HN user
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.
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.
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.
It's why the word Incognito in Chrome for iOS has an asterisk next to it:
"On Chrome for iOS, due to platform limitation regular and incognito* tabs share HTML5 local storage, which is typically used by sites to store files on your device (client-side caching) or to provide offline functionality. This means the same sites can always access their data in this storage in both regular and incognito* tabs. Incognito* tabs will still keep browsing history and cookies separate from regular tabs, which are cleared once those tabs are closed."
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.
The data seems a bit dated. RSS functionality for example had since been restored: http://searchengineland.com/google-quietly-brings-back-rss-f...
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.
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.
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.
Publishing a transparency report is an excellent step and it doesn't deserve this sort of comment. Government surveillance is a policy issue first and foremost, concentrating on consumer tech companies is but an attention seeking techniques to make the news more palatable to casual readers, if corporate compliance bothers you then telecom companies ought to top of the list seeing as they never even mounted a single challenge, nor did they seek transparency.
If your reasoning is that they're not lobbying against this, then you're wrong. You can't expect people not to use the Facebooks or Apples, it's a policy issue. Pressure the government, vote for the right people.
Perhaps, I doubt the change was as dramatic though, considering it's not just the app itself that underwent transformation but also browsers and the web platform as a whole. But then again we're talking about spreadsheet software.
Google Sheets has changed quite a bit over those "2 to 3 years", being a web app and all, Excel hasn't. I suggest taking second glance.
It was a joke.
I try to ignore trolls but some comments make me want to self harm.
How exactly is fracturing the Internet and stopping the free flow of information will make it "stronger"? any sort of amplified indignation about the NSA is a red herring, Brazil had that plan for a long time and now and they are using the NSA as an excuse to accelerate it, and ironically their main reason is to enable more extensive local surveillance: http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/08/11/act...
Instant Extended API in chrome://flags
They've been doing that on mobile Chrome for a while. It makes perfect sense on mobile, saving vertical space and whatnot, seems alright on the desktop as well.
Notice the mic icon to the right.
Not to be pedantic but "PRISM" is a code name for a specific program, and it's not the one that does in-transit interception. That would be XKeyscore.
'Blamed and shamed'?! I don't even think it's an issue, your wifi password isn't that of your bank account. They store your emails unencrypted for crying out loud, wifi passwords pale in comparison. It's a non issue.
Not sure what the author is after here. I mean he's not breaking any news, he admits as much, he also links to some of the articles that were published weeks ago that do a better job of discussing the security/convenience trade offs. Seems like he missed the furore at the the time and decided to compensate with a woefully inaccurate and baiting headline.
Because it's unusual for VC firms to invest in startups?
Cloud Endpoints is worth considering: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/
I'm not suggesting it's impossible, I'm just saying that it's much more difficult to hide stuff in OSS thus less likely. It's the closed source stuff you ought to be more suspicious of.
Its source code is available for audit and scrutiny, so yeah. If you're looking to spread FUD do that to the closed source stuff.
That doesn't mean this development is meaningless and should be dismissed, it mitigates real concerns. As for the human element, that is probably the hardest to defend against but enacting sound engineering solutions is more than half the battle.
They're not forcing you. You can give them that or you might consider the benefits not worth it and you won't, it's not an NSA type issue.
Their business - like that of most tech companies - is built on data (so is every business to some degree) they can't forgo data, that is stupid. If the NSA is your main concern then it's government policy you want to be changed, not the engineering decisions of private companies. Also worth mentioning that unless you're speaking of telecom companies there is no profit motive to cooperating with government but mainly legal obligations.
I assume you mean encrypting data at rest since this development takes care of all in transit encryption, well, because of ads, analytics, other predictive data intensive services like "Google Now" etc.
It's a stupid question. They want webmail services (nay all cloud services) to cease automatically processing data they store. It's nonsense, that is what these services are all about, they want them to become useless, basically destroying their whole functionality and the economy related to them.
What is it 2004?! of course it's legal, same as "scanning" mail content to identify spam or enable full text search. This lawsuit is ridiculous, it's either a money making scam or a PR stunt or both.