Which would you rather have, the ISP whose business model includes Six Strikes programs in league with the Govt, or Google that just might not, but at the cost of stripping your privacy?
Well, except for your unfortunate slang term for a small city, you might be right that the services need retooling. If the town is small enough, you can get the entire list of businesses into an app. So then make it customer-driven: (Parody of Clippy meant for humor only!) "I see you want to go somewhere. Pick by name or by category?" "I see you are going to Joe's Hardware store. What do you need there?" "I see you are intending to get a new garden hose. Did you feel like trying out the new expandible host as seen on TV?"
Damn maybe I better become a consultant to these local biz'es.
I know I'm just one more armchair commenter, but there's clues here to work with.
First of all, I think anyone wanting to start a business needs to go into it with a solid chunk of funding knowing full well that they'll burn money for a couple of years. So then while your point had rhetorical value, "$50 at a time" is a little low. I'd prefer to think of it more like "plan an ad campaign that seems to get the most bang for the buck". Personally I think company vehicles are severely under-rated. I've noted a few businesses from that avenue because they were "just doing their thing" so it felt different than regular ads.
Re: Yelp, I've come across gaps aka "be the first to rate this". To me that screams to just find someone (reputable! more later there!) to rate it. "Reputable" could mean a system of "Super-Reviewers" who have the freedom to be autonomous enough so that if they have a bad experience, they can say so. (I know, lots of problems, but the problem for this post today is avoiding astro-turfing per se.)
There's other things that might be doable, but I'll go all Fermat and say they won't fit in this post. Teaser: Some feeling tells me Google Glass and tech-friends are going to be a game-changer for this topic.
I didn't do any extensive analysis, which in some ways is my point - the data to do the analysis with on these kinds of questions eventually buries into "company proprietary info". To clarify, the other half of my point is that I am used to and sorta don't care that the top "newsrags" have a huge collection of stuff going on. Let's say that Ghostery works, and blocks them, and then Evidon does whatever they want later. In the modern age, I expect many sites to deploy stuff.
But I hold "privacy companies" to far higher standards because of the specific nature of the services that they purport to sell. So as a consumer, it's absolutely not my job to be wondering why those elements are on a privacy site's page.
I got half way there - I have been using adblock for years. However, however flawed it might be, Ghostery at least pointed out those lists of cookie-whatever tracker companies that aren't actually serving ads.
I haven't heard about easyprivacy before, so I might look into that. I think I tried and abandoned noscript a few times because it's a bit too fierce and it became a lot of work to add-in the sites I wanted to run stuff (yahoo mail, monster jobs site, but a surprising number of others now escaping me.)
Elsewhere someone mentioned requestpolicy.
However, I was particularly interested in finding one of these services that doesn't just block stuff, but produces the ordered list in realtime of what in fact it did block. For example, besides Google, that SafeShepherd site uses "Mix Panel" and "Perfect Audience". So that's why these "privacy companies" make me giggle grumpily - "hmm, so you're a company that wants to offer to remove tracking info, so why do you have those enabled and what do they track?" This is something like the third of these "privacy services" showing up this year, each with little wiggly angles they are playing.
"Isn't ghostery owned by Evidon, who also owns Rapleaf? I wouldn't trust either of them. However, I wouldn't trust Safe Shepherd either as they are aggregating info as well."
Nice bit of homework there. Is there a more free/open plugin that does the same kind of thing that Ghostery does by providing lists of blocked trackers? I'd be happy to use that instead.
This was the entire point of Freshman year - in return for your tuition (!!) among other things you got to get away from a daily "papers please" mentality of the lower grades, and then you were graded on the fewer metrics for that class, "however you (presumed honestly) got there". Cue the brilliant slackers types having to face their latent tendencies.
This just another sad factor showing that data leads to people getting a carnal lust to control people with.
I'm wondering why someone can't use the copyright angle to yell at any "fake pub" that swipes professor photos. (Possibly even the name-credentials part as well)
I'll reply to you because your sarcasm indicates you might want to ponder the journalism conflicts emerging here.
It's not about Disney this time - it's about overall news slant. Slashdot built a culture for 15 years of users submitting stories which would be sifted (haphazardly, as the running joke goes.) Then they go live, followed by users making comments. However funny the erratic editing was, there was no direct flow of gain to the slashdot ownership structure except when noted.
This time it absolutely does matter that "users" are in fact employees of the parent company owner, âgoing incognito as pseudo-usersâ.
That matters big time because at least I can grin and ignore things by Roblimo. I would have missed the deep links if guttentag hadn't done the homework. That's bad news for a news site because yes, they are getting more and more aggressive putting their own spin on the news mix slant.
And yes as ac jokes we have been saying we will leave, for years now, but submarine shills for the owner company is yet another new trick and they will keep adding more.
*e-mail* is what they are describing in the article, right? But no. They make a point to specifically mention Gmail about 7 times, and not Hotmail or the other online mail services. Product Placement in the middle of news.
That's rather disturbing - that the best defense that money can buy failed to pick up a spy op for an entire decade!! I don't even know what to make of this news. Do you SysAdmin types out there have some input? Wouldn't you have noticed suspicious activity *sometime* sooner than a decade?
... Or Loki from Avengers. Eventually he did call on an alien army to just go all ground-pound n Manhattan, but until that point he did a scary job of just maneuvering everyone into his traps.
These times are becoming really difficult to deal with. I sorta imagine a few old-timer cops are upset at this, maybe 5 years away from retirement, and they watched their job go from "stop the drug dealer, the mugger, the pickpocket, and even the fake lawyer", to 911-spoofing fake SWAT calls.
P.s. you made me want to go hunt the net to see if anyone stuck an IQ number on the Joker (RIP Heath Ledger!) He had a couple of gloriously scary tricks up his sleeve in that movie.
In a perfect world, you'd be right. But even the best have their limits. While a horrible movie overall, I just watched "Firewall" and it involved a kidnap team impersonating the house owner to the alarm company, just going to show that supposed security has some real limits.
So if someone targetted the SWAT crew enough times to thoroughly exhaust them, eventually it *would* affect their performance and that could cause problems. If every situation is real, they can get in the zone and do it. If they have to "guess" if it's fake then the cognitive dissonance might rip them apart.
Your comment gave me an idle interesting passing thought. All this stuff is starting to feel like a Stratego game. In classic Stratego pieces of equal rank remove each other, but I seem to recall that in one of the anniversary editions they introduced a variant rule that in clashes of equal rank, *the attacking piece wins* (through power of surprise/initiative/momentum etc.) I like that as a concept. That's what seems to be happening in the Copyright War. Yes, we kicked out SOPA, but they just shuffle the pieces and keep re-introducing it and eventually we'll be too tired to fight anymore and they win.
Over on another story, Jammie Thomas lost the Supreme Court appeal, so that $222,000 for sharing 24 songs is now part of the judicial landscape.
And "Danger" is right. This is basically the top of the line for evil. How can a police dept ever know what to do if there's the specter this was cry-wolf? And... Brian Krebs?! I know he annoyed the underground, but he's just about in the best possible place to survive one of these attacks. How about instead some more naive social rights protester? They could make a mistake out of fear and the whole thing would go wrong.
And... something that's bothering me... 2013?! Really?! All the precedents for this weren't solved say around 2005? This is an "Evergreen threat", one that can continue to happen over and over forever. I don't know the meta-solution to it. What if one of these attacks happens around the country say once a week? What does that do to our conception of security?
Hmm. Sidestepping that "GUI's mean you aren't doing work", my keyboard of choice for some 5+ years now has been a couple of Microsoft wireless keyboard-mice combos. (Just something about the layout and action speeds.) It's dirty as all get out, but the letters aren't wearing out. I think that's because mice don't show wear in the same fashion, so when your workflow all day consists of some mix of running reports off the accounting software, exporting the data into reports, and then on other days messing around with spreadsheets, you aren't pounding on the letters in the same sequence as typing proposals or maybe programming.
How long until the vending system gets a Facebook page? Then when everyone orders Such&Such keyboard and headphones, the machine can post "Joe Smith Likes this!" Then they can sell that data to advertisers!
Maybe then we need to make the science people "into a game". Hold on, before we get to shouting "dehumanized". While discouraging the practices of a certain specific game company, make what those guys do into a "sim(ulation) game". Pick your favorite doctor! Follow him as he dispenses medicine! Or works on a solution to a problem! "14% progress... 15% progress...". Count the lives saved/restored to health!
The graphics are "simple" in that top down 2D is an easy first level implementation.
But I bet someone will holler about the security risk so it might not happen.
Yeah, and while we knew there were a bunch before, I think we're def. seeing Dice's hand in all this.
The other posters are right about the shift to video, and Roblimo, who really was off the radar until last month. Here is a Reuters article describing specifically how this company is a spinoff of some other one a couple years ago. So yes, it's absolutely a Slash-vertisement. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/idUS120683+20-Mar-2012+BW20120320
Besides your heuristics, let's go even farther. It's these companies that seem to specialize in "protecting/training", with unclear extra motives buried in there. To paraphrase xkcd: "My hobby: watching Anonymous bust open these companies purporting to specialize in providing privacy/security services." Because they're in a position where they can't have ANY incident on their record with the services they sell. Yeah, I sorta don't care if Walmart hoses their data records in some random location branch because that store manager was an idiot. It's Walmart. These security companies are in a different league. Remember HBGary?
And these Slashverts are coming *fast*. No subtle sneak-in. Fast. The question is whether the rest of what used to be slashdot is worth reading anymore if these aggressive slashverts keep barreling at us. It's like a game of Ad-DonkeyKong. Jump over the barrels!
But they just might be doing so. Unlike a "policy" they really can't retract an entire product like that; but early scuttle of this "Windows Blue" thing DOES seem to have some UI fixes in it. Depending if MS can hold to real timetables or not these days, it is "sorta scheduled" for maybe late this summer.
You missed my last sentence. All the finesses. And there are lots of them. That's because once you start with legit intelligence the solution space becomes something like NP-Hard.
However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones. It's NOT a solved problem. All I said was that Asimov laid out the groundwork.
Slashdot Mirror
No one else has yet chimed in with the obligatory aurora boreanaz.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDguY0jtzBQ
How a group like this doesn't get pulled under by Security Theater is beyond me.
Lemme try reframing the REALLY sticky question:
Which would you rather have, the ISP whose business model includes Six Strikes programs in league with the Govt, or Google that just might not, but at the cost of stripping your privacy?
Well, except for your unfortunate slang term for a small city, you might be right that the services need retooling. If the town is small enough, you can get the entire list of businesses into an app. So then make it customer-driven: (Parody of Clippy meant for humor only!)
"I see you want to go somewhere. Pick by name or by category?"
"I see you are going to Joe's Hardware store. What do you need there?"
"I see you are intending to get a new garden hose. Did you feel like trying out the new expandible host as seen on TV?"
Damn maybe I better become a consultant to these local biz'es.
I know I'm just one more armchair commenter, but there's clues here to work with.
First of all, I think anyone wanting to start a business needs to go into it with a solid chunk of funding knowing full well that they'll burn money for a couple of years. So then while your point had rhetorical value, "$50 at a time" is a little low. I'd prefer to think of it more like "plan an ad campaign that seems to get the most bang for the buck". Personally I think company vehicles are severely under-rated. I've noted a few businesses from that avenue because they were "just doing their thing" so it felt different than regular ads.
Re: Yelp, I've come across gaps aka "be the first to rate this". To me that screams to just find someone (reputable! more later there!) to rate it. "Reputable" could mean a system of "Super-Reviewers" who have the freedom to be autonomous enough so that if they have a bad experience, they can say so. (I know, lots of problems, but the problem for this post today is avoiding astro-turfing per se.)
There's other things that might be doable, but I'll go all Fermat and say they won't fit in this post. Teaser: Some feeling tells me Google Glass and tech-friends are going to be a game-changer for this topic.
Hi there.
I didn't do any extensive analysis, which in some ways is my point - the data to do the analysis with on these kinds of questions eventually buries into "company proprietary info". To clarify, the other half of my point is that I am used to and sorta don't care that the top "newsrags" have a huge collection of stuff going on. Let's say that Ghostery works, and blocks them, and then Evidon does whatever they want later. In the modern age, I expect many sites to deploy stuff.
But I hold "privacy companies" to far higher standards because of the specific nature of the services that they purport to sell. So as a consumer, it's absolutely not my job to be wondering why those elements are on a privacy site's page.
I got half way there - I have been using adblock for years. However, however flawed it might be, Ghostery at least pointed out those lists of cookie-whatever tracker companies that aren't actually serving ads.
I haven't heard about easyprivacy before, so I might look into that. I think I tried and abandoned noscript a few times because it's a bit too fierce and it became a lot of work to add-in the sites I wanted to run stuff (yahoo mail, monster jobs site, but a surprising number of others now escaping me.)
Elsewhere someone mentioned requestpolicy.
However, I was particularly interested in finding one of these services that doesn't just block stuff, but produces the ordered list in realtime of what in fact it did block. For example, besides Google, that SafeShepherd site uses "Mix Panel" and "Perfect Audience". So that's why these "privacy companies" make me giggle grumpily - "hmm, so you're a company that wants to offer to remove tracking info, so why do you have those enabled and what do they track?" This is something like the third of these "privacy services" showing up this year, each with little wiggly angles they are playing.
"Isn't ghostery owned by Evidon, who also owns Rapleaf? I wouldn't trust either of them.
However, I wouldn't trust Safe Shepherd either as they are aggregating info as well."
Nice bit of homework there. Is there a more free/open plugin that does the same kind of thing that Ghostery does by providing lists of blocked trackers? I'd be happy to use that instead.
This was the entire point of Freshman year - in return for your tuition (!!) among other things you got to get away from a daily "papers please" mentality of the lower grades, and then you were graded on the fewer metrics for that class, "however you (presumed honestly) got there". Cue the brilliant slackers types having to face their latent tendencies.
This just another sad factor showing that data leads to people getting a carnal lust to control people with.
A sleazy op is likely to make mistakes.
I'm wondering why someone can't use the copyright angle to yell at any "fake pub" that swipes professor photos. (Possibly even the name-credentials part as well)
I'll reply to you because your sarcasm indicates you might want to ponder the journalism conflicts emerging here.
It's not about Disney this time - it's about overall news slant. Slashdot built a culture for 15 years of users submitting stories which would be sifted (haphazardly, as the running joke goes.) Then they go live, followed by users making comments. However funny the erratic editing was, there was no direct flow of gain to the slashdot ownership structure except when noted.
This time it absolutely does matter that "users" are in fact employees of the parent company owner, âgoing incognito as pseudo-usersâ.
That matters big time because at least I can grin and ignore things by Roblimo. I would have missed the deep links if guttentag hadn't done the homework. That's bad news for a news site because yes, they are getting more and more aggressive putting their own spin on the news mix slant.
And yes as ac jokes we have been saying we will leave, for years now, but submarine shills for the owner company is yet another new trick and they will keep adding more.
You sir, need some more Business classes! : )
Ya know, we might be looking at Advertising 4.0.
*e-mail* is what they are describing in the article, right? But no. They make a point to specifically mention Gmail about 7 times, and not Hotmail or the other online mail services. Product Placement in the middle of news.
That's rather disturbing - that the best defense that money can buy failed to pick up a spy op for an entire decade!! I don't even know what to make of this news. Do you SysAdmin types out there have some input? Wouldn't you have noticed suspicious activity *sometime* sooner than a decade?
Oh, I do often treat life in gaming terms, but that particular example lurked in my mind for 20 years and today it became useful to haul out.
These times are becoming really difficult to deal with. I sorta imagine a few old-timer cops are upset at this, maybe 5 years away from retirement, and they watched their job go from "stop the drug dealer, the mugger, the pickpocket, and even the fake lawyer", to 911-spoofing fake SWAT calls.
P.s. you made me want to go hunt the net to see if anyone stuck an IQ number on the Joker (RIP Heath Ledger!) He had a couple of gloriously scary tricks up his sleeve in that movie.
In a perfect world, you'd be right. But even the best have their limits. While a horrible movie overall, I just watched "Firewall" and it involved a kidnap team impersonating the house owner to the alarm company, just going to show that supposed security has some real limits.
So if someone targetted the SWAT crew enough times to thoroughly exhaust them, eventually it *would* affect their performance and that could cause problems. If every situation is real, they can get in the zone and do it. If they have to "guess" if it's fake then the cognitive dissonance might rip them apart.
Your comment gave me an idle interesting passing thought. All this stuff is starting to feel like a Stratego game. In classic Stratego pieces of equal rank remove each other, but I seem to recall that in one of the anniversary editions they introduced a variant rule that in clashes of equal rank, *the attacking piece wins* (through power of surprise/initiative/momentum etc.) I like that as a concept. That's what seems to be happening in the Copyright War. Yes, we kicked out SOPA, but they just shuffle the pieces and keep re-introducing it and eventually we'll be too tired to fight anymore and they win.
Over on another story, Jammie Thomas lost the Supreme Court appeal, so that $222,000 for sharing 24 songs is now part of the judicial landscape.
And "Danger" is right. This is basically the top of the line for evil. How can a police dept ever know what to do if there's the specter this was cry-wolf? And ... Brian Krebs?! I know he annoyed the underground, but he's just about in the best possible place to survive one of these attacks. How about instead some more naive social rights protester? They could make a mistake out of fear and the whole thing would go wrong.
And ... something that's bothering me ... 2013?! Really?! All the precedents for this weren't solved say around 2005? This is an "Evergreen threat", one that can continue to happen over and over forever. I don't know the meta-solution to it. What if one of these attacks happens around the country say once a week? What does that do to our conception of security?
Hmm. Sidestepping that "GUI's mean you aren't doing work", my keyboard of choice for some 5+ years now has been a couple of Microsoft wireless keyboard-mice combos. (Just something about the layout and action speeds.) It's dirty as all get out, but the letters aren't wearing out. I think that's because mice don't show wear in the same fashion, so when your workflow all day consists of some mix of running reports off the accounting software, exporting the data into reports, and then on other days messing around with spreadsheets, you aren't pounding on the letters in the same sequence as typing proposals or maybe programming.
Vending Machines, hmm?
How long until the vending system gets a Facebook page? Then when everyone orders Such&Such keyboard and headphones, the machine can post "Joe Smith Likes this!" Then they can sell that data to advertisers!
Do Vending Machines have Friends?
The fun never stops!
Maybe then we need to make the science people "into a game". Hold on, before we get to shouting "dehumanized". While discouraging the practices of a certain specific game company, make what those guys do into a "sim(ulation) game". Pick your favorite doctor! Follow him as he dispenses medicine! Or works on a solution to a problem! "14% progress... 15% progress...". Count the lives saved/restored to health!
The graphics are "simple" in that top down 2D is an easy first level implementation.
But I bet someone will holler about the security risk so it might not happen.
Yeah, and while we knew there were a bunch before, I think we're def. seeing Dice's hand in all this.
The other posters are right about the shift to video, and Roblimo, who really was off the radar until last month. Here is a Reuters article describing specifically how this company is a spinoff of some other one a couple years ago. So yes, it's absolutely a Slash-vertisement. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/idUS120683+20-Mar-2012+BW20120320
Besides your heuristics, let's go even farther. It's these companies that seem to specialize in "protecting/training", with unclear extra motives buried in there. To paraphrase xkcd: "My hobby: watching Anonymous bust open these companies purporting to specialize in providing privacy/security services." Because they're in a position where they can't have ANY incident on their record with the services they sell. Yeah, I sorta don't care if Walmart hoses their data records in some random location branch because that store manager was an idiot. It's Walmart. These security companies are in a different league. Remember HBGary?
And these Slashverts are coming *fast*. No subtle sneak-in. Fast. The question is whether the rest of what used to be slashdot is worth reading anymore if these aggressive slashverts keep barreling at us. It's like a game of Ad-DonkeyKong. Jump over the barrels!
But they just might be doing so. Unlike a "policy" they really can't retract an entire product like that; but early scuttle of this "Windows Blue" thing DOES seem to have some UI fixes in it. Depending if MS can hold to real timetables or not these days, it is "sorta scheduled" for maybe late this summer.
You missed my last sentence. All the finesses. And there are lots of them. That's because once you start with legit intelligence the solution space becomes something like NP-Hard.
However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones. It's NOT a solved problem. All I said was that Asimov laid out the groundwork.