anyone's online habits, searches etc. in order to present relevant ads and make money. This is purely a strawman argument.
nuff said
US may be taking a back seat in science, but what is described in the article has nothing to do with that.
Russian space agency needs money very much like NASA. The proposal to shoot down an asteroid (which, according to recent calculations is not an imminent threat) is made primarily to raise their profile, and perhaps get some cash. It certainly helps that the cause is "you will die unless you pay". If you read the original russian announcement you'd notice that they "will need 100s of millions of dollars" and they hope US and European partners will bring some dough to the table :)
I am somewhat familiar with a state of Russian science, and while it may be that over countries are going ahead of US - Russia is not one of them. Real science in Russia is, unfortunately, taking a backseat to populist crackpottery (such as controlling the clouds or making machines that cure all diseases with "magnetism" and other such things bordering on mysticism) that is in style with the new rich, who are ready to pay for it.
If slashdot was ran by people without (obvious) agenda, perhaps the headline could read:
"Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Claims To Be Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing".
Other than that - all is well, though I am ready to bet that either there was more to this story or less. I.e. either he actually did something, for example being a douche and claiming he is a famous sci-fi writer and has a right to cross borders without being searched, certainly his hysterical blog post lends credence to this idea), or perhaps he wasn't beaten and left "half naked" (did the border guards seize his clothes?).
In any case,there is definitely additional information that needs to come to light, and it'd be nice if slashdot did not claim a post of offended party to be statement of fact.
This is certainly NOT the case with Russian. While alphabets are different, and majority of Russians do NOT speak a foreign language, acceptance of latin alphabet is high (nearly universal). There is absolutely no issue with using latin-based URLs or addresses and very little drive to change that.
Trying to remove universal access and Babylonize the internet under the fairly flimsy pretext of internationalization seems a very misplaced effort to me.
Imagine what would happen if instead of converging on the same "arabic" numerals, each country would keep using a different counting/numeric system? Domain names are no different - they are NOT general purpose words and they should be built using one universal approach.
Now those countries, organizations and businesses that wish to become inaccessible to most of the world (except the native speakers of their own language) can finally do so as easily as possible. Create their own little Internet reservations and stay there :)
As long as my software (such as Firefox) obligingly converts these IDN urls into the dash-hex notation making them obviously unreadable, I am ok with that.
Disclaimer: I am a native of non-English speaking country. I am sure a few of my countrymen will use this feature based on misplaced patriotism. I am also sure that vast majority will ignore it just like they ignore potential to use non-latin domain names that exists right now.
I think this ruling is just fine as long as they extend analogy with the physical world further. I.e. if e-mail and information stored on the 3rd party servers are not "private", then e-mails and information stored locally on servers in my home should be protected by the 4th amendment.
As long as that's the way they read the law (applying "home" boundaries literally rather than as a way to define a set of "things that belong to a person") - fine with me. It's not upholding the spirit of the amendment but rather only the letter, but that's better than nothing I suppose.
Clearly 4 in a *million* must be a very very small number, not like 1 in 250000 - which has thousands on the right-hand side, so that can't be good.
In an attempt to make a new probability "less scary" the authors (or summary writers) also commit a specific error - there is only ONE asteroid so any probability related to it is ALWAYS 1 in something. It can never be 4 in something because there is only once chance of collision.
That's pretty much how VoIP works.
We have GPX - it is widely adopted, supported by multiple devices and extremely extensible. Why not add extension to GPX and make your data more compatible with existing software? Instead they create another incompatible "standard", slap an "open source" moniker on it and here we go - another incompatible "technology".
May be this is Microsoft's way of countering Apple? Support Linux to keep unix-like marketplace from falling entirely into Apple's hands? :)