(IANAL.) The idea is that forcing you to reveal something you know (passcode, etc) is testifying and thus could be self-incrimination and not constitutional, but that forcing you to provide something about yourself is totally kosher. The analogy is being compelled to give up a key or DNA vs a safe combination - the former is searchable, the latter is not. Fingerprints are routinely taken upon arrest, even if the person is released without charges. Physical descriptions or stuff on/about you is not testifying. The argument to make here is a fourth amendment one about being "secure in ones papers" - but they have a warrant so that doesn't do any good anyway.
What it comes down to is the fifth amendment is a very important, but very circumscribed, right - not a get out of jail free card. Which shouldn't have been a surprise, really, otherwise the police would never be able to prosecute much of anything.
"Degenerates" is over the line, but there is a problem here. Like any social problem the question of who contributes what share of the blame is in dispute.
Actually it's apparently not a port. You could copy a regular ELF binary from your Linux system and it would run just fine. The kernel is actually implementing the Linux syscalls, more or less. IIUC it's a peer to Windows in the NT kernel.
This isn't the first time people have done this. The old Services for Unix implemented a lot of the primitives like fork() but still required recompilation. People bolted on an ELF loader and dynamic linker to that and were able to get stuff working.
I've read that book several times. Well worth the read - talks about the development of the Morse electric telegraph from the earlier mechanical and needle designs, the extensive pneumatic tube links between post offices, and the first undersea cables and some of the technical rivalries that developed. It even talks about multiplexing and ciphers and stock tickers and so on.
One of my favorite stories is how comparatively late Morse&c were to the party. There were working electric telegraphs but they were fantastically complex, using multiple wires to move needles around to point at letters. There's the famous story about developing the code by going through a bin of printer's type to figure out letter frequencies (which is why 'e' is the shortest encoding). Morse's one-wire telegraph was the most straightforward and reliable - but even Morse started out overly complex with a tricky machine that drew the dots and dashes on moving strip of paper. It didn't occur to them that before long operators would simply use the ticking sound to hear the code. In retrospect the telegraph would've happened much sooner if people had realized it didn't have to be so complicated in order to work.
Funny joke, but the Hudson is actually much cleaner. You can even eat the fish out of it (though they don't recommend it more than a few times a month for pregnant women, at least last time I saw a sign).
Back when they started putting in all the piers in NYC, there were no shipworms. You had these 100+ year old wooden piers that were like brand-new, and nobody gave it too much though. "There's just no shipworms in the Hudson, I guess" - people certainly were no strangers to the risk of putting wood in water. But in the late 80s-early 90s the river became clean enough that the teredos came back and ruined a bunch of these old piers and in very short order (10-20 years). Turns out the worms (actually a kind of clam) are very sensitive to pollution.
Some people say "God willing" like that in the US as well to a similar extent. The thing that's more interesting is that a lot of them really mean it. That is, if you're living your life, it doesn't really matter what you do or how prudently you behave - you don't have any real control, it's all in God's hands. To the point where it's not worth driving safely, because if you made it, clearly you were *supposed* to make it, and if you die, clearly you were *supposed* to die.
This isn't an Islam thing - Christianity has exactly this in predestination. Actually (some) Calvinists were even worse - if you went to heaven, that's all God - but if you sin and go to hell, that's your fault.
I think you're conflating the law and the EULAs. EULAs do generally forbid having more than one 'active' copy at a time but the law makes no distinction - people have licenses, and that's all that matters (aside from that DMCA wrinkle...)
That's very generous of you, and it sounds like they really appreciated your effort. I know at my squad we'd be talking about that kind of thing for years. We are also a small volunteer agency serving about 7000 people (with mutual aid to nearby towns) and it makes my day whenever I can tell people "we don't charge" - usually they're expecting a big bill just for walking in the door. Our first experience with volunteer EMS was actually in Maine with the Popham VFD (south of Bath, near Portland). They pulled my 6 year old brother out of the ocean there. He's fine (kids usually are), and my parents really appreciated their efforts and professionalism.
So I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to find a FCC citation. I'm a ham and I know the FCC licenses individuals and stations, which is what my ham license covers, but I think in the case of a commercial or public-safety license the agency holds the license and allows its members to use it for transmission. The reason this is legal is that - unlike a ham license - a certified radio technician has to be the one to program the radios, and they're not tunable to a specific frequency without reprogramming (or in the old days, swapping crystals). It's possible we've been breaking the law, but I don't think so.
As for whether to buy a bunch of radios... so the agency will know best whether radios are the best thing to do with the money. Buying radios is a tremendous expenditure - not hundreds of dollars, but tens of thousands of dollars, unfortunately. Radio expenditures are a substantial fraction of our yearly total- up to 20% in some years (but the radios are good for many years). We've been trying to move to UHF, since with the police repeater the range is much improved over VHF low-band, and it's exclusively for cost reasons that we've not done it completely yet. The police donated a rack of old radios to get us started, since at the time we couldn't even afford to have just 4 to sign out for the duty crew. The reason they're so expensive is because they are public safety equipment and you can literally kick it around, drop it in a lake, hit it with a hammer without damaging it. I think our current radio is the PR860 - new they were something like $1200 each? They've been discontinued and it looks like a reputable used source goes for $400-$600/ea and you'll probably want a new battery for those.
If the agency has radios for the people who can use them, the money is better spent on something else. For our squad it would be nice for every member to have their own radio, so people could report that they're responding to the call or to pick up the ambulance. Today only the crew chief can do that - with the pagers you can receive, just not transmit - but we've decided that's enough since we can actually handle the call with only one other person as long as the crew chief shows up, and we ride with three. So if somebody wanted to give us $10k for something we'd probably earmark it for a training fund - training is very expensive. We have a generous donor who covers most of our training, and it's a real weight off our minds. And for a fire department, I think the training is substantially more expensive than EMS.
I'm a volunteer EMT in New Jersey and also a ham radio operator, and as far as I know, most places including our own use local radio systems like the one you describe. The license covers everybody in the agency (just like a taxi dispatcher's will). We use a two-tone system; the radio is squelched until the two tones come through and then the radio alerts (if it's set to alert) and unsquelches for the voice transmission. The earliest iteration of this was called a Plectron and the term is still used informally to refer to our Minitor portable pagers. All the neighboring agencies use variations on this system, but I believe the largest agencies (like NYFD) have some computerized dispatch. We don't directly get dispatched by neighboring towns for mutual aid - that comes through our own dispatch so they know to keep track of us - but if we are on a call to a neighboring town we are allowed to transmit on their frequency and have some radios that can do so.
We use VHF low band (~45MHz) for dispatch and used to use it for voice comms, but the antennas are just too long for portable use to be effective. Most nearby police are on UHF, and the regional emergency frequencies are on VHF. We have Motorola radios for each frequency band, each with anywhere from 4-20 channels programmed into them.
The decision for who gets radios that can transmit is mostly driven by cost and numbers. In our squad, all the crew chiefs have transmit-capable radios, and everyone else has a Minitor (2-5). The radios are 2-3x the cost of the pagers. We have about 16 radios that can be signed out for use by non-crew chiefs.
Every agency uses something a little different, and in most cases (especially smaller agencies) it's roughly the same system they came up with about 40 years ago. So there's a lot of historical legacy involved. The newfangled thing is trunking radio systems - those are nice because they provide talkgroups and make interoperability and provisioning straightforward - but you kind of need to move all at once since "normal" equipment won't work with them.
You must not have ADS-B out (or are flying in boring airspace). Swing over to NYC's Bravo and try it on a nice weekend - it's lit up like a Christmas tree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's saved my bacon, but it's pretty handy to know exactly where to see and avoid. And there's no "workload permitting" caveat like with flight following.
I'm sorry, but who gives a shit? ADS-B is totally public info broadcast over an open standard and available to anyone with an antenna. The software is bog-standard and all this has been doable for at least 10 years. It's so bog-standard there's a large community doing this on a routine basis for more than 2 years (and that's only one example).
Of course, before that you could tune to the local ATC frequency (it's just an AM radio) and listen to position reports.
Next this guy will be listening to the local cab dispatch frequency and telling us he can find people who have called for a ride.
There's a big difference between a car that's not yours and is well understood to be someone else's private property and an open web server on the open internet, voluntarily offering up pages to passers-by. It's more like you're wandering through a locker room and one of the lockers is open. You notice there's a box of chocolates saying "take one", so you do. Of course the box could've been intended for someone else, but with the locker door open who is to know? The missing access control is what made it ambiguous that the voluntary offering was intended for anybody on the internet.
That said, as far as printers go, it is implicit that the printer is there for the use of whomever can physically access it - not random people a thousand miles away. Printing "you've been hacked" just demonstrates foreknowledge that it was illicit access. But if it was some webserver offering up files or status pages or whatever, there's a lot of cases where it could be ambiguous. Config pages are problematic because there's no legitimate cause (that I know of) to configure a device you're not sure is yours*. Probably the sweet spot of ambiguity is webcams - lots of webcams are for use by the public, but lots are not and still publicly available.
*I will confess to moving a neighbor's wireless router from channel 3 (seriously?) to a channel that didn't interfere with 2/3 of the available channels...
"Language paralegal" is awesome. And for the record, "sitting next to someone on the standards committee" is expert-level qualification in my book. (In any case, "laughing in faces" is too bombastic for my tastes.) It means you work at a shop that 100% gets the complexity of the language. I'm in awe of such people. I've met Stroustrup once and managed to find a few compiler bugs but there's a lot I don't pretend to understand. And everything I know I'm shaky on, I learned existed in the first place from working near the proper experts.
What I mostly meant was there's a lot of people who put "C++ expert" on their resume - and it usually means they're an expert in the 30% of the language they know exists. Which doesn't mean they're not capable - that 30% is pretty much all you need for most things - it just means they've underestimated the language. I was one of those people after about 9 months of using C++. The problem is eventually you have to peek beneath the covers to interoperate with some template monstrosity or you otherwise get a bit too clever and blow your foot off (as the saying goes) so it pays to be a bit skeptical in general.
There's a lot of things like this in C++ that can slip past a person for years before it actually bites them
This, times 1000. I love C++ and use it professionally, and prefer it to a lot of languages - but if someone tells me they're a C++ expert I'll laugh in their face unless they're Stroustrup or Herb Sutter or someone like that.
I've been using C++ seriously for more than 5 years, and the more I learn about C++ the less I know. A few of my favorite are "what's the correct way to call swap" (and ADL in general) and reference lifetime extension. Gotta love stuff that seems like it obviously works when you don't understand it, until you realize what you're actually doing, and then it shouldn't work - but there's a special case that makes it work. Then you wonder "why did they support this?" and realize that this tiny little insane corner is crucial to making the language make sense. Just don't think about it too hard. For argument-dependent lookup, it's why you can print strings. For reference lifetime extension, it's why a ranged-for over a temporary container works (among a few other things).f
Port and starboard are explicitly referenced to the object's "forward", i.e. object's left and object's right respectively. So in this case port is the turtle's left no matter which way they face. That's why they use it on boats and planes and things where some might be facing backwards.
(By the way, if you need help remembering colors and orientations, port wine is red - and port has the same number of letters as left. Starboard is right and green.)
My argument isn't predicated on me being right about how the data's being used, it's solely that the EFF can only be talking out their nether regions when they say that they do know how it's being used. Indeed, if there is some huge conspiracy that's so secret that not even the engineers working on the systems in question know about it, then it's even less likely that the EFF knows, right?
Don't bother replying, I'm not trying to convince you and I know I won't succeed. But other people read these comments.
The EFF has credibility with me as well (less than they used to, for similar reasons as PETA), but how can they possibly know what Google is using the data for internally? They don't have enough information to know anything beyond "it's being synced" - which for a feature called "Chrome Sync" seems pretty obvious. The reason it's being synced is also obvious and the blog post states it plainly - most schools don't buy a chromebook per student, they have a cart that's brought where required, and the sync is so that when the student signs in they have their personalization.
Google has always said "we use aggregate data to make our services better". They say it everywhere. It's how Google works. But they also say "we're not looking at individuals or less-than-anonymized groups of people". And there's no evidence they're doing the latter in addition to the former. I can't figure out on what basis - and with what information - the EFF is making that claim other than "we don't like Google". It sounds like a PR stunt for their new initiative. Really if the EFF *did* know that the data was being used for nefarious purposes, it would mean there was some sort of external leak of user data - which would be much more damaging than the supposed activity they are concerned with.
As a disclaimer, I do work at Google. I do in fact know what Google does with user data. It's pretty much what it says on the tin, and they are extremely serious about it. Nefarious use of user data is one of the few outright firing offenses, and they will find you.
So you don't believe me. That's fine, and I'm not surprised. But why do you believe the EFF, which is the party with the less information, in absence of evidence beyond their say-so? That's firmly conspiracy theory territory. Even if they did have a better track record (hard to say, they're not without mistakes), and didn't have any agendas (not true) they simply can't back up their assertions here with any evidence. You're left with an unverifiable claim from someone who can't know, vs unverifiable claim from someone who does know.
Which is more likely - the EFF made a bullshit accusation with no evidence that they suffer no penalty for and might even help them anyways, or Google making a bald-faced, PR-damaging lie that can be discovered with a simple subpoena?
You know, I actually do feel that way? There's a reason they put the fourth amendment in the constitution. There are people we as a society want the government to be able to catch, if they do it properly.
That's the thing though - they fucked up. They had this interception treasure trove and were caught with their hands in the cookie jar because they're too afraid of the public to stick to what they're... you know, allowed to do. Their lawyers can explain until they're blue in the face how it's not technically unconstitutional, but too fucking bad, they've lost.
The Fourth Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Really, I think we all want both. But the TLAs fucked up the "shall not be violated... but upon probable cause [list of conditions]" part, and the "right of the people to be secure" part is more important. So until they can get their shit back in order, yes I agree that it's better for them to lose intercept capabilities. Yes that will probably mean murderers, chlld pornographers, and terrorists going uncaught.
Really, the biggest fuckup the government made was personally pissing off the only people who could hurt them - basically, Apple and Google and the other tremendous technology companies. They really do care about both their user's privacy and their own data security - and complying with lawful government requests to the exact extent required. And they took it personally, having the NSA go around the back door when they were obeying the law on warrants. The EFF can talk until they're blue in the face about encryption and PGP-ing your email and so on, but when full-device and e2e encryption are on by default in new iPhones and Androids, that makes a much bigger difference to many more people. And of course to the TLAs.
In NYC the Taxi and Limousine Commision regulates... taxis and limos. Taxis are hailed and can't be called, and limos are called and can't be hailed. You can't carry passengers for hire without being one or the other.
For years and years this has been the case. You'd "dial 7" or "dial 6" or whatever and the "black car" (technically a limo, but to distinguish from the yellow taxis) would come pick you up.
So Uber shows up and the T&LC goes "Great! Another black car company! Fill out this paperwork and you're all set". All the drivers are licensed limo drivers and all the cars have T&LC plates on them. You just use an app instead of a phone call. In competition a lot of the black car companies have put out their own apps that do the same things.
I guess this is different than most cities, where I understand Uber drivers are less stringently licensed and their vehicles are not specifically registered...? Seems like a fairly reasonable system actually and I wonder why more cities don't adopt it. It solves the "problem" of Uber nicely. There's a lot of complaining about Uber in NYC but don't see what all the fuss is about - was anybody complaining about the other black car companies?
I know it's fun to be holier-than-thou, but moral absolutism has just as many problems as moral relativism. Everybody was doing lots of things throughout history that they thought were OK. Today, we do things we think OK. Why are you so positive that the clock of ethics has stopped as of Friday October 16 2015 and will not change in the future? Let's pick a plausible-enough example... What if in 200 years there is such a population crunch that we need a "cap and trade" on new babies, and procreation and birth control are such that... I don't know, unsafe sex without a permit was as morally risky as driving drunk and for similar reasons? If you had a stance that such things as the choice to have a child are individual concerns and not the governments', that might be viewed as just as backwards, wrong, and dangerous as slavery. Your descendants might think "how could he be so stupid? why didn't he see the evil? it's so obvious!"
There are at least as many ethical standards that might change in 200 years as those that probably won't. I assume you're just as happy to be called evil then for your stances that seems downright progressive today.
Slashdot Mirror
See this Slashdot article from October 2014: Virginia Court: LEOs Can Force You To Provide Fingerprint To Unlock Your Phone. And that's not the first.
(IANAL.) The idea is that forcing you to reveal something you know (passcode, etc) is testifying and thus could be self-incrimination and not constitutional, but that forcing you to provide something about yourself is totally kosher. The analogy is being compelled to give up a key or DNA vs a safe combination - the former is searchable, the latter is not. Fingerprints are routinely taken upon arrest, even if the person is released without charges. Physical descriptions or stuff on/about you is not testifying. The argument to make here is a fourth amendment one about being "secure in ones papers" - but they have a warrant so that doesn't do any good anyway.
What it comes down to is the fifth amendment is a very important, but very circumscribed, right - not a get out of jail free card. Which shouldn't have been a surprise, really, otherwise the police would never be able to prosecute much of anything.
"Degenerates" is over the line, but there is a problem here. Like any social problem the question of who contributes what share of the blame is in dispute.
But I'll just leave this here: Human waste shuts down BART escalators. Clearly something is horribly horribly wrong.
Actually it's apparently not a port. You could copy a regular ELF binary from your Linux system and it would run just fine. The kernel is actually implementing the Linux syscalls, more or less. IIUC it's a peer to Windows in the NT kernel.
This isn't the first time people have done this. The old Services for Unix implemented a lot of the primitives like fork() but still required recompilation. People bolted on an ELF loader and dynamic linker to that and were able to get stuff working.
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I've read that book several times. Well worth the read - talks about the development of the Morse electric telegraph from the earlier mechanical and needle designs, the extensive pneumatic tube links between post offices, and the first undersea cables and some of the technical rivalries that developed. It even talks about multiplexing and ciphers and stock tickers and so on.
One of my favorite stories is how comparatively late Morse&c were to the party. There were working electric telegraphs but they were fantastically complex, using multiple wires to move needles around to point at letters. There's the famous story about developing the code by going through a bin of printer's type to figure out letter frequencies (which is why 'e' is the shortest encoding). Morse's one-wire telegraph was the most straightforward and reliable - but even Morse started out overly complex with a tricky machine that drew the dots and dashes on moving strip of paper. It didn't occur to them that before long operators would simply use the ticking sound to hear the code. In retrospect the telegraph would've happened much sooner if people had realized it didn't have to be so complicated in order to work.
ATSC includes a time stream in PSIP
Funny joke, but the Hudson is actually much cleaner. You can even eat the fish out of it (though they don't recommend it more than a few times a month for pregnant women, at least last time I saw a sign).
Back when they started putting in all the piers in NYC, there were no shipworms. You had these 100+ year old wooden piers that were like brand-new, and nobody gave it too much though. "There's just no shipworms in the Hudson, I guess" - people certainly were no strangers to the risk of putting wood in water. But in the late 80s-early 90s the river became clean enough that the teredos came back and ruined a bunch of these old piers and in very short order (10-20 years). Turns out the worms (actually a kind of clam) are very sensitive to pollution.
Some people say "God willing" like that in the US as well to a similar extent. The thing that's more interesting is that a lot of them really mean it. That is, if you're living your life, it doesn't really matter what you do or how prudently you behave - you don't have any real control, it's all in God's hands. To the point where it's not worth driving safely, because if you made it, clearly you were *supposed* to make it, and if you die, clearly you were *supposed* to die.
This isn't an Islam thing - Christianity has exactly this in predestination. Actually (some) Calvinists were even worse - if you went to heaven, that's all God - but if you sin and go to hell, that's your fault.
I think you're conflating the law and the EULAs. EULAs do generally forbid having more than one 'active' copy at a time but the law makes no distinction - people have licenses, and that's all that matters (aside from that DMCA wrinkle...)
Burning methane like that is actually much better for the environment (or at least the greenhouse gases) than releasing it as methane.
That's very generous of you, and it sounds like they really appreciated your effort. I know at my squad we'd be talking about that kind of thing for years. We are also a small volunteer agency serving about 7000 people (with mutual aid to nearby towns) and it makes my day whenever I can tell people "we don't charge" - usually they're expecting a big bill just for walking in the door. Our first experience with volunteer EMS was actually in Maine with the Popham VFD (south of Bath, near Portland). They pulled my 6 year old brother out of the ocean there. He's fine (kids usually are), and my parents really appreciated their efforts and professionalism.
So I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to find a FCC citation. I'm a ham and I know the FCC licenses individuals and stations, which is what my ham license covers, but I think in the case of a commercial or public-safety license the agency holds the license and allows its members to use it for transmission. The reason this is legal is that - unlike a ham license - a certified radio technician has to be the one to program the radios, and they're not tunable to a specific frequency without reprogramming (or in the old days, swapping crystals). It's possible we've been breaking the law, but I don't think so.
As for whether to buy a bunch of radios... so the agency will know best whether radios are the best thing to do with the money. Buying radios is a tremendous expenditure - not hundreds of dollars, but tens of thousands of dollars, unfortunately. Radio expenditures are a substantial fraction of our yearly total- up to 20% in some years (but the radios are good for many years). We've been trying to move to UHF, since with the police repeater the range is much improved over VHF low-band, and it's exclusively for cost reasons that we've not done it completely yet. The police donated a rack of old radios to get us started, since at the time we couldn't even afford to have just 4 to sign out for the duty crew. The reason they're so expensive is because they are public safety equipment and you can literally kick it around, drop it in a lake, hit it with a hammer without damaging it. I think our current radio is the PR860 - new they were something like $1200 each? They've been discontinued and it looks like a reputable used source goes for $400-$600/ea and you'll probably want a new battery for those.
If the agency has radios for the people who can use them, the money is better spent on something else. For our squad it would be nice for every member to have their own radio, so people could report that they're responding to the call or to pick up the ambulance. Today only the crew chief can do that - with the pagers you can receive, just not transmit - but we've decided that's enough since we can actually handle the call with only one other person as long as the crew chief shows up, and we ride with three. So if somebody wanted to give us $10k for something we'd probably earmark it for a training fund - training is very expensive. We have a generous donor who covers most of our training, and it's a real weight off our minds. And for a fire department, I think the training is substantially more expensive than EMS.
I'm a volunteer EMT in New Jersey and also a ham radio operator, and as far as I know, most places including our own use local radio systems like the one you describe. The license covers everybody in the agency (just like a taxi dispatcher's will). We use a two-tone system; the radio is squelched until the two tones come through and then the radio alerts (if it's set to alert) and unsquelches for the voice transmission. The earliest iteration of this was called a Plectron and the term is still used informally to refer to our Minitor portable pagers. All the neighboring agencies use variations on this system, but I believe the largest agencies (like NYFD) have some computerized dispatch. We don't directly get dispatched by neighboring towns for mutual aid - that comes through our own dispatch so they know to keep track of us - but if we are on a call to a neighboring town we are allowed to transmit on their frequency and have some radios that can do so.
We use VHF low band (~45MHz) for dispatch and used to use it for voice comms, but the antennas are just too long for portable use to be effective. Most nearby police are on UHF, and the regional emergency frequencies are on VHF. We have Motorola radios for each frequency band, each with anywhere from 4-20 channels programmed into them.
The decision for who gets radios that can transmit is mostly driven by cost and numbers. In our squad, all the crew chiefs have transmit-capable radios, and everyone else has a Minitor (2-5). The radios are 2-3x the cost of the pagers. We have about 16 radios that can be signed out for use by non-crew chiefs.
Every agency uses something a little different, and in most cases (especially smaller agencies) it's roughly the same system they came up with about 40 years ago. So there's a lot of historical legacy involved. The newfangled thing is trunking radio systems - those are nice because they provide talkgroups and make interoperability and provisioning straightforward - but you kind of need to move all at once since "normal" equipment won't work with them.
You're right. It would be much better if they came up with the perfect rules to start with and then never ever changed them.
You must not have ADS-B out (or are flying in boring airspace). Swing over to NYC's Bravo and try it on a nice weekend - it's lit up like a Christmas tree. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's saved my bacon, but it's pretty handy to know exactly where to see and avoid. And there's no "workload permitting" caveat like with flight following.
I'm sorry, but who gives a shit? ADS-B is totally public info broadcast over an open standard and available to anyone with an antenna. The software is bog-standard and all this has been doable for at least 10 years. It's so bog-standard there's a large community doing this on a routine basis for more than 2 years (and that's only one example).
Of course, before that you could tune to the local ATC frequency (it's just an AM radio) and listen to position reports.
Next this guy will be listening to the local cab dispatch frequency and telling us he can find people who have called for a ride.
There's a big difference between a car that's not yours and is well understood to be someone else's private property and an open web server on the open internet, voluntarily offering up pages to passers-by. It's more like you're wandering through a locker room and one of the lockers is open. You notice there's a box of chocolates saying "take one", so you do. Of course the box could've been intended for someone else, but with the locker door open who is to know? The missing access control is what made it ambiguous that the voluntary offering was intended for anybody on the internet.
That said, as far as printers go, it is implicit that the printer is there for the use of whomever can physically access it - not random people a thousand miles away. Printing "you've been hacked" just demonstrates foreknowledge that it was illicit access. But if it was some webserver offering up files or status pages or whatever, there's a lot of cases where it could be ambiguous. Config pages are problematic because there's no legitimate cause (that I know of) to configure a device you're not sure is yours*. Probably the sweet spot of ambiguity is webcams - lots of webcams are for use by the public, but lots are not and still publicly available.
*I will confess to moving a neighbor's wireless router from channel 3 (seriously?) to a channel that didn't interfere with 2/3 of the available channels...
"Language paralegal" is awesome. And for the record, "sitting next to someone on the standards committee" is expert-level qualification in my book. (In any case, "laughing in faces" is too bombastic for my tastes.) It means you work at a shop that 100% gets the complexity of the language. I'm in awe of such people. I've met Stroustrup once and managed to find a few compiler bugs but there's a lot I don't pretend to understand. And everything I know I'm shaky on, I learned existed in the first place from working near the proper experts.
What I mostly meant was there's a lot of people who put "C++ expert" on their resume - and it usually means they're an expert in the 30% of the language they know exists. Which doesn't mean they're not capable - that 30% is pretty much all you need for most things - it just means they've underestimated the language. I was one of those people after about 9 months of using C++. The problem is eventually you have to peek beneath the covers to interoperate with some template monstrosity or you otherwise get a bit too clever and blow your foot off (as the saying goes) so it pays to be a bit skeptical in general.
This, times 1000. I love C++ and use it professionally, and prefer it to a lot of languages - but if someone tells me they're a C++ expert I'll laugh in their face unless they're Stroustrup or Herb Sutter or someone like that.
I've been using C++ seriously for more than 5 years, and the more I learn about C++ the less I know. A few of my favorite are "what's the correct way to call swap" (and ADL in general) and reference lifetime extension. Gotta love stuff that seems like it obviously works when you don't understand it, until you realize what you're actually doing, and then it shouldn't work - but there's a special case that makes it work. Then you wonder "why did they support this?" and realize that this tiny little insane corner is crucial to making the language make sense. Just don't think about it too hard. For argument-dependent lookup, it's why you can print strings. For reference lifetime extension, it's why a ranged-for over a temporary container works (among a few other things).f
Port and starboard are explicitly referenced to the object's "forward", i.e. object's left and object's right respectively. So in this case port is the turtle's left no matter which way they face. That's why they use it on boats and planes and things where some might be facing backwards.
(By the way, if you need help remembering colors and orientations, port wine is red - and port has the same number of letters as left. Starboard is right and green.)
My argument isn't predicated on me being right about how the data's being used, it's solely that the EFF can only be talking out their nether regions when they say that they do know how it's being used. Indeed, if there is some huge conspiracy that's so secret that not even the engineers working on the systems in question know about it, then it's even less likely that the EFF knows, right?
Don't bother replying, I'm not trying to convince you and I know I won't succeed. But other people read these comments.
The EFF has credibility with me as well (less than they used to, for similar reasons as PETA), but how can they possibly know what Google is using the data for internally? They don't have enough information to know anything beyond "it's being synced" - which for a feature called "Chrome Sync" seems pretty obvious. The reason it's being synced is also obvious and the blog post states it plainly - most schools don't buy a chromebook per student, they have a cart that's brought where required, and the sync is so that when the student signs in they have their personalization.
Google has always said "we use aggregate data to make our services better". They say it everywhere. It's how Google works. But they also say "we're not looking at individuals or less-than-anonymized groups of people". And there's no evidence they're doing the latter in addition to the former. I can't figure out on what basis - and with what information - the EFF is making that claim other than "we don't like Google". It sounds like a PR stunt for their new initiative. Really if the EFF *did* know that the data was being used for nefarious purposes, it would mean there was some sort of external leak of user data - which would be much more damaging than the supposed activity they are concerned with.
As a disclaimer, I do work at Google. I do in fact know what Google does with user data. It's pretty much what it says on the tin, and they are extremely serious about it. Nefarious use of user data is one of the few outright firing offenses, and they will find you.
So you don't believe me. That's fine, and I'm not surprised. But why do you believe the EFF, which is the party with the less information, in absence of evidence beyond their say-so? That's firmly conspiracy theory territory. Even if they did have a better track record (hard to say, they're not without mistakes), and didn't have any agendas (not true) they simply can't back up their assertions here with any evidence. You're left with an unverifiable claim from someone who can't know, vs unverifiable claim from someone who does know.
Which is more likely - the EFF made a bullshit accusation with no evidence that they suffer no penalty for and might even help them anyways, or Google making a bald-faced, PR-damaging lie that can be discovered with a simple subpoena?
You know, I actually do feel that way? There's a reason they put the fourth amendment in the constitution. There are people we as a society want the government to be able to catch, if they do it properly.
That's the thing though - they fucked up. They had this interception treasure trove and were caught with their hands in the cookie jar because they're too afraid of the public to stick to what they're... you know, allowed to do. Their lawyers can explain until they're blue in the face how it's not technically unconstitutional, but too fucking bad, they've lost.
The Fourth Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Really, I think we all want both. But the TLAs fucked up the "shall not be violated... but upon probable cause [list of conditions]" part, and the "right of the people to be secure" part is more important. So until they can get their shit back in order, yes I agree that it's better for them to lose intercept capabilities. Yes that will probably mean murderers, chlld pornographers, and terrorists going uncaught.
Really, the biggest fuckup the government made was personally pissing off the only people who could hurt them - basically, Apple and Google and the other tremendous technology companies. They really do care about both their user's privacy and their own data security - and complying with lawful government requests to the exact extent required. And they took it personally, having the NSA go around the back door when they were obeying the law on warrants. The EFF can talk until they're blue in the face about encryption and PGP-ing your email and so on, but when full-device and e2e encryption are on by default in new iPhones and Androids, that makes a much bigger difference to many more people. And of course to the TLAs.
In NYC the Taxi and Limousine Commision regulates... taxis and limos. Taxis are hailed and can't be called, and limos are called and can't be hailed. You can't carry passengers for hire without being one or the other.
For years and years this has been the case. You'd "dial 7" or "dial 6" or whatever and the "black car" (technically a limo, but to distinguish from the yellow taxis) would come pick you up.
So Uber shows up and the T&LC goes "Great! Another black car company! Fill out this paperwork and you're all set". All the drivers are licensed limo drivers and all the cars have T&LC plates on them. You just use an app instead of a phone call. In competition a lot of the black car companies have put out their own apps that do the same things.
I guess this is different than most cities, where I understand Uber drivers are less stringently licensed and their vehicles are not specifically registered...? Seems like a fairly reasonable system actually and I wonder why more cities don't adopt it. It solves the "problem" of Uber nicely. There's a lot of complaining about Uber in NYC but don't see what all the fuss is about - was anybody complaining about the other black car companies?
A better known example is the E6B. Even used on screen (for its intended purpose!) by Mr. Spock in more than one original series Star Trek episode.
I know it's fun to be holier-than-thou, but moral absolutism has just as many problems as moral relativism. Everybody was doing lots of things throughout history that they thought were OK. Today, we do things we think OK. Why are you so positive that the clock of ethics has stopped as of Friday October 16 2015 and will not change in the future? Let's pick a plausible-enough example... What if in 200 years there is such a population crunch that we need a "cap and trade" on new babies, and procreation and birth control are such that... I don't know, unsafe sex without a permit was as morally risky as driving drunk and for similar reasons? If you had a stance that such things as the choice to have a child are individual concerns and not the governments', that might be viewed as just as backwards, wrong, and dangerous as slavery. Your descendants might think "how could he be so stupid? why didn't he see the evil? it's so obvious!"
There are at least as many ethical standards that might change in 200 years as those that probably won't. I assume you're just as happy to be called evil then for your stances that seems downright progressive today.