The only thing they indexed was identifier/location pairs, which are - by definition - public knowledge. Everybody's entitled to know their current location, and the SSID/MAC/whatevers are broadcasted for the express purpose of distinguishing all the base stations in the area.
Nobody's seriously alleging that they made a database of passwords, or website access by location, so they certainly aren't indexing that - unless you consider a file allocation table to be an index in this context.
They may have stored the packets incidental to building a location database, and they should've deleted them. But, as Kismet stores all packets by default, it's not like they went out of their way to hold onto them. In fact, it's pretty clear that they didn't know this was happening - hence the announcement.
The very simple fact of the matter is that I, and everyone else, is and has been perfectly entitled to record any piece of RF, audio, or video that runs into me. The only exceptions I can come up with are no-camera areas which rely on device control, and unencrypted cell phone calls from the AMPS days, and those were quickly encrypted anyways.
Look at TV, radio, police frequency scanners, radar detectors, cantennas, telescopes, or listening through the walls at the couple shouting (or fucking) next door. They range from common to creepy, but with the exception of the radar detector (in 2 states), they're all legal. And I can record any of them.
Precedent and law overwhelmingly states that you can do whatever the hell you want with radio/light or sound waves that reach your eyes/ears/antennas.
People go to greater lengths than Google did to receive TV broadcasts, such as from outside the usual service area. It's a whole hobby - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX
This is a case of people of people who purchased a product to send and receive information to all computers in a particular radius, and are then upset when Google finds itself inside that radius and receives the information it's being sent. That's not exactly 'great lengths'.
They may have broken the letter of the law, but almost positively not the spirit. In any case, the law is seriously flawed if it prevents Google's activity. And here's why:
People were going to great lengths to literally broadcast the information into the car. How the hell can Google be held responsible for hearing it? If you put 50kW of The Office into my house from a hundred miles away, how is it illegal for me to watch it? And I know it's not illegal for me to record it.
You don't *need* any analogies for this situation - IT'S A BROADCAST. They're all radio waves. Everybody understands FM, AM, TV broadcasts and would think it absolutely ridiculous for a broadcaster to get all up in arms about somebody receiving it. That's what WiFi is, but with somewhat less power, so it comes up less often.
Can everybody PLEASE stop using analogies? They only serve to cloud the issue, and everybody already understands radio. It's a matter of making it clear to everybody that WiFi is radio.
Google picking up packets is not the same, even remotely, as rifling through someone's trash. Grandma, if she understands the concept of a password, knows to not write it on a sign in foot-high letters and stick it on her front lawn.
Since everybody is getting their analogies wrong, here's an identical situation: You've set up an AM radio station to talk to your friend across town. When you tell him about your sexual exploits, somebody tuning across the dial hears you. Do you get pissed and lawsuit-y because of it? Because that's exactly what having an unencrypted network is, just with somewhat less power and on a different frequency, plus some headers. It's not even an analogy, they're the same thing
What if that religious fanaticism happens to be the religion that controls a major portion of the oil in the world?
Then we should get off oil, like people have been saying for 40 years. Sadly, I don't even think the dead birds sitting in the Gulf watery oil pond will change people's minds
My thoughts exactly. IIRC, for the old wax-cylinder recordings that wouldn't survive a playback, they used a laser "stylus" to measure the exact depth and variation of the grooves down to fractions of a mm, and were able to play it back no problem. They got a higher-quality sound off the drum then even the destructive stylus would've managed.
That's the thing about digital formats going obsolete - as long as the information can be represented as a series of bits on whatever the current computer is, anybody can build or recreate a software 'machine' to decode/convert them. And any guy with a computer can do that... it doesn't need the resources of a couple of engineers from GE.
The concern is not so much about the language itself as with Microsoft. They've *said* they won't sue anyone using/writing for Mono, but since they've threatened to do some very similar things and I'm not so sure I trust them.
In any case, the intensity with which Icaza has been pushing Mono, plus his ties with Microsoft, scare the crap out of me.
So please, feel free to develop with it. But I'm not so sure I'll be installing Mono to run your app, because I try to keep it off otherwise.
You missed the whole "invitation" part. A network beacon is an advertisement (analogous as well as technical); if the network it advertised is unencrypted, it's an invitation.
With all due respect, I'm not stupid enough to operate something I'm clueless about, particularly when it's easy to see that it could cause myself or others big problems if I did it wrong.
I happen to be knowledgeable about computers, but not so much about mushrooms. I know enough to know that the wrong ones can be dangerous; hence I don't eat strange mushrooms because I don't know if they'll kill me. I'm not installing an auto-start generator with failover electrical panel by myself, because it can kill the linemen if I do it wrong.
Most people look at complex systems and say "huh, better know how to use that before I mess it up". For some reason, this doesn't seem to be the case with electronics. And what about sending data through the air at several dozen million bits a second isn't complicated?
I fault, and therefore have no sympathy for, people who look at complex pieces of equipment and go "I shouldn't need to learn how this works on even a rudimentary level".
To the contrary. The New York Times is one of the very few papers that even has a fighting chance of staying afloat. You can't really find better journalism anywhere. Joe Bloggs isn't going to have confidential wiretapping memos leaked to him anytime soon, and he definitely won't risk jailtime for it.
I know I'll continue my subscription for the foreseeable future, as will most of the people I know.
I made a comment a few weeks ago about people not understanding the concept of radio. People go to great expense and effort to throw their signal and information as widely as possible, and then complain when that happens. It's like people who don't want to be photographed in public.
I encrypt my wireless network, because I only want people I approve to access it. As a technically savvy individual, I use strong encryption. But ethically and (I think) legally, even if I were to use the embarrassingly-weak WEP, my intent to encrypt would be unmistakable.
WPA2/other strong encryption is like locking your house with a deadbolt and putting up an alarm. It takes a lot of work to get in. WEP is like locking your screen door - it means 'don't come in' and while it's trivial to do so, you can't claim you thought it was OK Unencrypted means 'come in, we have cookies!'. For things like coffee-shop hotspots, this is exactly the intent. For lazy homeowners, this is probably not what they want.
I have no sympathy for our lazy homeowners who don't want to take the time to understand exactly what that magic box does, and now are mad at Google. Admittedly, it's governments who are pursuing this, but it's tantamount to punishing someone who took a free sample from a grocery store.
tl;dr - unencrypted networks are implicit invitations to do whatever you want.
First of all, I know of no schools who don't own the property at least 3 feet away from the building. But to address your point, yes there's a tremendous difference. The kid in a classroom is a student at the school among his classmates - the kid on the sidewalk is just some kid.
Yes, there are some asshole kids who need a smackdown. This girl is pretty clearly one of them. And in this case, suspension is the wrong move mostly because she should've been sued for libel
But it's like Mr. Bong Hits 4 Jesus guy. The way I see it, if the conduct in question does not depend on the fact that the child is a student of that school then the school shouldn't be involved. It didn't matter that either of these kids were members of the school - had they gone to other schools, or were homeschooled, it would have been thhe same. Same with Bong Hits kid - he could've been a 38-year-old loser who wanted to be funny and it wouldn't have mattered.
I guess what I mean is - I'm seeing a lot of kids getting hit with disciplinary sticks primarily because the school has them, and not because it's the appropriate action. Usually this happens for things that are perfectly legal that the school just doesn't like for some (perhaps legitimate) reason, so they take action simply because they can.
But yeah, the school's wrong here because for a 14-year-old girl (who knows the consequences) to do something so fucking stupid over a dress code thing (probably dressing like a slut) should simply wreck her life, not just get her a 2-week vacation. There are people who would literally kill this guy over stuff like that.
People go to great pains to send a hundred mW throughout the air as far as it'll go, and are surprised when it does just that?
I'm on a volunteer ambulance squad; being a nerd I made a python script to scrape our crappy eDispatch provider's website for our dispatches and assemble them on a nice website. There was a big fight over password protecting this... despite the fact that we are going to great pains and expense to pump the very same information at about 50W. I ended up throwing a trivial password on it, until everybody forgot.
Point is, people don't seem to understand the 'broad' part of 'broadcast', and get annoyed that they don't have full control of the signals they emanate past their walls.
You simply can't make a modern video codec without treading on someone's patent any more, and this is no exception.
Yes, that's the MPEG's assertion. However, your comment implicitly asserts that Google is tremendously stupid. Even Google's biggest detractors can't reasonably make that claim.
Google is pushing the format pretty hard. And after all, they bought On2 in the first place. And, considering they must have a truckload of lawyers who specialize in software patents, they'd know if they had a timebomb on their hands. They sure aren't acting like it, which leads me to believe that they think they can make a very good case that it's patent free.
As for the format itself, it's certainly inferior to h264 - but I'll take slightly larger size/worse quality for patent free any day of the week.
I'd like to tone it down a bit, but he *can't* arrest them, and he *can't* get all pissy because somebody called him names ON THE INTERNET. Therefore, he is an idiot. I don't even know what he did that they're name-calling over, but in light of his idiocy it's likely he deserves it.
Guess you should sue Slashdot now, huh? That's not fair - I'll give you a hint. I'll be in PA sometime in the next few months... good luck.
Right. I forgot about Firefox's built-in email, IRC/IM, and newsgroup clients. But the HTML editor sure is useful!
Firefox comes built in with a theming mechanism, and a spell-checker. Admittedly those could be a bit unnecessary, though I don't think so. I'm not sure what else could be considered 'bells and whistles'.
Old versions: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ Don't like auto-upgrades? Turn it off. Most users are happy that things like security fixes, etc are handled automatically. If your extensions are breaking, complain to the developer - they can easily ensure compatibility so that your extensions are ready by the day of release.
But if you're using unmaintained extensions (legitimate concern), you can take matters into your own hands. Instructions are all over the internet, but here you go: make a key in about:config called 'extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6' and set it to false.
No, there's no central extension tool. Should there be? And you're absolutely, completely wrong about the addons website. I *just* opened Safari and tried to download some random extension. Download now was grayed, but I clicked on it anyway. "To install this addon, get Firefox - or download anyway". Download anyway was a direct link to a.xpi, which addresses another one of your complaints.
I can only conclude you're talking out your ass. Every single one of your concerns is either not a concern, or easily fixed in about 10 seconds. Play again next time.
As for the rest of your criticisms, I don't see what you're talking about. Maybe if you explained what's wrong with the bookmarks editor, the privacy settings, and the stability of the platform...
So maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't they just design a big plug and stick it in the pipe?
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI. Doing some quick math, we have:
area pi*r^2=pi*60^2=11309in^2
11309in^2 * 150000lb/in^2 = 1,696,458lbs, or more than 1.5 million pounds, pushing on whatever plug you insert. If you dropped a skyscraper on it, it might cut it off - but that's a bit tricky to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing they indexed was identifier/location pairs, which are - by definition - public knowledge. Everybody's entitled to know their current location, and the SSID/MAC/whatevers are broadcasted for the express purpose of distinguishing all the base stations in the area.
Nobody's seriously alleging that they made a database of passwords, or website access by location, so they certainly aren't indexing that - unless you consider a file allocation table to be an index in this context.
They may have stored the packets incidental to building a location database, and they should've deleted them. But, as Kismet stores all packets by default, it's not like they went out of their way to hold onto them. In fact, it's pretty clear that they didn't know this was happening - hence the announcement.
The very simple fact of the matter is that I, and everyone else, is and has been perfectly entitled to record any piece of RF, audio, or video that runs into me. The only exceptions I can come up with are no-camera areas which rely on device control, and unencrypted cell phone calls from the AMPS days, and those were quickly encrypted anyways.
Look at TV, radio, police frequency scanners, radar detectors, cantennas, telescopes, or listening through the walls at the couple shouting (or fucking) next door. They range from common to creepy, but with the exception of the radar detector (in 2 states), they're all legal. And I can record any of them.
Precedent and law overwhelmingly states that you can do whatever the hell you want with radio/light or sound waves that reach your eyes/ears/antennas.
People go to greater lengths than Google did to receive TV broadcasts, such as from outside the usual service area. It's a whole hobby - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX
This is a case of people of people who purchased a product to send and receive information to all computers in a particular radius, and are then upset when Google finds itself inside that radius and receives the information it's being sent. That's not exactly 'great lengths'.
They may have broken the letter of the law, but almost positively not the spirit. In any case, the law is seriously flawed if it prevents Google's activity. And here's why:
People were going to great lengths to literally broadcast the information into the car. How the hell can Google be held responsible for hearing it? If you put 50kW of The Office into my house from a hundred miles away, how is it illegal for me to watch it? And I know it's not illegal for me to record it.
You don't *need* any analogies for this situation - IT'S A BROADCAST. They're all radio waves. Everybody understands FM, AM, TV broadcasts and would think it absolutely ridiculous for a broadcaster to get all up in arms about somebody receiving it. That's what WiFi is, but with somewhat less power, so it comes up less often.
Can everybody PLEASE stop using analogies? They only serve to cloud the issue, and everybody already understands radio. It's a matter of making it clear to everybody that WiFi is radio.
Bullshit. You're being intellectually dishonest.
Google picking up packets is not the same, even remotely, as rifling through someone's trash. Grandma, if she understands the concept of a password, knows to not write it on a sign in foot-high letters and stick it on her front lawn.
Since everybody is getting their analogies wrong, here's an identical situation: You've set up an AM radio station to talk to your friend across town. When you tell him about your sexual exploits, somebody tuning across the dial hears you. Do you get pissed and lawsuit-y because of it? Because that's exactly what having an unencrypted network is, just with somewhat less power and on a different frequency, plus some headers. It's not even an analogy, they're the same thing
What if that religious fanaticism happens to be the religion that controls a major portion of the oil in the world?
Then we should get off oil, like people have been saying for 40 years. Sadly, I don't even think the dead birds sitting in the Gulf watery oil pond will change people's minds
My thoughts exactly. IIRC, for the old wax-cylinder recordings that wouldn't survive a playback, they used a laser "stylus" to measure the exact depth and variation of the grooves down to fractions of a mm, and were able to play it back no problem. They got a higher-quality sound off the drum then even the destructive stylus would've managed.
That's the thing about digital formats going obsolete - as long as the information can be represented as a series of bits on whatever the current computer is, anybody can build or recreate a software 'machine' to decode/convert them. And any guy with a computer can do that... it doesn't need the resources of a couple of engineers from GE.
You copied someone else's comment word-for-word an hour and a half later. STFU
The concern is not so much about the language itself as with Microsoft. They've *said* they won't sue anyone using/writing for Mono, but since they've threatened to do some very similar things and I'm not so sure I trust them.
In any case, the intensity with which Icaza has been pushing Mono, plus his ties with Microsoft, scare the crap out of me.
So please, feel free to develop with it. But I'm not so sure I'll be installing Mono to run your app, because I try to keep it off otherwise.
You missed the whole "invitation" part. A network beacon is an advertisement (analogous as well as technical); if the network it advertised is unencrypted, it's an invitation.
With all due respect, I'm not stupid enough to operate something I'm clueless about, particularly when it's easy to see that it could cause myself or others big problems if I did it wrong.
I happen to be knowledgeable about computers, but not so much about mushrooms. I know enough to know that the wrong ones can be dangerous; hence I don't eat strange mushrooms because I don't know if they'll kill me. I'm not installing an auto-start generator with failover electrical panel by myself, because it can kill the linemen if I do it wrong.
Most people look at complex systems and say "huh, better know how to use that before I mess it up". For some reason, this doesn't seem to be the case with electronics. And what about sending data through the air at several dozen million bits a second isn't complicated?
I fault, and therefore have no sympathy for, people who look at complex pieces of equipment and go "I shouldn't need to learn how this works on even a rudimentary level".
To the contrary. The New York Times is one of the very few papers that even has a fighting chance of staying afloat. You can't really find better journalism anywhere. Joe Bloggs isn't going to have confidential wiretapping memos leaked to him anytime soon, and he definitely won't risk jailtime for it.
I know I'll continue my subscription for the foreseeable future, as will most of the people I know.
I made a comment a few weeks ago about people not understanding the concept of radio. People go to great expense and effort to throw their signal and information as widely as possible, and then complain when that happens. It's like people who don't want to be photographed in public.
I encrypt my wireless network, because I only want people I approve to access it. As a technically savvy individual, I use strong encryption. But ethically and (I think) legally, even if I were to use the embarrassingly-weak WEP, my intent to encrypt would be unmistakable.
WPA2/other strong encryption is like locking your house with a deadbolt and putting up an alarm. It takes a lot of work to get in.
WEP is like locking your screen door - it means 'don't come in' and while it's trivial to do so, you can't claim you thought it was OK
Unencrypted means 'come in, we have cookies!'. For things like coffee-shop hotspots, this is exactly the intent. For lazy homeowners, this is probably not what they want.
I have no sympathy for our lazy homeowners who don't want to take the time to understand exactly what that magic box does, and now are mad at Google. Admittedly, it's governments who are pursuing this, but it's tantamount to punishing someone who took a free sample from a grocery store.
tl;dr - unencrypted networks are implicit invitations to do whatever you want.
10-12". I'm not sure I buy it, but it sounds reasonable enough.
And I did, but it was just for the UK.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/03/12/0149233
Pretty accurate, except GM owns all the roads and they're perfectly entitled to declare your vehicle not street legal.
But yeah, instead of doing that they're saying the mods themselves are illegal. Just ban the bastards and move on, no refunds. Just look at VAC.
First of all, I know of no schools who don't own the property at least 3 feet away from the building. But to address your point, yes there's a tremendous difference. The kid in a classroom is a student at the school among his classmates - the kid on the sidewalk is just some kid.
Yes, there are some asshole kids who need a smackdown. This girl is pretty clearly one of them. And in this case, suspension is the wrong move mostly because she should've been sued for libel
But it's like Mr. Bong Hits 4 Jesus guy. The way I see it, if the conduct in question does not depend on the fact that the child is a student of that school then the school shouldn't be involved. It didn't matter that either of these kids were members of the school - had they gone to other schools, or were homeschooled, it would have been thhe same. Same with Bong Hits kid - he could've been a 38-year-old loser who wanted to be funny and it wouldn't have mattered.
I guess what I mean is - I'm seeing a lot of kids getting hit with disciplinary sticks primarily because the school has them, and not because it's the appropriate action. Usually this happens for things that are perfectly legal that the school just doesn't like for some (perhaps legitimate) reason, so they take action simply because they can.
But yeah, the school's wrong here because for a 14-year-old girl (who knows the consequences) to do something so fucking stupid over a dress code thing (probably dressing like a slut) should simply wreck her life, not just get her a 2-week vacation. There are people who would literally kill this guy over stuff like that.
People go to great pains to send a hundred mW throughout the air as far as it'll go, and are surprised when it does just that?
I'm on a volunteer ambulance squad; being a nerd I made a python script to scrape our crappy eDispatch provider's website for our dispatches and assemble them on a nice website. There was a big fight over password protecting this... despite the fact that we are going to great pains and expense to pump the very same information at about 50W. I ended up throwing a trivial password on it, until everybody forgot.
Point is, people don't seem to understand the 'broad' part of 'broadcast', and get annoyed that they don't have full control of the signals they emanate past their walls.
A custom version of DDR... loaded with the Village People /juvenile
Google gains nothing by releasing an inferior codec under the same restrictions. After all, if you need the MPEG patents, why not just use MPEG4?
I imagine they're working up to it. More specifically, they're probably fishing for a lawsuit so they can prove that it's kosher.
You simply can't make a modern video codec without treading on someone's patent any more, and this is no exception.
Yes, that's the MPEG's assertion. However, your comment implicitly asserts that Google is tremendously stupid. Even Google's biggest detractors can't reasonably make that claim.
Google is pushing the format pretty hard. And after all, they bought On2 in the first place. And, considering they must have a truckload of lawyers who specialize in software patents, they'd know if they had a timebomb on their hands. They sure aren't acting like it, which leads me to believe that they think they can make a very good case that it's patent free.
As for the format itself, it's certainly inferior to h264 - but I'll take slightly larger size/worse quality for patent free any day of the week.
He is an idiot.
I'd like to tone it down a bit, but he *can't* arrest them, and he *can't* get all pissy because somebody called him names ON THE INTERNET. Therefore, he is an idiot. I don't even know what he did that they're name-calling over, but in light of his idiocy it's likely he deserves it.
Guess you should sue Slashdot now, huh? That's not fair - I'll give you a hint. I'll be in PA sometime in the next few months... good luck.
Right. I forgot about Firefox's built-in email, IRC/IM, and newsgroup clients. But the HTML editor sure is useful!
Firefox comes built in with a theming mechanism, and a spell-checker. Admittedly those could be a bit unnecessary, though I don't think so. I'm not sure what else could be considered 'bells and whistles'.
Old versions: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Don't like auto-upgrades? Turn it off. Most users are happy that things like security fixes, etc are handled automatically.
If your extensions are breaking, complain to the developer - they can easily ensure compatibility so that your extensions are ready by the day of release.
But if you're using unmaintained extensions (legitimate concern), you can take matters into your own hands. Instructions are all over the internet, but here you go: make a key in about:config called 'extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6' and set it to false.
No, there's no central extension tool. Should there be? .xpi, which addresses another one of your complaints.
And you're absolutely, completely wrong about the addons website. I *just* opened Safari and tried to download some random extension. Download now was grayed, but I clicked on it anyway. "To install this addon, get Firefox - or download anyway". Download anyway was a direct link to a
I can only conclude you're talking out your ass. Every single one of your concerns is either not a concern, or easily fixed in about 10 seconds. Play again next time.
Holy hell man, fix your English. If you want previous releases, they're all right here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ . Starting from .08 .
As for the rest of your criticisms, I don't see what you're talking about. Maybe if you explained what's wrong with the bookmarks editor, the privacy settings, and the stability of the platform...
So maybe this is a stupid question, but why can't they just design a big plug and stick it in the pipe?
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI. Doing some quick math, we have:
area pi*r^2=pi*60^2=11309in^2
11309in^2 * 150000lb/in^2 = 1,696,458lbs, or more than 1.5 million pounds, pushing on whatever plug you insert. If you dropped a skyscraper on it, it might cut it off - but that's a bit tricky to do.