And it strikes me as pretty straight forward, even trivial, to work around this. All you would have to do is add a delay or secondary trigger to the code. Visitor resizes? then wait X milliseconds before checking window size. Or check window size only on a scroll or page down action.
Note: I'm not a web designer or coder, so I could be talking out my ass when it comes to judging the difficulty involved. But I'd be willing to bet money on it.
1) Your trip to the store uses public roads, so you are already accepting that other people can see you doing so. A random member of the public is allowed to watch you do so and in every jurisdiction I know of, is allowed to write down what cars he or she sees, along with the direction, speed, license plate and so on.
2) Any store you patronize must know that you were there. That is inherent in making any transaction. Since the store is their private property, just about everywhere allows them to set up security cameras for loss prevention. Thus, it is straight forward to combine your face with the time you entered, how long you shopped before heading to the cash, what items you purchased, what payment method was used, paper or plastic etc. And once collected, they own that data, so they can in most areas, sell that to whomever they like. You implicitly agree to this when you choose to shop at that location.
3) Same thing applies to your credit card. Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover know, usually to the second, when and where you make credit card purchases. For some things, it is obvious what you bought based solely on where you bought it. But for the majority of charges, the data collectors have to infer from other data. (e.g. Visa doesn't know what appears on your grocery list, but can make some shrewd guesses at the liquor store, dealership parts counter, local pizza joint et al) You agreed to this when you signed the card holder agreement#
4) Air Miles and store loyalty cards are among the worst offenders for data collection, analysis and distribution. For any of the ones I know of, it is their core business. Again, you agreed to this when signing the card holder agreement#.
5) Most of this isn't new, this sort of thing has been going on literally for decades. What IS new is that the collected data is being shared more widely than before. It used to be a store wouldn't share its data for fear of giving competitors an edge. But now, everyone is doing it and, most importantly, making enough profit by doing so to make it a good idea from their perspective. Also new is the ever increasing sophistication of the analysis being done.
#Foot note: As far as I know, every card of every kind includes text in its contracts to the effect that merely using the card is legally equivalent to signing the contract.
Thank you for doing so and for letting me know. But I'll bet you one free Internet that most of the issues I raised were things you were already aware of.
Oh, there are many companies that give at least lip service to human value. But, except for a small subset of investors who are deliberately choosing ethics over profits, the vast majority of investors are going to put their money into things that generate the best returns. The reason Mark Zuckerberg is rich is because his company stock is highly valued in the market. The stock is highly valued because Facebook generates a shit load of ad revenues, both from the direct display of ads and the back end analytic services that alarm me so much. The ad revenues are so high because Facebook is, for the most part, able to deliver on its promise to deliver better targeted ads and better market penetration than anyone else in that space. (recent exaggerated metrics scandal aside) While there is probably a fair bit of advertising on Facebook simply because it is the biggest, most well known platform for doing so after Google, at the end of the day the majority of advertisers are seeing actual returns on their marketing dollars spent on Facebook.
Facebook could be dead in the water for all intents and purposes by the New Year of there was some kind of sea change in how ads on Facebook are viewed. If people en masse decided to hard boycott every advertiser there, the ad companies would yank their ads pretty damned quick. Facebook has enough cash reserves to outlast most boycotts, but of everyone stuck to the boycotts and contacted vendors directly and explicitly said the boycott is because Facebook has proven itself to be fundamentally hostile to the very concept of privacy and by extension, any one who advertises there is going to be assumed to be equally evil.
But as I said before, most people just don't care even when some outrageous violation hits the headlines. At best you see a slump in Facebook use and a small bit of boycotting, a boycott that also doesn't last for more than a month or two.
As I see it, our best and perhaps only hope is for a legislative solution. Fines with real bite to them, laws written with an eye to recruiting the public as eager informants. For example: Facebook took in over 40 BILLION dollars in gross revenue for 2017. Doing a cursory Google search, I find that most fines that Facebook has been handed are in the one million U$ range. That's ten minutes revenue. Another way to put it? Using 100U$ bills, their fines would be a large briefcase each. Meanwhile FORTY tractor trailers full of cash are backing up the Facebook loading dock every year. (35% of which is profit) There just is NO way the kind of fines we're seeing are going to effect change. The EU might fine them a billion or so, but based on past results, Facebook likely won't have to pay anything that large.
What I'd want to do is write a law that ALL profits resulting as a result of a privacy violation are forfeit. Moreover, that the entire amount then be handed over to all the registered users affected by the breach. In other words, the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal would cost Facebook roughly 14 BILLION. Now, Facebook has a LOT of users. Recipients might see 5 or 10 bucks, but it would utterly cripple Facebook. NO Internet advertising platform in the world would dare risk that, no investor would put money into a company that didn't give good assurances that the company has done everything possible to mitigate that risk. They would not only have to take real steps to guard user privacy, it would be sound financial sense to spend good money on proper tech and admins to protect that. As a bonus, it means every user would then have a real (albeit small) personal stake in keeping an eye on those platform's behaviour. (the sound of investors screaming as their expected dividends evaporated would be music to my ears)
I'm no radio engineer, but it seems to me that you could duplicate some of that functionality without having to dive down to bare metal in your exploit. There are already "network analyser" apps for mobile devices. Those provide signal to noise ratio information already. Rain kills signal through two methods that I know of, simple attenuation and increased backscatter. If you already have clear weather reports from that already established location, a simple statistical comparison to your baseline (harvested from many devices at that location over time) should give you a good idea whether there is precipitation going on or not. You may not be able to get high accuracy, but even a rate of successful guesses in excess of 75% could be extremely useful. As something of a sanity check, you can compare results from known indoor and outdoor hotspots. Someone in a park using a municipal hot spot is going to be more affected by weather than someone sitting in the local McDonalds.
As low quality confirmation information, on the back end you can look at otherwise unexplained slow downs in traffic speed. The key would be to make sure to evaluate traffic in both directions. Some yahoo cutting you off triggers a slow down for you and every one behind you that can persist as a ripple in traffic speeds and moves backwards through the traffic at some speed related to traffic forward velocity. (I think it's called the slinky effect and I do not remember the math behind it, but it was something like a ripple in traffic moves back through the traffic at half of the average forward velocity) But that yahoo, unless he triggers an accident, doesn't affect the traffic going the other way. A slow down in both directions, with no construction or accident to explain it, could well be rain causing skilled drivers to slow down and open up their following distances.
Sadly, you're probably correct insomuch as anyone on/. who cares about such things already knows this stuff is going on. So those who don't care will skip it and those who do care *may* skip it, or at best skim it because I'm preaching to the choir...
Motherboards blow 10 kinds of ass with their strict layout. Standards schmandards The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
There are at least 12 form factors (AT, baby AT, ATX,Micro ATX BTX DTX LPX NLX Micro ATX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX) thatr I know of, plus numerous proprietary form factors in the SBC segment. The industry came up with those because it was useful to them to do so. Nobody forced them to and nothing stops anyone from coming up with their own form factor or proprietary extensions to existing standards. Those standards and the minimum level of interoperability are a big part of why digital technology saw such an explosion in my lifetime.
Let's look at this from both sides of the purchase: Would you want to buy a Dell tower if you knew that only Dell branded add-ons will work with it? Dell proprietary memory, Dell proprietary video card, Dell proprietary cases, Dell proprietary network cards, Dell proprietary storage and so on. We had just that situation back when I was first learning computers. With rare exceptions, hardware for a Burroughs computer had to come from Burroughs, Philips hardware had to come from Philips and so on. No single OEM aside from maybe IBM, could really achieve economies of scale, all the OEMs R&D was restricted by the need to not infringe on patented good ideas from other outfits. Shit was expensive, shit didn't work all that well, shit was difficult to adapt to user needs and it was hard to make shit talk to other shit reliably. Through sheer size, IBM managed to dominate the market and some of the early desktop standards were explicitly "IBM compatible"
On the manufacturer end, being able to use an existing hardware standard also means they are more likely to be able to use standard software implementations as well. That speeds development time and reduces R&D costs. Why re-invent the network stack, possibly introducing your own failure points, when there is already a very good, exhaustively examined and tested standard? If you make sounds cards (or these days, dedicated sound processors for inclusion in someone else's motherboard) do you really want to have to develop to meet 20 different hardware standards to match every mobo manufacturers proprietary designs, or would you prefer to just develop to the PCI standard and be able to make one device that works for almost everybody?
Finally, proprietary motherboard designs are still alive and well in the industrial/embedded segments and in laptops and other mobile devices. There the form factor is constrained by physical environment and case packaging concerns, not meeting form factor standards. What IS still being develop to standard in those markets is the interfaces. Most notebooks use the same sorts of ram, albeit with a different size and pin count, as desktop machines. They still do standard ethernet, bluetooth and so on. Also, as far as I know, Big Iron (mainframes and other very large scale computing solutions) is still largely proprietary.
A VPN only masks your IP from the destination web site and the routers your packets pass through. Your phone always knows where you are and shares that info with your carrier, OEM and application store, just for starters.
A VPN only masks your IP from the destination web site and the routers your packets pass through. Your phone always knows where you are. It knows what cell towers are in range and relative signal strength from each, that right there can locate you within a hundred meter radius or so. The Android and Apple OS'es themselves know your location from the Cell towers, GPS (accurate within 8 meters) available Wi-Fi sources (~50 m), Bluetooth(100m), NFC (10 cm) and things like Samsungs S-beam (combines NFC and Wi-Fi). By combining these sources of location data, you can come up with a surprisingly accurate estimate of location for a given device. After all, even if you don't use Apple pay (for example) your phone can still "see" the Apple Pay reader device on the Starbucks counter while you're paying for your latte with cash. That device location is known and certainly isn't prone to moving around much.
None of that can be completely disabled. This information then gets shared with a handful of OEM apps and the application stores. On the back end, there are a handful of demographic and geolocation data base providers collating, cross referencing and compiling all the data from a myriad sources. Some of those sources include data like name, address and phone numbers. (shopper loyalty cards, Air Miles, store specific free draws etc)
Having Facebook know where you are at all times and showing you ads based on what they know about you is scary enough. But it gets worse when you realize that Facebook is tracking you and adding you to the databases they use even if you've never been a Facebook user. The real worst though is that these backend databases aren't really subject to any oversight and are accessible to any one willing to sign a contract with the analytics company. From time to time and in various places, laws have been passed that say marketers cannot collect certain kinds of information in certain ways or do certain things with that information. But it is rare for a law to take a holistic approach, starting with privacy and working from there. And I've NEVER heard of a law that banned certain data practices and required that all existing data gathered that way be purged
And don't forget radio signal fingerprinting. There is the cell tower, the free Wi-Fi at your favourite coffee shop, Bluetooth, S beam (or equivalent) and NFC . As I've said above, demographic and geolocation companies use more sources of information than just the apps you chose to install. Check your email at Starbucks? One of your apps, maybe even a vendor installed and non-removable app reports your location. Pay using your phone? The credit card company might be sharing your location into. Use Air Miles? You're definitely being tracked, that's how Air Miles can afford to give you those travel points, ditto for most store loyalty cards. Using ANY Android or Apple mobile device? The apps store itself knows your location and this function cannot be disabled. Google at least doesn't typically share this info directly. The deal it makes with advertised is : Tell us what demographic slice you want $ad to be shown to, frequency etc and we'll pass it along to the appropriate eyeballs.
However, thanks to things like beacon pixels and very carefully selected demographic criteria, it is fairly straight forward for an advertiser to discover your location. e.g. "show Ad_A to people within this zip code, show ad_B to people who have their credit card tied to their phone, show ad_C to someone who has paid with their phone at a Starbucks in the last 30 days" Do enough of these, constantly sharing the results with those back end database companies and you end up with a scarily accurate and damn near real time profile on individuals.
As I said above just a moment ago, it's not the app in question that is the problem. The offending app is just one spy among a myriad others that the database compilers partner with. Facebook collects data not only from its own app and site, but also through leasing access to 3rd party geolocation and demographic database providers. So even if you delete the Facebook app and archive your Facebook profile (you can't really delete a profile as easily as you might think) Facebook can and does still track you. Here is the scary part: Facebook is still tracking you and compiling profile information on you even if you have never interacted with Facebook or their services before
There are only a handful of geolocation and demographic database providers and all of them have numerous data feeds. A rough rule of thumb is that if you are using any free digital based service (Air Miles, store loyalty cards, branded credit cards etc) then these companies know who you are and a scary amount about your shopping habits and normal movement patterns.
As in the world of counter-inelligence, the problem isn't the spy. It is the intelligence agency that employs the spy. It's just that the spy happens to be one thing you might catch and defeat. Good counter-inel isn't just making sure you have no spies in your camp. It is also things like making sure none of your people leave useful information left laying around and carefully feeding false information to the other side. Thing is, that is very hard to do even for very good intelligence agencies. It is hopeless to think of the general mass of humanity (most of whom don't care) achieving the same level of vigilance.
I could be wrong about this, but it's my understanding that just because the app isn't open and being used doesn't mean that all components of it are static data in storage. While messing around in the various settings and controls on Android mobile devices, I noticed a curious thing. Go to the apps list, tap any app that you have installed. You'll be given two choices for that app: Uninstall and Force Stop. Force Stop can be greyed out for many of the apps that were pre-installed and the manufacturer judged to be important to basic function of the device. For everything else, clicking that button then changes it to a greyed out state. One would have to assume that if you're given a Force Stop button and it changes state when you use it, then it is actually doing something "under the hood"
Of course, the benign possibility is that the app has some kind of monitor process that phones home occasionally to check for updates. (home being defined as either the app store or the developers own systems) But making that background process also track your location and report that in any of several ways should be trivial for any app developer skilled enough to meet the inclusion criteria of the Android or Apple app stores.
For companies like Facebook and pretty much every free mobile game out there, their entire business model is providing you with a service only as an opportunity to gather every possible scrap of data on you. Just because your phone isn't passing along what it knows about your location doesn't mean that the background app can't determine where you are through a number of other methods. It just means the level of certainty drops a tiny bit.
For example, you go to your favourite caffeine dispensary where they also happen to have free Wi-Fi. You happen to have $shiny_app installed but don't allow it to know your location. But it can still get identifying data for radio sources through the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and possibly the NFC reader (aka S Beam in Samsung phones, many other phones have something similar). The background process I described already gathers that info and then phones home with that radio finger print. The $shiny_app developer has a data base, purchased from a 3rd party, which lists millions of such fingerprints. Thanks to numerous other mobile users who haven't disabled location data on their devices, the database has a pretty clear idea of where each radio fingerprint is physically located.
It's important to note that deleting an offending app won't solve the problem. MOST of the apps you have installed will be doing this and there are only a handful of providers of that third party geolocation database. Thus the 3rd party database company has dozens, even hundreds of informants at any given time, compiling really massive amounts of data. To me, it is those 3rd party database providers that are the real and pernicious privacy threat.
As far as I know, these data analytic companies collect FAR more than just geolocation data. Many of them also cooperate with programs like Air Miles, store loyalty cards and so on. Which means that not only do they know where you are pretty much in real time, there's a good chance they know your name, credit score, banking information, shopping habits and place of employment. And while there is a tiny minority of people who actually worry about protecting their privacy from these apps (like a majority of slashdotters), very few seem to be taking a step back and worrying about the big picture.
What we need is a way to make protecting privacy more profitable than violating it but I'm certainly not the genius who will come up with one.
I see your point about soma and whatever recreational drug you care to mention. And Facebook does have some parallels in 1984. But you overlook the "we have always been at war with eastasia" as an excuse for universal surveillance and population control which is the big issue in 1984 and in modern politics.
Thankfully, while it is technically possible, we are still years away from a universal program of eugenics and genetic engineering to produce a docile and obedient society a la Brave New World.
To be fair though, the existence of an idea in science fiction doesn't mean that people at the time thought it was actually possible. It just means the author and audience that it was a neat concept and that the author was able to couch it in plausible terms.
And I think people under-estimate the "neat concept" thing as a driver of progress. It may not be possible to build an actual light sabre as depicted in Star Wars, but people are going to try and come up with solutions or work-arounds for the various physical problems until we have something close enough for practical purposes. (right now we have thermal lances which do similar things to materials and tissue as a light sabre, it just doesn't form a neat collimated bar bar you can swing around)
It's my understanding and experience that reputable forecasters always phrase things like : "If this trend continues..." or "Without substantive change in the way we do X, Y is the likely result."
In my opinion, that isn't just weasel wording to cover themselves if their predictions turn out to be off or even completely wrong. They are challenges to drive further research, free debates on how to achieve the desired changes and so on. Once we accept that trend X is likely to result in Y, then we can take a good hard look at what we can do to change the X trend line. As you point out, advances in technology often change what really results, ending in a wrong prediction. But socio-economic factors also affect environmental predictions as well. If we double efficiency in something, we halve the cost and in some cases that actually results in larger consumption than we started with, as the thing becomes more accessible to the masses.My pet example isn't the CFL and LED bulbs I've seen elsewhere, but air conditioning. Some of the hottest places in the world are also the poorest. If having a/c becomes half as costly because of advances in power generation OR in economic factors like subsidies or economic booms, a/c adoption in those areas will skyrocket. Doubling of efficiency in food production can cause population booms, which in turn drive more energy consumption and so on.
There are two logical fallacies that seem to be core to the human condition and hence core to the political rhetoric we see on climate and energy issues.
1) People knee jerk reject predictions that don't fit their existing biases. And as a result will attack minor or even irrelevant aspects of a predictions and then act that being able to find fault in one thing means the entire prediction is therefore invalid. Look at how climate change deniers attack climate predictions.
2) A wrong prediction, where things turn out better than the worst case scenario is actually a success. Through a combination of things, we were able to avert the worst case. But many people just focus on "the scientists got that wrong, how can we trust them to get this other thing right?" When, arguably, what we should be doing is looking at what we did to contribute to that good result and increase our efforts in that area.
Ultimately, nobody can make 100% accurate predictions about the future. We certainly can't say "things will follow this curve until $tech is discovered/invented, at which point the data will look like this" All we can do is look at the data we have, apply our best available reasoning to that data and make reasonable extrapolations.
And yet, there have been those on this site who argue that making a copy isn't "theft" because the owner isn't deprived of their copy.
In this case, for foreigners with sensitive business documents, the CIA and NSA would be seriously remiss in their duties if they didn't try to mine such info at every opportunity and analyse it 6 ways from Sunday to give the US any edge in security (and lets be honest, any edge in prosperity too)
Terrorists, at least, tech savvy terrorists, wouldn't have sensitive data on mobile devices coming across the border. As others have said, it only makes sense to use cloud storage for that sort of thing. BUT, what the hypothetical terrorist might have on his device is traces of the address of their chosen cloud storage, encryption keys needed and so on. (probably not log in/authentication credentials, those are usually memorized.) If a bad actor forgot the encryption keys were on his system, DHS would have a nice invitation to access every thing he could.
In theory, what happens is your sensitive business info gets slurped onto a thumb drive and then sent to the DHS central database and some automatic screening goes on. If you have nothing that raises red flags, it gets archived in that massive NSA storehouse and you are free to go. Unless it becomes relevant to a case, your data never gets looked at by a human being and likely never gets re examined by software either.
The irony of someone promoting this sort of thinking while using the handle AHuxley is just staggering. You do know that Aldous was on the left side of the political spectrum right? He was a humanist, cherished the value of human beings over the systems humans create to serve their needs.
sadly, your IP has probably been noted, correlated with all your other traffic and this post is what put you over the top to get flagged on the NSA servers. If the US goes full fascist, guys like you will disappear in Night and Fog II electric boogaloo..
That could be the plot of a decent movie. DHS decides to spend a LOT more attention on tourists coming in and out of Las Vegas during the Black Hat conference. Licking their chops in anticipation of all the grey and black hats they're gonna catch. But word of this plan leaks and attendance to the Con spikes massively as hacker and cracker folk from all over the world rush to Las Vegas in hopes of scoring the major coup of being the one who provided the poison pill mobile device that brought the DHS system down. Security checkpoints buckle under the unexpected load, supervisors calling in everybody for unscheduled overtime, the whole thing blowing up and social media, some grey hats going through security over and over, with ever decreasingly plausible disguises to see what it takes to make the overwork slobs on the front lines go "wait a second..." And then, when misery is at its peak, someone's carefully crafted data finds a weakness in the data upload system and brings down the DHS-NOC links for every customs point in America and a few in other countries.
TALK ABOUT BRAGGING RIGHTS. It's xkcd's Bobby Tables gone hard core.
(innocent look) Does any one know if DHS sanitizes its data inputs?
I wonder if the private data coming from the device of an attractive woman makes any change to the odds of it being "accidentally" left on the USB? A local tech shop has had to fire a few employees over the years because they would make a point of skimming through the hard drives of attractive women, hoping to score some nude selfies.
Plus, is anyone making sure that these thumb drives aren't growing legs? The DHS doesn't have a good track record there. There has been apparently a lot of cases of valuables were mysteriously disappearing while in DHS custody
1) manufacturers don't want the consumer looking too closely at tech specs. Technically, most of the HDR offerings are pretty much the same and what can be seen with an optical device might not make a noticeable difference to an average consumer. But have a tech review site say that Brand X came in below average for AdobeRGB would be a mortal wound to sales.
2) I don't know what it's like with HDR sets, but for other panels I have the impression that there is only a very small handful of actual fabs making the raw panels. That would mean that that the panels themselves are largely identical, so trying to compete on specs is a mugs game. Finished panels, whether it be TVs, monitors or digital signage get sold on brand recognition and marketing schmooze.
3) Consumers, on average, are far more sensitive to price per diagonal inch of screen than they are tech specs, warranty, privacy concerns etc. So that's where vendors focus their efforts.
4) I'm willing to bet that in the professional space, you *can* get proper tech specs for TV's and not just monitors. I don't remember the vendor in question but I recall looking at published specs per panel from a video wall company that was touting HDR upgrades for the TV studio market and they definitely quoted $RGB specs.
5) When all is said and done, unless you have audiophile level addiction to video equipment, it doesn't really matter now does it? The pros want and need calibrated color gamuts because they need to match printer colors, logos need to use correct corporate branded color, need to work on hidef movies where any shortfall in the color gamut of the work flow WILL show up in the final analogue film and so on.
For your average user, what are they going to compare the image their living room set displays to? About the only place I can think of it mattering to a residential consumer is either multi-monitor displays (where as long as all panels match each other, you're usually good to go), or video walls for the wealthy and that brings us back to the professional panel vendors. A videophile might want to bask in the knowledge that they spent an extra X grand to make sure they get full sRGB gamut (I don't know of any TV that comes close to 100% of AdobeRGB) but that's a real niche market and one that doesn't seem to attract the same level of "price no object as long as there is pseudo science invoked" silliness of the audiophile segment. Sitting in a living room watching movies, can an average viewer discern even a 5% difference in color gamut if they don't have both panels playing the same thing at the same time?
I do remember when/. was a content aggregator. At the time, people complained that the posted articles were things they had already seen elsewhere. (quite often weeks before) There have been a few times in/. history where the staff flat out asked the users for suggestions on improving the site. One perennial suggestion was to provide meaningful, original content. This article is clearly geek worthy, whether it matters is subject to individual taste, so they are fulfilling their mission statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: I'm not a web designer or coder, so I could be talking out my ass when it comes to judging the difficulty involved. But I'd be willing to bet money on it.
2) Any store you patronize must know that you were there. That is inherent in making any transaction. Since the store is their private property, just about everywhere allows them to set up security cameras for loss prevention. Thus, it is straight forward to combine your face with the time you entered, how long you shopped before heading to the cash, what items you purchased, what payment method was used, paper or plastic etc. And once collected, they own that data, so they can in most areas, sell that to whomever they like. You implicitly agree to this when you choose to shop at that location.
3) Same thing applies to your credit card. Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover know, usually to the second, when and where you make credit card purchases. For some things, it is obvious what you bought based solely on where you bought it. But for the majority of charges, the data collectors have to infer from other data. (e.g. Visa doesn't know what appears on your grocery list, but can make some shrewd guesses at the liquor store, dealership parts counter, local pizza joint et al) You agreed to this when you signed the card holder agreement#
4) Air Miles and store loyalty cards are among the worst offenders for data collection, analysis and distribution. For any of the ones I know of, it is their core business. Again, you agreed to this when signing the card holder agreement#.
5) Most of this isn't new, this sort of thing has been going on literally for decades. What IS new is that the collected data is being shared more widely than before. It used to be a store wouldn't share its data for fear of giving competitors an edge. But now, everyone is doing it and, most importantly, making enough profit by doing so to make it a good idea from their perspective. Also new is the ever increasing sophistication of the analysis being done.
#Foot note: As far as I know, every card of every kind includes text in its contracts to the effect that merely using the card is legally equivalent to signing the contract.
quote: "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..." Marvin the paranoid android
damn, my inline quote stuff got lost in the posting. I must have done something wrong. The "motherboards blow..." bit is a quote from the parent post.
Thank you for doing so and for letting me know. But I'll bet you one free Internet that most of the issues I raised were things you were already aware of.
Facebook could be dead in the water for all intents and purposes by the New Year of there was some kind of sea change in how ads on Facebook are viewed. If people en masse decided to hard boycott every advertiser there, the ad companies would yank their ads pretty damned quick. Facebook has enough cash reserves to outlast most boycotts, but of everyone stuck to the boycotts and contacted vendors directly and explicitly said the boycott is because Facebook has proven itself to be fundamentally hostile to the very concept of privacy and by extension, any one who advertises there is going to be assumed to be equally evil.
But as I said before, most people just don't care even when some outrageous violation hits the headlines. At best you see a slump in Facebook use and a small bit of boycotting, a boycott that also doesn't last for more than a month or two.
As I see it, our best and perhaps only hope is for a legislative solution. Fines with real bite to them, laws written with an eye to recruiting the public as eager informants. For example: Facebook took in over 40 BILLION dollars in gross revenue for 2017. Doing a cursory Google search, I find that most fines that Facebook has been handed are in the one million U$ range. That's ten minutes revenue. Another way to put it? Using 100U$ bills, their fines would be a large briefcase each. Meanwhile FORTY tractor trailers full of cash are backing up the Facebook loading dock every year. (35% of which is profit) There just is NO way the kind of fines we're seeing are going to effect change. The EU might fine them a billion or so, but based on past results, Facebook likely won't have to pay anything that large.
What I'd want to do is write a law that ALL profits resulting as a result of a privacy violation are forfeit. Moreover, that the entire amount then be handed over to all the registered users affected by the breach. In other words, the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal would cost Facebook roughly 14 BILLION. Now, Facebook has a LOT of users. Recipients might see 5 or 10 bucks, but it would utterly cripple Facebook. NO Internet advertising platform in the world would dare risk that, no investor would put money into a company that didn't give good assurances that the company has done everything possible to mitigate that risk. They would not only have to take real steps to guard user privacy, it would be sound financial sense to spend good money on proper tech and admins to protect that. As a bonus, it means every user would then have a real (albeit small) personal stake in keeping an eye on those platform's behaviour. (the sound of investors screaming as their expected dividends evaporated would be music to my ears)
As low quality confirmation information, on the back end you can look at otherwise unexplained slow downs in traffic speed. The key would be to make sure to evaluate traffic in both directions. Some yahoo cutting you off triggers a slow down for you and every one behind you that can persist as a ripple in traffic speeds and moves backwards through the traffic at some speed related to traffic forward velocity. (I think it's called the slinky effect and I do not remember the math behind it, but it was something like a ripple in traffic moves back through the traffic at half of the average forward velocity) But that yahoo, unless he triggers an accident, doesn't affect the traffic going the other way. A slow down in both directions, with no construction or accident to explain it, could well be rain causing skilled drivers to slow down and open up their following distances.
Sadly, you're probably correct insomuch as anyone on /. who cares about such things already knows this stuff is going on. So those who don't care will skip it and those who do care *may* skip it, or at best skim it because I'm preaching to the choir...
There are at least 12 form factors (AT, baby AT, ATX,Micro ATX BTX DTX LPX NLX Micro ATX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX) thatr I know of, plus numerous proprietary form factors in the SBC segment. The industry came up with those because it was useful to them to do so. Nobody forced them to and nothing stops anyone from coming up with their own form factor or proprietary extensions to existing standards. Those standards and the minimum level of interoperability are a big part of why digital technology saw such an explosion in my lifetime.
Let's look at this from both sides of the purchase: Would you want to buy a Dell tower if you knew that only Dell branded add-ons will work with it? Dell proprietary memory, Dell proprietary video card, Dell proprietary cases, Dell proprietary network cards, Dell proprietary storage and so on. We had just that situation back when I was first learning computers. With rare exceptions, hardware for a Burroughs computer had to come from Burroughs, Philips hardware had to come from Philips and so on. No single OEM aside from maybe IBM, could really achieve economies of scale, all the OEMs R&D was restricted by the need to not infringe on patented good ideas from other outfits. Shit was expensive, shit didn't work all that well, shit was difficult to adapt to user needs and it was hard to make shit talk to other shit reliably. Through sheer size, IBM managed to dominate the market and some of the early desktop standards were explicitly "IBM compatible"
On the manufacturer end, being able to use an existing hardware standard also means they are more likely to be able to use standard software implementations as well. That speeds development time and reduces R&D costs. Why re-invent the network stack, possibly introducing your own failure points, when there is already a very good, exhaustively examined and tested standard? If you make sounds cards (or these days, dedicated sound processors for inclusion in someone else's motherboard) do you really want to have to develop to meet 20 different hardware standards to match every mobo manufacturers proprietary designs, or would you prefer to just develop to the PCI standard and be able to make one device that works for almost everybody?
Finally, proprietary motherboard designs are still alive and well in the industrial/embedded segments and in laptops and other mobile devices. There the form factor is constrained by physical environment and case packaging concerns, not meeting form factor standards. What IS still being develop to standard in those markets is the interfaces. Most notebooks use the same sorts of ram, albeit with a different size and pin count, as desktop machines. They still do standard ethernet, bluetooth and so on. Also, as far as I know, Big Iron (mainframes and other very large scale computing solutions) is still largely proprietary.
A VPN only masks your IP from the destination web site and the routers your packets pass through. Your phone always knows where you are and shares that info with your carrier, OEM and application store, just for starters.
None of that can be completely disabled. This information then gets shared with a handful of OEM apps and the application stores. On the back end, there are a handful of demographic and geolocation data base providers collating, cross referencing and compiling all the data from a myriad sources. Some of those sources include data like name, address and phone numbers. (shopper loyalty cards, Air Miles, store specific free draws etc)
Having Facebook know where you are at all times and showing you ads based on what they know about you is scary enough. But it gets worse when you realize that Facebook is tracking you and adding you to the databases they use even if you've never been a Facebook user. The real worst though is that these backend databases aren't really subject to any oversight and are accessible to any one willing to sign a contract with the analytics company. From time to time and in various places, laws have been passed that say marketers cannot collect certain kinds of information in certain ways or do certain things with that information. But it is rare for a law to take a holistic approach, starting with privacy and working from there. And I've NEVER heard of a law that banned certain data practices and required that all existing data gathered that way be purged
However, thanks to things like beacon pixels and very carefully selected demographic criteria, it is fairly straight forward for an advertiser to discover your location. e.g. "show Ad_A to people within this zip code, show ad_B to people who have their credit card tied to their phone, show ad_C to someone who has paid with their phone at a Starbucks in the last 30 days" Do enough of these, constantly sharing the results with those back end database companies and you end up with a scarily accurate and damn near real time profile on individuals.
There are only a handful of geolocation and demographic database providers and all of them have numerous data feeds. A rough rule of thumb is that if you are using any free digital based service (Air Miles, store loyalty cards, branded credit cards etc) then these companies know who you are and a scary amount about your shopping habits and normal movement patterns.
As in the world of counter-inelligence, the problem isn't the spy. It is the intelligence agency that employs the spy. It's just that the spy happens to be one thing you might catch and defeat. Good counter-inel isn't just making sure you have no spies in your camp. It is also things like making sure none of your people leave useful information left laying around and carefully feeding false information to the other side. Thing is, that is very hard to do even for very good intelligence agencies. It is hopeless to think of the general mass of humanity (most of whom don't care) achieving the same level of vigilance.
Of course, the benign possibility is that the app has some kind of monitor process that phones home occasionally to check for updates. (home being defined as either the app store or the developers own systems) But making that background process also track your location and report that in any of several ways should be trivial for any app developer skilled enough to meet the inclusion criteria of the Android or Apple app stores.
For companies like Facebook and pretty much every free mobile game out there, their entire business model is providing you with a service only as an opportunity to gather every possible scrap of data on you. Just because your phone isn't passing along what it knows about your location doesn't mean that the background app can't determine where you are through a number of other methods. It just means the level of certainty drops a tiny bit.
For example, you go to your favourite caffeine dispensary where they also happen to have free Wi-Fi. You happen to have $shiny_app installed but don't allow it to know your location. But it can still get identifying data for radio sources through the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and possibly the NFC reader (aka S Beam in Samsung phones, many other phones have something similar). The background process I described already gathers that info and then phones home with that radio finger print. The $shiny_app developer has a data base, purchased from a 3rd party, which lists millions of such fingerprints. Thanks to numerous other mobile users who haven't disabled location data on their devices, the database has a pretty clear idea of where each radio fingerprint is physically located.
It's important to note that deleting an offending app won't solve the problem. MOST of the apps you have installed will be doing this and there are only a handful of providers of that third party geolocation database. Thus the 3rd party database company has dozens, even hundreds of informants at any given time, compiling really massive amounts of data. To me, it is those 3rd party database providers that are the real and pernicious privacy threat.
As far as I know, these data analytic companies collect FAR more than just geolocation data. Many of them also cooperate with programs like Air Miles, store loyalty cards and so on. Which means that not only do they know where you are pretty much in real time, there's a good chance they know your name, credit score, banking information, shopping habits and place of employment. And while there is a tiny minority of people who actually worry about protecting their privacy from these apps (like a majority of slashdotters), very few seem to be taking a step back and worrying about the big picture.
What we need is a way to make protecting privacy more profitable than violating it but I'm certainly not the genius who will come up with one.
Thankfully, while it is technically possible, we are still years away from a universal program of eugenics and genetic engineering to produce a docile and obedient society a la Brave New World.
And I think people under-estimate the "neat concept" thing as a driver of progress. It may not be possible to build an actual light sabre as depicted in Star Wars, but people are going to try and come up with solutions or work-arounds for the various physical problems until we have something close enough for practical purposes. (right now we have thermal lances which do similar things to materials and tissue as a light sabre, it just doesn't form a neat collimated bar bar you can swing around)
In my opinion, that isn't just weasel wording to cover themselves if their predictions turn out to be off or even completely wrong. They are challenges to drive further research, free debates on how to achieve the desired changes and so on. Once we accept that trend X is likely to result in Y, then we can take a good hard look at what we can do to change the X trend line. As you point out, advances in technology often change what really results, ending in a wrong prediction. But socio-economic factors also affect environmental predictions as well. If we double efficiency in something, we halve the cost and in some cases that actually results in larger consumption than we started with, as the thing becomes more accessible to the masses.My pet example isn't the CFL and LED bulbs I've seen elsewhere, but air conditioning. Some of the hottest places in the world are also the poorest. If having a/c becomes half as costly because of advances in power generation OR in economic factors like subsidies or economic booms, a/c adoption in those areas will skyrocket. Doubling of efficiency in food production can cause population booms, which in turn drive more energy consumption and so on.
There are two logical fallacies that seem to be core to the human condition and hence core to the political rhetoric we see on climate and energy issues.
1) People knee jerk reject predictions that don't fit their existing biases. And as a result will attack minor or even irrelevant aspects of a predictions and then act that being able to find fault in one thing means the entire prediction is therefore invalid. Look at how climate change deniers attack climate predictions.
2) A wrong prediction, where things turn out better than the worst case scenario is actually a success. Through a combination of things, we were able to avert the worst case. But many people just focus on "the scientists got that wrong, how can we trust them to get this other thing right?" When, arguably, what we should be doing is looking at what we did to contribute to that good result and increase our efforts in that area.
Ultimately, nobody can make 100% accurate predictions about the future. We certainly can't say "things will follow this curve until $tech is discovered/invented, at which point the data will look like this" All we can do is look at the data we have, apply our best available reasoning to that data and make reasonable extrapolations.
I probably have the time (retired) but I doubt I have the technical chops to make it plausible nor the writing chops to make such a work saleable.
In this case, for foreigners with sensitive business documents, the CIA and NSA would be seriously remiss in their duties if they didn't try to mine such info at every opportunity and analyse it 6 ways from Sunday to give the US any edge in security (and lets be honest, any edge in prosperity too)
Terrorists, at least, tech savvy terrorists, wouldn't have sensitive data on mobile devices coming across the border. As others have said, it only makes sense to use cloud storage for that sort of thing. BUT, what the hypothetical terrorist might have on his device is traces of the address of their chosen cloud storage, encryption keys needed and so on. (probably not log in/authentication credentials, those are usually memorized.) If a bad actor forgot the encryption keys were on his system, DHS would have a nice invitation to access every thing he could.
In theory, what happens is your sensitive business info gets slurped onto a thumb drive and then sent to the DHS central database and some automatic screening goes on. If you have nothing that raises red flags, it gets archived in that massive NSA storehouse and you are free to go. Unless it becomes relevant to a case, your data never gets looked at by a human being and likely never gets re examined by software either.
The irony of someone promoting this sort of thinking while using the handle AHuxley is just staggering. You do know that Aldous was on the left side of the political spectrum right? He was a humanist, cherished the value of human beings over the systems humans create to serve their needs.
sadly, your IP has probably been noted, correlated with all your other traffic and this post is what put you over the top to get flagged on the NSA servers. If the US goes full fascist, guys like you will disappear in Night and Fog II electric boogaloo..
TALK ABOUT BRAGGING RIGHTS. It's xkcd's Bobby Tables gone hard core.
(innocent look) Does any one know if DHS sanitizes its data inputs?
Plus, is anyone making sure that these thumb drives aren't growing legs? The DHS doesn't have a good track record there. There has been apparently a lot of cases of valuables were mysteriously disappearing while in DHS custody
2) I don't know what it's like with HDR sets, but for other panels I have the impression that there is only a very small handful of actual fabs making the raw panels. That would mean that that the panels themselves are largely identical, so trying to compete on specs is a mugs game. Finished panels, whether it be TVs, monitors or digital signage get sold on brand recognition and marketing schmooze.
3) Consumers, on average, are far more sensitive to price per diagonal inch of screen than they are tech specs, warranty, privacy concerns etc. So that's where vendors focus their efforts.
4) I'm willing to bet that in the professional space, you *can* get proper tech specs for TV's and not just monitors. I don't remember the vendor in question but I recall looking at published specs per panel from a video wall company that was touting HDR upgrades for the TV studio market and they definitely quoted $RGB specs.
5) When all is said and done, unless you have audiophile level addiction to video equipment, it doesn't really matter now does it? The pros want and need calibrated color gamuts because they need to match printer colors, logos need to use correct corporate branded color, need to work on hidef movies where any shortfall in the color gamut of the work flow WILL show up in the final analogue film and so on. For your average user, what are they going to compare the image their living room set displays to? About the only place I can think of it mattering to a residential consumer is either multi-monitor displays (where as long as all panels match each other, you're usually good to go), or video walls for the wealthy and that brings us back to the professional panel vendors. A videophile might want to bask in the knowledge that they spent an extra X grand to make sure they get full sRGB gamut (I don't know of any TV that comes close to 100% of AdobeRGB) but that's a real niche market and one that doesn't seem to attract the same level of "price no object as long as there is pseudo science invoked" silliness of the audiophile segment. Sitting in a living room watching movies, can an average viewer discern even a 5% difference in color gamut if they don't have both panels playing the same thing at the same time?
I do remember when /. was a content aggregator. At the time, people complained that the posted articles were things they had already seen elsewhere. (quite often weeks before) There have been a few times in /. history where the staff flat out asked the users for suggestions on improving the site. One perennial suggestion was to provide meaningful, original content. This article is clearly geek worthy, whether it matters is subject to individual taste, so they are fulfilling their mission statement.