Copying a lot of data from an infected drive onto a clean drive is typically considered a bad idea.
Sorry but that's complete crap. This type of malware doesn't infect data that I have seen and that can be scanned as needed. I regularly see systems infected with this crap from clients I image the drives then extract the actual data from the image and have yet to see an infected file. I've dealt with a dozen instances of this in just the past 2 months or so. As long as you're even halfway competent you're not going to transfer the infection across.
The hallmark of scareware is the easiest method to get into a target's system. It's much easier to tell them "this stuff does things you want it to do" so they'll just allow it than to surreptitiously infect their documents, spreadsheets and MP3s. Of course, this is to date and may change in the future but I tend to doubt it.
This may be a bit nit-picky but this bit in the article rubs me the wrong way:
"It's sort of a plague," said Kent Woerner, a network administrator for a public school district in Beloit, Kansas, some 5,500 miles away from Innovative Marketing's offices in Kiev. He ran into one of its products, Advanced Cleaner, when a teacher called to report that pornographic photos were popping up on a student's screen. A message falsely claimed the images were stored on the school's computer.
"When I have a sixth-grader seeing that kind of garbage, that's offensive," said Woerner. He fixed the machine by deleting all data from the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows. All stored data was lost.
Stephen Layton, who knows his way around technology, ended up junking his PC, losing a week's worth of data that he had yet to back up from his hard drive, after an attack from an Innovative Marketing program dubbed Windows XP Antivirus. The president of a home-based software company in Stevensville, Maryland, Layton says he is unsure how he contracted the malware.
But he was certain of its deleterious effect. "I work eight-to-12 hours a day," he said. "You lose a week of that and you're ready to jump off the roof."
Here we have 2 supposedly technically proficient individuals who apparently had no clue how to recover data from the hard drives of computers before reinstalling the OS. Hell, even if you don't have a second computer on which to mount the infected drive in order to simply copy the data (absurd for a school admin, let alone a software developer) you could do a parallel install onto the same drive.
Let's get this right, folks: recovering the data should be paramount in most cases. There is no excuse for simply deleting data because you're too lazy a tech to back it up first. It simply is not that difficult.
Police have had limited success in cracking down on the scareware industry. Like Innovative Marketing, most rogue internet companies tend to be based in countries where laws permit such activities or officials look the other way.
Considering they weren't in the US I don't think there's much else that could be done directly. From what I can tell, the US Federal Trade Commission asked a foreign government to shut down a corrupt corporation within the borders of said foreign government.
Any criminal charges would have to be from within the country of origin unless we have a treaty allowing extradition. (I'm sure I'm not quite right on what'd be required as IANAL.)
Were this a US corporation I'm sure the legal action taken would have been drastically different.
That's exactly what I did to bump up to Windows 7. I picked up a nice i7 8 core system with Win7 for a song. I then sold the existing one (Core2Duo) to someone else. I actually ended up with about $20 left over after the deal was done; how can you argue? The value of all these "dead" virus infected rigs is incredible. Once Window sis reinstalled, even a 3 year old system can get $200 cash and still performs well for all basic needs.
I've often thought that instead of paying to have then "recycled" government(s) should be taking in these systems and giving them to schools or something otherwise useful. I know, a standardized platform is easier to manage but surely there's something useful that could be done with them if the previous owners don't want to refurb and sell them.
Actually, it looks to be potentially more useful than WebTV ever was but only time will tell. There are quite a few of my home user clients that would probably prefer something like this to a full blown system.
Wonder how long it'l take to actually see in a live product and how much it'll really cost. The numbers in the article appear to be a manufacturer's cost.
The graphics design aspect is, granted, one issue with Dropbox. It may allow this one tech to sync specific files between the boss's kid's system and theirs, though. That way the kid's working on a local copy on his own rig that is also synced back where it belongs when he's done. Kludgy but...
Anyhow, you're in the lucky minority of businesses that has folks on hand that can pretty well manage everything. Hell, it's almost certain that at least 50% of you would welcome a chance to assemble a server while on the clock.
The only trouble I've found with putting that many drives into a system is the cases/power supplies to handle that are much pricier than hobbyists tend to think they ought to be. This ends up making them compromise and use adapters, etc, to get it into a smaller case. I have a nice 4U case that I can fit 6 SATA drives in plus externals on ESATA if needed. (Just for "research" purposes, of course.) The drives themselves ran me about the same as the rest of the rig. Heh.
Is there something special about computerized systems that makes them require more testing than mechanical systems? The type of testing is different, but I don't see why I should inherently trust a throttle cable and more than a position sensor, other than old people are afraid of/don't understand computers.
Delayed reply, I know. I kept forgetting to do this. Heh.
Yes, the difference is a mechanical system is under the direct control of the driver. While power braking and steering is helpful, it is not impossible to control the vehicle without the power. With drive by wire you have an electronic sensor to determine the driver's input. This is then translated by the computer and sent on to the appropriate system.
If there is a bug in the code that translates these inputs then the driver may well tell the car to do one thing and it does the opposite. This wouldn't be nearly as likely with a throttle cable. Now, this is probably a vast oversimplification of the issue going on with Toyotas right now but there needs to be a lot more testing than "does it engage the brakes when I step on the pedal".
All this said, Io have very little insight int the testing that Toyota does. It does seem that they're failing somewhat at isolating the issue but that's just my take from media reports so it's worth precisely dick in the grand scheme of things.
I agree a NAS or cheap PC would be a better choice for some. I often put clients into something along these lines, if they need. The PC build, though, is going to end up at a minimum of $400 and probably much more if you add that many drives. Most small NAS units I've dealt with have issues of their own, some of which cause data loss! That D-Link unit you linked to is one. See here for some well known issues. It's a nice option but hardly without issues.
The problem is really who gets paid to maintain whatever solution is chosen. Not everyone has or wants the skills needed. That's where an IT consultant can come in handy. Most of my clients with a server pay me $300 or more a year just for basic management tasks. Some places think they can't afford that so they try to do it all themselves instead. While that ends up making me a bit more on average when they screw something up, I see my task as preventing issues as much as possible.
Dropbox is pretty well hands off and while it's not always free there's no overhead for administrative tasks. That makes it a bargain for those who can fit inside the size limits. To get a server capable of the level of service Dropbox offers (again, aside from size limits for some folks) and maintain it will run more than $200 a year on average.
Out of my 500+ clients I have 2 who couldn't manage to fit into Dropbox if they needed to. One is a professional photographer and regularly has single image files over 1GB, I use a nice little NAS nowadays. He's got over 16TB of space and will need more before long, he says. The other client runs an architectural consulting firm; his data is close to 100GB in size although we could massage that into Dropbox if needed. Those are fringe cases, though. Most folks get by just fine with small-ish servers or USB drives of one sort or another. Some are switching into cloud storage options too, though.
tl;dr: Not everyone is capable of rolling their own box or even of filling a NAS with drives. Not Not everyone is able to properly manage a server, doing backups properly and so on. Not everyone has half a terabyte of picture, video & music files to back up. Dropbox (and some other cloud storage options) can be a cost effective solution for these folks.
All that said, I agree that other solutions exist and are compelling for some.
Dropbox does block level updates so much of the time even large-ish files update quite fast. Then again, I'm not a graphics geek so maybe the entire file does change enough to make it a hassle.
They also now have LAN sync so the files sync internally quite fast, which makes it a decent fit for this situation.
Again, the caveat would be the size limits of Dropbox itself. Their highest amount of space is 100 GB and that's $200/year so it's not a perfect solution. It does work well for small businesses that can't (or think they can't) afford a "real" server.
That's probably technically true but as I understand it the publisher is generally the one insisting on DRM in the first place.
I know several Valve devs personally now and worked at Microsoft in the Games division around the time Xbox was released (dated, I know). Most game developers I've dealt with get that the fans are what make their game, not marketing or corporate BS, and they complain bitterly about it.
Most often this sort of injury is a result of a landmine. Many victims also lose one or both legs but just having your nuts blown off is not uncommon. Of course, there are a number of other ways this could happen but I'd lay money on a small or improperly laid landmine.
NSFW? Seriously? I mean, some of them are nude-ish but there's no actual porn or anything. I guess it depends where you work but man, that's hardly offensive.
*wonders if he missed something worthwhile*
Heh, seriously I didn't expect anywhere near that level of attractiveness. Wow.
I saw clients hit with this behavior after the Michael Jackson hit the news and with each major story since. Each time a tragedy hits I tell my girlfriend virus/spyware cleaning calls are about to pick up a bit for me. Sad but entirely predictable now.
As it always should have been. I am not an expert on this topic but allowing computerized systems to be in charge of the vehicle without intensive testing has always seemed bad to me. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out over the next months/years that the testing has changed very little since cars were mostly mechanical.
It's also important to keep in mind that aircraft and cars aren't quite in the same class when you're defining risk.
They clearly DID record it. They used a picture of the child in the case engaging in "improper behavior in the home" then confirmed to the child's father that this is true. I'm horrified by this and want to know why the heck there aren't also criminal charges filed against every staff member who knew of this without alerting the public.
What an incredibly terrifying thing this must be to each family in that district who has had such a laptop in their home. Aside from basic states of undress they may have caught kids in there's the likelihood of actually having captured sex acts, whether adults or children. This is just insane! It's not just stored, either. Clearly someone actually reviews these recordings!
This is all aside from what exactly a school is thinking for disciplining children for something that happens int he home. As a father myself I'd be furious if such a thing happened to my child. Sure, some things can impact schools but this takes it to an entirely new level.
But is this really the purpose of government? What if I don't want to pay for high-speed internet because all I do is e-mail people every once in a while? (I actually DO have high-speed, but I have family members -- siblings, not grandparents -- who only use internet for occasional e-mail and still only have dial-up) Why should I be forced to pay for high-speed that I will never use?
We should be increasing people's options, not limiting them. And increased options doesn't have to mean "better" options.
Considering the full National Broadband Plan (NBP) has yet to be publicly released, we're not certain exactly what is required. It sounds to me as though it's the availability of 100 Mbit that's being mandated, not that citizens will be forced to actually pay for it.
My main concern is really the cost at which it comes in. While 100 Mbit is available in some areas, the cost of it is insanely high. We really need true competition in this space instead of the duopoly that currently exists. Hopefully the NBP will address this so we can begin to see innovation again instead of retrenching existing business models (mass media, for example).
I totally agree with correcting tax rates, however I also think that local governments should move to pick up more of the slack. I don't see how it's the state's business to pay for things like firetrucks, municipal police cruisers, or schools (on a day to day basis). So yes, there is a problem with fiscal responsibility, the state is just confused with how much it's supposed to be taking IMO. I think we're arguing the same point, anyway.
You might want to read the WA State Constitution. ===== ARTICLE IX EDUCATION
SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex. ===== While I agree municipalities should kick in enough, the state does have a duty to fund education.
The only reason they're working to resolve it is because of Kevin Smith. If it was a nobody with no platform to mention this from, Southwest would've cared much less.
Actually, I suspect it's mostly because it's on Twitter that they reacted at all. Random average Joes have had similar responses from other corporations as well. They tend to be scared to death of bad publicity and Twitter especially seems to make them nervous.
Of course, the fact that it's a celebrity, however minor (sorry Kevin; I love your films but...) on Twitter doesn't exactly hurt.
And guess what comes next? A reverse-competitive bidding process, whereby various cities write off their taxes on both the profits and the capital equipment, waive requirements like community access programs, and more- just to get google to give them fiber-to-the-home, something that has no proven public benefit. Which is idiotic- I don't want my tax dollars used to fund capital expenditures for corporations!
Anyone else a little more than slightly freaked out by this move? Google now encompasses search, email, instant messaging, calendaring, social networking, blogging (both content production and reading), cellular and telephone services, online payment, and now actual last-mile services? What's left?
Why does it feel like in 10 years we'll be calling it The Gnet, not the Internet?
*hands a tinfoil hat to SuperBanana*
That's called diversification and is a sound business strategy. I think Google's just doing good business by having a finger in lots of pies.
As an IT consultant for many small businesses in Seattle, I can say a service like this is sorely needed. There is simply too little choice at far too high a price right now. This is the third pipe we've needed for quite some time in order to break the back of the current broadband oligarchy. This is clearly in the public interest.
I think you mean the east side and north end of Puget Sound but yeah. Last I heard, Qwest refused to do a fiber rollout and threatened lawsuits if the city did their own. When they finally started offering faster tiers they called it "fiber-like" speeds. Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.
Qwest upper management is a bunch of asshats that cares only about milking every last dollar they can out of their infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Copying a lot of data from an infected drive onto a clean drive is typically considered a bad idea.
Sorry but that's complete crap. This type of malware doesn't infect data that I have seen and that can be scanned as needed. I regularly see systems infected with this crap from clients I image the drives then extract the actual data from the image and have yet to see an infected file. I've dealt with a dozen instances of this in just the past 2 months or so. As long as you're even halfway competent you're not going to transfer the infection across.
The hallmark of scareware is the easiest method to get into a target's system. It's much easier to tell them "this stuff does things you want it to do" so they'll just allow it than to surreptitiously infect their documents, spreadsheets and MP3s. Of course, this is to date and may change in the future but I tend to doubt it.
This may be a bit nit-picky but this bit in the article rubs me the wrong way:
"It's sort of a plague," said Kent Woerner, a network administrator for a public school district in Beloit, Kansas, some 5,500 miles away from Innovative Marketing's offices in Kiev. He ran into one of its products, Advanced Cleaner, when a teacher called to report that pornographic photos were popping up on a student's screen. A message falsely claimed the images were stored on the school's computer.
"When I have a sixth-grader seeing that kind of garbage, that's offensive," said Woerner. He fixed the machine by deleting all data from the hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows. All stored data was lost.
Stephen Layton, who knows his way around technology, ended up junking his PC, losing a week's worth of data that he had yet to back up from his hard drive, after an attack from an Innovative Marketing program dubbed Windows XP Antivirus. The president of a home-based software company in Stevensville, Maryland, Layton says he is unsure how he contracted the malware.
But he was certain of its deleterious effect. "I work eight-to-12 hours a day," he said. "You lose a week of that and you're ready to jump off the roof."
Here we have 2 supposedly technically proficient individuals who apparently had no clue how to recover data from the hard drives of computers before reinstalling the OS. Hell, even if you don't have a second computer on which to mount the infected drive in order to simply copy the data (absurd for a school admin, let alone a software developer) you could do a parallel install onto the same drive.
Let's get this right, folks: recovering the data should be paramount in most cases. There is no excuse for simply deleting data because you're too lazy a tech to back it up first. It simply is not that difficult.
FTA (I know, I know):
Police have had limited success in cracking down on the scareware industry. Like Innovative Marketing, most rogue internet companies tend to be based in countries where laws permit such activities or officials look the other way.
Considering they weren't in the US I don't think there's much else that could be done directly. From what I can tell, the US Federal Trade Commission asked a foreign government to shut down a corrupt corporation within the borders of said foreign government.
Any criminal charges would have to be from within the country of origin unless we have a treaty allowing extradition. (I'm sure I'm not quite right on what'd be required as IANAL.)
Were this a US corporation I'm sure the legal action taken would have been drastically different.
That's exactly what I did to bump up to Windows 7. I picked up a nice i7 8 core system with Win7 for a song. I then sold the existing one (Core2Duo) to someone else. I actually ended up with about $20 left over after the deal was done; how can you argue? The value of all these "dead" virus infected rigs is incredible. Once Window sis reinstalled, even a 3 year old system can get $200 cash and still performs well for all basic needs.
I've often thought that instead of paying to have then "recycled" government(s) should be taking in these systems and giving them to schools or something otherwise useful. I know, a standardized platform is easier to manage but surely there's something useful that could be done with them if the previous owners don't want to refurb and sell them.
Actually, it looks to be potentially more useful than WebTV ever was but only time will tell. There are quite a few of my home user clients that would probably prefer something like this to a full blown system.
Wonder how long it'l take to actually see in a live product and how much it'll really cost. The numbers in the article appear to be a manufacturer's cost.
Makes about as much sense as nuclear bombs for propulsion.
The graphics design aspect is, granted, one issue with Dropbox. It may allow this one tech to sync specific files between the boss's kid's system and theirs, though. That way the kid's working on a local copy on his own rig that is also synced back where it belongs when he's done. Kludgy but ...
Anyhow, you're in the lucky minority of businesses that has folks on hand that can pretty well manage everything. Hell, it's almost certain that at least 50% of you would welcome a chance to assemble a server while on the clock.
The only trouble I've found with putting that many drives into a system is the cases/power supplies to handle that are much pricier than hobbyists tend to think they ought to be. This ends up making them compromise and use adapters, etc, to get it into a smaller case. I have a nice 4U case that I can fit 6 SATA drives in plus externals on ESATA if needed. (Just for "research" purposes, of course.) The drives themselves ran me about the same as the rest of the rig. Heh.
Is there something special about computerized systems that makes them require more testing than mechanical systems? The type of testing is different, but I don't see why I should inherently trust a throttle cable and more than a position sensor, other than old people are afraid of/don't understand computers.
Delayed reply, I know. I kept forgetting to do this. Heh.
Yes, the difference is a mechanical system is under the direct control of the driver. While power braking and steering is helpful, it is not impossible to control the vehicle without the power. With drive by wire you have an electronic sensor to determine the driver's input. This is then translated by the computer and sent on to the appropriate system.
If there is a bug in the code that translates these inputs then the driver may well tell the car to do one thing and it does the opposite. This wouldn't be nearly as likely with a throttle cable. Now, this is probably a vast oversimplification of the issue going on with Toyotas right now but there needs to be a lot more testing than "does it engage the brakes when I step on the pedal".
All this said, Io have very little insight int the testing that Toyota does. It does seem that they're failing somewhat at isolating the issue but that's just my take from media reports so it's worth precisely dick in the grand scheme of things.
I agree a NAS or cheap PC would be a better choice for some. I often put clients into something along these lines, if they need. The PC build, though, is going to end up at a minimum of $400 and probably much more if you add that many drives. Most small NAS units I've dealt with have issues of their own, some of which cause data loss! That D-Link unit you linked to is one. See here for some well known issues. It's a nice option but hardly without issues.
The problem is really who gets paid to maintain whatever solution is chosen. Not everyone has or wants the skills needed. That's where an IT consultant can come in handy. Most of my clients with a server pay me $300 or more a year just for basic management tasks. Some places think they can't afford that so they try to do it all themselves instead. While that ends up making me a bit more on average when they screw something up, I see my task as preventing issues as much as possible.
Dropbox is pretty well hands off and while it's not always free there's no overhead for administrative tasks. That makes it a bargain for those who can fit inside the size limits. To get a server capable of the level of service Dropbox offers (again, aside from size limits for some folks) and maintain it will run more than $200 a year on average.
Out of my 500+ clients I have 2 who couldn't manage to fit into Dropbox if they needed to. One is a professional photographer and regularly has single image files over 1GB, I use a nice little NAS nowadays. He's got over 16TB of space and will need more before long, he says. The other client runs an architectural consulting firm; his data is close to 100GB in size although we could massage that into Dropbox if needed. Those are fringe cases, though. Most folks get by just fine with small-ish servers or USB drives of one sort or another. Some are switching into cloud storage options too, though.
tl;dr: Not everyone is capable of rolling their own box or even of filling a NAS with drives. Not Not everyone is able to properly manage a server, doing backups properly and so on. Not everyone has half a terabyte of picture, video & music files to back up. Dropbox (and some other cloud storage options) can be a cost effective solution for these folks.
All that said, I agree that other solutions exist and are compelling for some.
I'll grant #3 but there's no reason not to slipstream SP3 into WinXP if you simply must install it.
Dropbox does block level updates so much of the time even large-ish files update quite fast. Then again, I'm not a graphics geek so maybe the entire file does change enough to make it a hassle.
They also now have LAN sync so the files sync internally quite fast, which makes it a decent fit for this situation.
Again, the caveat would be the size limits of Dropbox itself. Their highest amount of space is 100 GB and that's $200/year so it's not a perfect solution. It does work well for small businesses that can't (or think they can't) afford a "real" server.
That's probably technically true but as I understand it the publisher is generally the one insisting on DRM in the first place.
I know several Valve devs personally now and worked at Microsoft in the Games division around the time Xbox was released (dated, I know). Most game developers I've dealt with get that the fans are what make their game, not marketing or corporate BS, and they complain bitterly about it.
Anecdotal, sure, so YMMV.
Most often this sort of injury is a result of a landmine. Many victims also lose one or both legs but just having your nuts blown off is not uncommon. Of course, there are a number of other ways this could happen but I'd lay money on a small or improperly laid landmine.
NSFW? Seriously? I mean, some of them are nude-ish but there's no actual porn or anything. I guess it depends where you work but man, that's hardly offensive.
*wonders if he missed something worthwhile*
Heh, seriously I didn't expect anywhere near that level of attractiveness. Wow.
I saw clients hit with this behavior after the Michael Jackson hit the news and with each major story since. Each time a tragedy hits I tell my girlfriend virus/spyware cleaning calls are about to pick up a bit for me. Sad but entirely predictable now.
As it always should have been. I am not an expert on this topic but allowing computerized systems to be in charge of the vehicle without intensive testing has always seemed bad to me. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out over the next months/years that the testing has changed very little since cars were mostly mechanical.
It's also important to keep in mind that aircraft and cars aren't quite in the same class when you're defining risk.
They clearly DID record it. They used a picture of the child in the case engaging in "improper behavior in the home" then confirmed to the child's father that this is true. I'm horrified by this and want to know why the heck there aren't also criminal charges filed against every staff member who knew of this without alerting the public.
What an incredibly terrifying thing this must be to each family in that district who has had such a laptop in their home. Aside from basic states of undress they may have caught kids in there's the likelihood of actually having captured sex acts, whether adults or children. This is just insane! It's not just stored, either. Clearly someone actually reviews these recordings!
This is all aside from what exactly a school is thinking for disciplining children for something that happens int he home. As a father myself I'd be furious if such a thing happened to my child. Sure, some things can impact schools but this takes it to an entirely new level.
Un-fucking-believable.
But is this really the purpose of government? What if I don't want to pay for high-speed internet because all I do is e-mail people every once in a while? (I actually DO have high-speed, but I have family members -- siblings, not grandparents -- who only use internet for occasional e-mail and still only have dial-up) Why should I be forced to pay for high-speed that I will never use?
We should be increasing people's options, not limiting them. And increased options doesn't have to mean "better" options.
Considering the full National Broadband Plan (NBP) has yet to be publicly released, we're not certain exactly what is required. It sounds to me as though it's the availability of 100 Mbit that's being mandated, not that citizens will be forced to actually pay for it.
My main concern is really the cost at which it comes in. While 100 Mbit is available in some areas, the cost of it is insanely high. We really need true competition in this space instead of the duopoly that currently exists. Hopefully the NBP will address this so we can begin to see innovation again instead of retrenching existing business models (mass media, for example).
Not to mention much of the corporate world's communications. This is one of those "looks good on paper" things.
I totally agree with correcting tax rates, however I also think that local governments should move to pick up more of the slack. I don't see how it's the state's business to pay for things like firetrucks, municipal police cruisers, or schools (on a day to day basis). So yes, there is a problem with fiscal responsibility, the state is just confused with how much it's supposed to be taking IMO. I think we're arguing the same point, anyway.
You might want to read the WA State Constitution.
=====
ARTICLE IX
EDUCATION
SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.
=====
While I agree municipalities should kick in enough, the state does have a duty to fund education.
You forget the sales tax all those well paid employees spend when they buy all their toys. That's a non-trivial amount, I assure you.
Sorry but you are absolutely WRONG on this. B&O tax allows no deductions of any kind for expenses. See Washington State's DoR FAQ on this.
The only reason they're working to resolve it is because of Kevin Smith. If it was a nobody with no platform to mention this from, Southwest would've cared much less.
Actually, I suspect it's mostly because it's on Twitter that they reacted at all. Random average Joes have had similar responses from other corporations as well. They tend to be scared to death of bad publicity and Twitter especially seems to make them nervous.
Of course, the fact that it's a celebrity, however minor (sorry Kevin; I love your films but ...) on Twitter doesn't exactly hurt.
And guess what comes next? A reverse-competitive bidding process, whereby various cities write off their taxes on both the profits and the capital equipment, waive requirements like community access programs, and more- just to get google to give them fiber-to-the-home, something that has no proven public benefit. Which is idiotic- I don't want my tax dollars used to fund capital expenditures for corporations!
Anyone else a little more than slightly freaked out by this move? Google now encompasses search, email, instant messaging, calendaring, social networking, blogging (both content production and reading), cellular and telephone services, online payment, and now actual last-mile services? What's left?
Why does it feel like in 10 years we'll be calling it The Gnet, not the Internet?
*hands a tinfoil hat to SuperBanana*
That's called diversification and is a sound business strategy. I think Google's just doing good business by having a finger in lots of pies.
As an IT consultant for many small businesses in Seattle, I can say a service like this is sorely needed. There is simply too little choice at far too high a price right now. This is the third pipe we've needed for quite some time in order to break the back of the current broadband oligarchy. This is clearly in the public interest.
I think you mean the east side and north end of Puget Sound but yeah. Last I heard, Qwest refused to do a fiber rollout and threatened lawsuits if the city did their own. When they finally started offering faster tiers they called it "fiber-like" speeds. Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.
Qwest upper management is a bunch of asshats that cares only about milking every last dollar they can out of their infrastructure.