trendia

Unfortunately, US carriers are selling the location data based on your SIM card, so even "dumb phones" are still subject to tracking.

AirSage is very clearly offering non-anonymized (read: private) information about individuals. That is, they offer "insights like the home and work locations of people".

AirSage uses its massive source data and patented algorithms to understand the movement of population and trips start to finish, origin to destination every day for the entire country. It’s not just about the where and when. Through years of research and development, AirSage also knows the “why”, or purpose, of the more than a billion trips made in the United States every day.

Understanding populations as they relate to the physical world has been the core competency of AirSage since the beginning. For any physical point of interest in the United States, insights like the home and work locations of people seen in an area or duration of stay or frequency of visits are all characteristics that can provide a new level of understanding never before capable.

Brands and Marketers recognize that the world is not just about what takes place on the screen of a tv, computer or mobile phone. It’s about how technology helps enhance our real physical world. AirSage is a leader in providing insightful information about the audiences advertisers want to reach as they relate to the locations and places that people spend their time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626702

Market research indicates that most people actually love RSS.

And it competed with Pocket.

8k has four times as many pixels as 4k, so at the same bitrate/pixel it would be around 48mbit/sec

In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of intitial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20:1; the ratio of debugging times over 25:1; of program sizes 5:1; and of program execution speed about 10:1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity. (Code Complete, page 548)

https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi...

There are many regulations that affect data, like HIPPA and ITAR.

How can Windows be used in such an environment if the data collection can’t be stopped?

If a .iso is provided, I can't see why flashing a custom "Helm iso" is any different from flashing the default "Raspberry Pi iso", and there are a lot of people who can flash the raspbian -- there have been 5 - 10 million raspberry pi's sold so far. So, I think there are a lot of people who can use the Raspberry Pi.

as good hardware is expensive

They don't need to sell hardware to achieve what they're doing. In the current form, they are mainly selling a service (SMTP relay on EC2) disguised as hardware (imx board inside a fancy box).

Why not charge the service for $100/year and allow anyone to use a Raspberry Pi and USB flash drive, which costs $35+$20? If they're using Linux on an imx, then there's likely little difficulty in porting to Raspberry Pi.

Why?

I think we need proper privacy measures, since the misuse of data is not necessarily an "antitrust issue". For instance, would breaking up Facebook really mean that the newly formed constituents respected privacy? And would antitrust enforcement against Google or Facebook reduce privacy exploitation by smaller entities?

I'd argue that it would not -- 1,000 small Facebooks could still violate privacy. Creating privacy legislation is the only real way to achieve proper privacy guarantees.

This sentence right here is incredibly vague:

Marcus also accuses Acton of “slow-playing” the implementation of a feature that would let businesses message WhatsApp users and ultimately help with monetization.

What does "monetization" mean? Charging more? Ads? Selling user data? If it means ads or selling user data, then that would directly violate the contract that Acton and Facebook agreed to, and thus Acton would have zero reason to implement it at all.

“And you can start testing [that] by sending them different kinds of advertising to see some kind of behaviour in the [listening] patterns.”

There will be a day where you can get a "discounted" automobile that forces you to listen to an advert before you can start the car, and where removing that advert violates the DMCA.

A few years after that, the feature will be present on all cars, and there won't be a discount at all.

Counter argument:

Vague language is the best way to enable selective enforcement. Large companies who can afford the best lawyers will be able to find interpretations that are in their favor. Smaller companies would be unable to do this and thus more likely to lose.

And this only gets worse if large companies spend more effort on lobbying — they can get vague wording that makes the public feel good (like something is happening!) but which requires no effort on the company to comply.

This is the exact opposite of what economics would predict. If you have a greater risk than your friend, then you will pay more because your expected risk is higher. In perfect competition, your rate would be equal to your expected return (that is, the premiums would match the expected payout).

So, if an insurer can identify that you have a greater risk than your friend, in perfect competition you would pay a higher rate. No insurer with perfect knowledge of risk would allow you to pay less than that, because they’re expected return would be negative.

They get famous not because of their well thought out positions but because of their charisma

Studies have shown that people trust pundits with gumption, not well-thought out or balanced ideas. Superforecasting, one of my favorite books, discusses this at great depth: the people with the greatest foresight and ability to predict future political events are the least trusted or respected, since they often don't have clear and easily-identifiable positions, but rather make all sorts of caveats and restrictions on their beliefs. This makes their arguments more complicated and less easily broken down during a shouting match on live TV, so viewers don't believe them as much and instead focus on the pundits with the clear, singular, loud opinions instead. Unfortunately, those pundits are often wrong, their opinions lack nuance, and their political forecasts are worthless.

Telemetry for telemetry. Nice.

It's just a matter of time until some developer poses the question:

"Are people who opt out of telemetry more likely to use Linux? Or live in Europe? Or have NVidia GPUs? Or... "

and gosh darn everyone else at Mozilla begins to wonder the same thing, and the best way to answer that question is to include it in your "totally not telemetry" telemetry reports, and then we're back to Square One.

Like a newspaper, magazine, or TV station?

I'm sure one of their metrics is "time on site", which often doesn't distinguish between "spends more time because they enjoy the product" and "spends more time because they can't find the things they're looking for and are becoming very frustrated with your service"

Honest question: What happens if a Russian or Chinese search engine doesn't comply?

How would the EU block them? This is especially important if the Russian or Chinese entity has no locus or presence in Europe.

(for instance, would you be able to get around it using a different DNS, or by using a VPN?)

Data collection fits "Industry standards" because the industry is inherently corrupt -- Adtech requires immense user data because they chose to target users rather than content.

would not recommend at all to maths-minded folks.

Why not?

The first one:

If you zoom in close enough, the horizon looks flat. (Alternatively, the plane is not high enough for the earth to look round with that focal length)

The second one:

All that matters is that Mercury isn't in the line between the Sun and the Earth. Take a look here [0] to see that there are times when Mercury's orbit would be visible from Earth.

Even then, I'm not sure why the Earth being flat would have anything to do with Mercury's visibility, since it would still be visible even if the Earth were flat.

[0] http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa09/Yoon/EMAT%206690/Fir...

"Those who look/think like themselves" has much more going than just sex/race. An individual choosing another board seat will likely a preference for people who went to the same Ivy League schools, who have the same wealthy family backgrounds, and, most important, share the same concept of how they want to run the business.

Making a law forcing a woman to be on the board won't eliminate those preferences, it will just mean that they'll choose a woman from a well-connected family who went to HBS and would be willing to support the voting positions of whomever is appointing them. You haven't changed the voting behavior too much, just the sex/racial makeup of it.

If the goal is to change how businesses behave, we would want people from entirely different fields. That is, we'd want representation from differing perspectives in the company -- perhaps from engineering or from labor.

In Germany, for instance, there is an expectation that the labor union has representation on the board [0], which would do much more for the people working in the company than having a female version of the male boardroom exec.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

You should work for the pharmaceutical companies to get Xanax added to the water supply.

Just imagine how much crime would go down if everyone was too chill to steal or murder!

Google's "opt-out" features are so difficult to uniformly turn off. The article points out that Google still tracks location data when you turn location tracking off because there is some other option in a different screen that you also need to turn off.

Further, most people never even know to opt-out of these tracking options in the first place, because they don't know that Google is collecting voice data.

Liars provide more details because they get bogged down in the story, whereas truth-tellers give you a broad overview and can still provide a coherent story when pressed for details.

One study found this by analyzing insurance claims [0]

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How-s...

This would make demand less elastic, pushing restaurant prices up for the rest of us.

What actions and what sort of payment?