Recent submissions

Comment · 13 years ago
I don't get the alarmist tone of that piece: it's very preliminary, they are consulting with interested parties, building an opt out mechanism.

Oh and Apple already deployed an identical ad id a while ago.

Comment · 13 years ago
This has nothing to do with Google's "business model", search is about relevance and despite the practices of these sites, I'm sure you can see how their content might be relevant and interesting to visitors. Those who processed the payment were the ones at fault since they were directly facilitating the blackmail.
Comment · 13 years ago
First of all let's not confuse the issues here, the one in question is about tagging visitors with cookies, and the one you link to is a terrible decision by a judge about the nature of data processing in the cloud with the potential to adversely affect all tech corps and startups and further enrich leech trial lawyers. Here are some opinions by those who know the law much better that myself:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/04/is-gmail-illegal/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/28...

It’s just an awful decision.

Back to the cookie thing, the technique described is not exclusive to national agencies, any black hat with gumption can manage it (although the NSA taps teleco traffic which makes it much easier for them) the attack vector in this case is a vulnerability in the Tor browser that ought not have been there in the first place (rather than any data analysis) and I'm guessing it was already patched seeing as the documents describing it are a bit dated.

It’s not a kickoff point to philosophise about the merits of free services and the legality of hadoop. Also "companies like Google" aren't the ones that came up with terrible laws nor should they stop building stuff because of them.

Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
SELinux default policies are usually written per distribution, by their maintainers. It's widely used and peer reviewed (Fedora, Red Hat) I'd trust it over any less involved attempt at emulating it.
Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
No. For the same grammatical reasons and for the more important fact that they don't sell data or information, they sell ad placement that get populated with relevant ads determined by analysing said data. Advertisers don't buy the data, they aren't exposed to it, they are exposed to dashboards, aggregates, and abstractions, e.g "I want this product advertised to 18-35 year old males" then don't get to personally know their demographic.
Comment · 13 years ago
Ads in paid Google Apps are subject to admin control to whether enable them or not. Also technically speaking "prostitution" is a human only trait.
Comment · 13 years ago
One: he's not just a "top guy at Google" he's Vint "I invented the internet" Cerf.

Two: the headline is highly paraphrased, which I guess you know since you've read the whole thing. Also sociologically speaking even that warped baiting headline is technically correct.

So, again since you actually read the piece, you'd agree that the point he was making is that "privacy", important as it is, is a subjective and evolving concept thus society shouldn't use it to dismiss or outright ban certain new technologies.

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