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Moving from Linux, though, could have upsides for Google. Android’s use of the technology, which is distributed by Oracle Corp., is at the center of a lengthy, bitter lawsuit between the two companies.
I am confused. I thought they were confusing Linux with Java, but the very next paragraph addresses the Java situation.
A previous version of this story was corrected to make clear Oracle link with Linux.
🤔
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Engineers of all stripes have an ethical responsibility to uphold, and it’s in making tough choices, like turning down customers, that you prove your worth.
That being said, it makes me sad that a scandal like this one, which in my sense is plagued by political opportunism on the left, has so much traction.
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Yeah… Some problems are not so clear cut. There are big differences between short term and long term outcomes, also between intent and outcome, as well as adjusting plans that don’t work well currently vs having evil intent.
- Would I say Trump has much empathy? … no.
- Is the right wing sadistic and enjoy suffering? I would also say no.
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No - The hysterics are ignoring the word of people there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGuSdXiFtLk
This man seems genuine to me, and seems to save more children than anyone here.
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moreover, if you take your or nebkors presented opinion at face value, that agent being interviewed is a terrorist, sadistic and evil. I never said wanting children to be safe are hysterics, but calling half the population evil while ignoring the whole argument is disingenuous to me.
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We have access to the same information, and have come to different conclusions due to our conflicting values. If you’re ashamed of the label that fits your opinions, perhaps you should consider changing your opinions or values to be less shameful. But I assure you, the problem is not my sources of information. I suspect it’s not yours, either.
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The barest start is to acknowledge the current atrocities being directly executed by the police and immigration systems, and working to stop them. Things like people being cruelly detained, isolated, abandoned in a heartless bureaucracy, children separated, deporting to known unsafe zones, etc. Next up is recognizing and taking responsibility for our actions (“our” being the United States, apologies for US-centricity) in Latin America over the course of the last 150 years, along with recent drug policy, climate change, etc. that have created this refugee crisis.
Then we can get into abolishing prisons, disarming all cops, restoring the top marginal tax rate to 90%, providing healthcare and education and food, etc. and really start getting it correct.
So yeah, because the right wing believes in property over persons, in denying moral responsibilities, in short-sighted selfishness and avarice, they are by definition heartless and sadistic. They are in charge, and their actions speak for themselves.
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I think that the author misses the point of having those command line tools available. It’s all about gradual development. Unix was designed for interchangeable parts that work together, making it as easy as possible to leverage work that others have done and replacing parts if they fail to work correctly, all the way up to the process level.
This kind of interoperability has proven very difficult to accomplish pervasively with GUI applications. You have to standardize on some interface to exchange data, and not only that, create an intuitive method to compose programs together. Unifying the “small, composable tools” and “graphical interface” paradigms would require a drastic change in the way that current GUI applications work, so much so that it would likely break the dominant WIMP paradigm.
The author was right: it’s easier to work with text, since your CLI applications already do it and that it doesn’t take extreme effort to try to use the applications in a different method than what the author thought of using it for. I think the best example of this has been Apple’s Automator. Sure, you can graphically script your Mac, but you only get the features that the application authors thought to give you.
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I might just add that Microsoft (with OLE), Apple (with MacOS classic, as well as AppleScript and Automator), Google (Android fragments, and now again with “stripes”) and many, many others have attempted to make “interchangeable” UI components. I think the closest to that today is something like React, where you really can just import a UI component.
That being said, text isn’t exactly “simple.” For one, just text encoding can be tricky. On top of that, applications generally care about the structure of whatever text input they get, whether it be JSON or something else. That means parsers everywhere, which are themselves very complex. I think the PowerShell approach of communicating through objects is worthwhile, since at least in principle behavior can be bundled with data directly.
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This kind of interoperability has proven very difficult to accomplish pervasively with GUI applications. You have to standardize on some interface to exchange data, and not only that, create an intuitive method to compose programs together.
If I understand you correctly, this is something Smalltalk “got right” nearly 40 years ago. All the GUI stuff can be seamlessly reused and composed. No text files needed. It’s actually very simple.
Unifying the “small, composable tools” and “graphical interface” paradigms would require a drastic change in the way that current GUI applications work, so much so that it would likely break the dominant WIMP paradigm.
Maybe, maybe not. The paradigm it clearly breaks is the one where standalone applications are the basic units of commercial value. Some of us may remember OpenDoc…
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If lobsters is right, and adtech is dead in Europe, then it probably means companies like Facebook will start changing users directly. In a certain sense, I would rather pay upfront than have to deal with ads, but that’s then less money to spend elsewhere, however small the amount.
In short, I think the cat is out of the bag in terms of the internet, and I doubt there’s any way to get back to the Good Old Days of everybody hosting their own personal server out of their garage.
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itistoday
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5 months ago
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Why we still can’t stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science
I’m surprised at how much this article seems to coddle students who plagiarize. I would hope I would have the fortitude to enforce a no-fuss two-strikes rule.
Then again, I bet a large reason why some of these students cheat is because the instructors expect them to produce an obscene amount of work relative to the time they have available. In that case, it really is the instructor’s fault for not respecting the student’s time.
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- Probabilistic programming will become much more important. Neural networks work very well if you have a lot of data, power, and time. Not only do humans not need millions and millions of hours of driving time to become proficient, but often all of data, power, and time are limited.
- Message passing–and so microkernels–will stage a comeback. Processors just aren’t getting much faster anymore, but datasets keep getting bigger.
- Not entirely tech related, but the cost of access to space will continue to drop, which will lead to malicious actors. Just take a look at this article from a few days ago. If you know people in aerospace, chances are they’ve at least at some point mentioned how vulnerable basically all the infrastructure is in space, to an even greater degree than on the ground.
I think generally technology will keep getting better. Personal computing isn’t going to go away, software development will likely remain as easy to get into. I think software will continue to improve to the point that it knows essentially everything about you. The downside is that it then knows absolutely everything about you. While we lobsters might be prudent enough to make a show like Black Mirror as a reminder of people’s humanity, I guarantee that worldwide everybody is not as sensible.
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zge
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9 months ago
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Google collects Android users' locations even when location services are disabled
But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Ok, but what if you haven’t logged into your Google Account? Then this was far less of an issue (not to say that it wasn’t one), at least for me.
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Not logging in doesn’t change much.
The account information gives them a few more data points, but they’re not very important ones. They don’t need your account info to send you advertisements about nearby businesses, for example, or to know you’ve been searching for some type of product.
Just because they don’t know your name doesn’t mean they haven’t been following you around the internet monitoring everything you’ve been doing.
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The article describes Google being really invasive about collecting data on you.
Why would they give a fuck about whether you’re logged in or not? It’s not like being signed in signifies your acceptance of everything they’re doing to you either!
No one should be surprised by this. Google is basically an arm of the US surveillance state, and has always been. If you look into it, you’ll find they were funded by the CIA (In-Q-Tel) to begin with.
Ever wonder why no other search engine has come close to the quality of Google’s search results? No one in 2017 can do what Sergey and Larry did in the early 2000’s?
Investors wouldn’t fund a massive money making machine? People wouldn’t flock to a non-invasive alternative with roughly equal quality search results?
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People wouldn’t flock to a non-invasive alternative with roughly equal quality search results?
Correct. Unless that alternative can also provide maps, multimedia, try to satisfy sci-fi fantasies, perform nearly every service under the sun, and become just as big of a household name, no one is going anywhere.
People already see critics and those who use the smaller alternatives as “power-hungry loonies who demand privacy in the postprivacy age” and “reject the inevitable” as I keep getting told.
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Correct. Unless that alternative can also provide maps
Come on. Google Maps would still work just fine, even if you used something else for searches.
multimedia, try to satisfy sci-fi fantasies, perform nearly every service under the sun, and become just as big of a household name, no one is going anywhere.
Now you’re just listing some hand-wavy services that Google supposedly provides, that we couldn’t live without.
Again, as if you couldn’t use a search engine like you and everyone else started using Google back in the day. It gave you much better results than anything before, and you never looked back.
Somehow we all managed without maps, “multimedia”, or the search engine “satisfying sci-fi fantasies”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
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Somehow we all managed without maps, “multimedia”, or the search engine “satisfying sci-fi fantasies”, whatever > that’s supposed to mean.
Maps has positively impacted my life in a big way. I don’t ever feel lost even in a completely new city. Even in a place with utterly insane streets, it is trivial to get around. It’s pretty freeing to know how to get some place completely new and how long it will take you to get there. Hands down, the best feature modern phones have.
Gmail and Drive are nice too, but not nearly as important.
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You’re oversimplifying. Big corporations by necessity cooperate with the states in which they operate. That’s the reality of doing business, anyone who thinks anything different is deluding themselves.
Also, anyone who thinks they can own a modern smartphone and thinks they can’t be tracked, that their location isn’t being recorded somewhere, and that everything they send and receive isn’t being scanned is also deluding themselves.
We live in David Brin’s Transparent Society - best either get used to it, or learn to forego the conveniences such modern technological advances bestow.
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We live in David Brin’s Transparent Society - best either get used to it, or learn to forego the conveniences such modern technological advances bestow.
Brin’s Transparent Society was predicated on “transparency from below”, in which we had an equal view into the lives of those viewing us.
Our current society is merely an authoritarian surveillance state. It looks nothing like what he described. “Get used to it” is a disastrously passive response to the current situation.
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My understanding is that the paper outlines two models - one in which total transparency reigns, and everyone can see everyone all the time. I agree we are nowhere near there.
The other is the model where only certain parties -state agencies and big companies see everything - we are getting there very quickly IMO.
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The paper outlines those two models, labels the former “The Transparent Society” and presents the latter as, essentially, a dystopian hell on earth inimical to human rights and freedom.
Since you feel we’re very quickly ending up in the latter, why advocate “best either get used to it, or learn to forego the conveniences”? That really seems to fly in the face of Brin’s paper, which was presenting an alternative to the current state of affairs that we could only ever hope to engage with by ignoring the very “resign yourself or go luddite” attitude that your post reifies.
tl;dr it’s weird to cite his paper in an argument that someone should resign themselves to the current surveillance status quo, when the paper advocates a radical alternative the current surveillance status quo
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You’re oversimplifying. Big corporations by necessity cooperate with the states in which they operate. That’s the reality of doing business, anyone who thinks anything different is deluding themselves.
Oversimplifying how? You don’t seem to be refuting anything I said.
You know the “co-operation” you referred to is all about either: 1) the government controlling the masses, and/or 2) the government preventing competition to the BigCorp, right?
But you made it sound like a vaguely good thing. It’s not. It never is.
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In the sense that compliance does not imply ownership. Google no doubt cooperates with various US intelligence agencies, but that does not make them owned by them or an “arm” of the government. I don’t disagree at all, I’m just pointing out that the phrasing you use implies things that I do not think are true.
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The problem is that people, for the most part, assess risk by how often they know of bad outcomes. When was the last time you heard that somebody was bitten by Google’s invasion of their privacy? Europe is a bit different with regard to a cultural memory of spying, and accordingly European policies usually favor privacy.
I don’t think things are looking up, either. As robots slowly eclipse humans in various kinds of labor, people’s opinions and attention will become increasingly valuable. If Facebook and Google’s revenue are any indication, there’s a lot of value in people’s privacy.
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I thoght that it might be harder for them to accurately track a device without an account, but after thinking about it in more detail, a kind of artifical device IP really shouldn’t be that hard for them to implement f they’ve gotten this far. The second reason was that until recently my phone was rooted with Cyanogen Mod w/o Gapps, so unless they pulled a MINIX on my phone, they shouldn’t have been able to access my device directly.
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Have you used that sim on another phone?
Have you used that phone number on another phone?
Does someone have a contact in their phone/google contact/facebook that says “zge, phone number xxx-xxx-xxx”?
Have you visited/logged into some other website that uses some google API that could identify you?
Have you connected to a wifi network? Have you used bluetooth? In both cases what you connect to could easily identify you.
Have you had wifi or bluetooth turned on but not connected to a network?
Has you phone been turned on? Android and iOS will both search for networks/devices anyway, to either make connecting quicker when you do turn it on, aid location information in maps etc., or, track you.
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The comments in the post discuss a 5XX vs a 4XX error and that client-side errors should be fixed by the client. Now I am wondering if the GDPR applies to European citizens or people that are currently in Europe (maybe a day trip or what ever). I usually thought that these GDPR filters are using geoIp. But what if a European citizen is in the US and the other way around? I only checked Wikipedia for this and they say the GDPR applies to EU-citizens. So how to figure out if a web client is a EU-citizen? What am I doing wrong?
The companies are just trying to protect themselves as best they can. Realistically, a European citizen suing a US-only company in a European court over European law is being frivolous and the company will likely not be affected in any way, so the butt-covering of geoip blocking is more a political statement to potential sue-ers than it is actual legal protection.
What is the actual message to European users of such political statement?
We don’t want your money? We don’t want your data? You do not deserve our technology? We are the Spiders of the Web and you are just a fly?
Btw, as an European I would really appreciate a clear statement on a website saying “we are sorry but we cannot protect your data and respect your rights, please search for one of our competitor that can do it better”.
I’m not ironic.
GDPR defines several important rights for the data subject that imply certain investments in cybersecurity and a basic quality of service. Being able to say “I cannot do this right, please ask to someone else” is a sign of professionalism.
You figure it out by asking them. There are many sites that don’t serve US citizens for various reasons. When you enter them, they ask you to declare you are not a US citizen. It’s as simple as that. If they lie, it’s on them.
Honestly, this GDPR thing has gotten many Americans acting indignated and generally quite irrational over something that hardly changes anything and is not without a slew of precedent. It’s just the first time US companies are visibly seriously affected by law elsewhere. Now you know how it feels. Get over the feeling and deal with it.
Well, in principle, I would guess that European courts might be apprehensive about dictating law globally, which would essentially be the case if it was found that GDPR applies to European citizens wherever they may be, and even if a website operator had taken all reasonable precautions to block European citizens from using their cite.
GDPR apply to data of European citizens worldwide and to data of non European citizens collected while they are in the Union.
However, if your registration form have a mandatory checkbox “I’m NOT a European citizen and I’m not going to use your services while in the European Union” AND the such checkbox is uncheked by default AND you block all European IPs, I think no European court will ever annoy you.