pcause - Slashdot User

Submission + - "Highly Confidential" Google docs say - Do Evil

Submitted by pcause on Friday April 16, 2010 @07:47AM

pcause writes: The latest documents released by Viacom show that Google knew that Youtube was "completely sustained by pirated content" before Google bought it. Of course, the docs that say this were labeled "highly confidential". I am sure that Google will say this is all old stuff, taken out of context and that they didn't have sex with that woman, Ms, Lewinsky. Sure.

Submission + - You call this cloud privacy?

Submitted by pcause on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @04:31PM

pcause writes: Google and a coalition of tech companies want to create legal protections against the government accessing you content in the cloud. Of course, they aren't proposing any restrictions on how *THEY* can use you content, location information and the like to make more $$ and further violate your privacy. Unregulated, nontransparent and unaccountable corporate entities saying they are to be trusted. Ken Lay of Enron would love these guys.

Submission + - Youtube wasevil, and Google knew

Submitted by pcause on Friday March 19, 2010 @04:20PM

pcause writes: Silicon Alley Insider has the most damning evidence released in the Viacom/YouTube suit. It seems clear from these snippets that YouTube knew it was pirating content and did it to grow fast and sell for a lot of $$. It also seems clear that Google knew the site was pirated content and bought it and continued the pirating.

Submission + - Eric Schmidt to user - It is all your fault

Submitted by pcause on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @03:16PM

pcause writes: Seems that Eric Schmidt thinks that there was nothing wrong with Buzz and that it was just "confused" users that were the problem. Just when they begin to dig out of the mess, the CEO blames the users for being clueless instead of taking responsibility for a mistake that has forever shown that Google's "do no evil" was, to quote Steve Jobs, "bulls**t". Users understood that Google was violating our privacy to advance its business. He is right that we didn't udnerstand one thing at all — why these privacy violations for Google's profits were good for us.

Submission + - Time for a Bill of Rights for email accounts?

Submitted by pcause on Monday February 15, 2010 @10:08AM

pcause writes: With Google demonstrating a disregard for the privacy of your email account is it time for legislation to protect your email account? Should the following be basic email rights:

- You are the owner of any email you receive, subject to copyright of the sender
- Your email content cannot be accessed or scanned other than for the purpose of preventing spam and malware
- The people who you correspond with is private information and cannot be used or shared in any way by a third party with the exception that an address book may be created for the sole benefit and use of the individual creating it. No use of the address book may be made without explicit opt in agreement of the user
- A company cannot ask you to waive these rights

- The FTC Can issue regulations about email, but all regulation must to the maximum reasonable extent be aimed at protecting consumer email privacy. Courts should interpret the intent of legislation to be to protect consumer email privacy to the maximum practical extent

This let's free email services still advertise and perform spam prevention, but it stops snooping and other creepy practices and accidental/intentional use of our private information to help some else improve their business results.

Submission + - Your location data, government access and privacy 1

Submitted by pcause on Friday February 12, 2010 @12:25PM

pcause writes: The Department of Justice doesn't think it needs a warrant to get access to your location data. I know everyone's first reaction is outrage but most of you with a smartphone and applications are sharing your location data with random apps so they can feed you ads, providing it to Google for maps and search, Foursquare for check ins and much more. Why in the world would anyone who shares their application data so widely have any expectation of privacy of the data or, for that matter, privacy at all?

We all hate Big Brother, but maybe the biggest threat to our privacy comes not from the government but from ourselves and the unregulated commercial entities we give access to all of this data without ever reading the TOS, or really having a clue what those folks can and will do with the data.

Submission + - Full body scanners see all EXCEPT bomb components

Submitted by pcause on Friday January 22, 2010 @04:03PM

pcause writes: Bruce Schneier points us to a video from Germany that shows the new, invasive full body scanners don't seem to be able to show/detect bomb components. Surprised? Of course this isn't the first time that TSA has rushed to embrace a new, high tech gadget that didn't work in the real world. Remember the failed sniffer technology? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the entire theatre of security and political correctness that TSA provides and get some folks in there that are actually concerned with real security.

Submission + - FTC worries about consumers,cloud data and privacy

Submitted by pcause on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @02:41PM

pcause writes: Ars Techina has a nice article about the FTC's concern that consumers don't understand the implications of storing their data in the cloud. From the article: But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time. And those are just the phone settings. Google also has access to search history data, anything stored in Google Docs or Spreadsheets, complete schedules stored in Google Calendar, and recent Maps searches. Combine them all, and companies like Google become one-stop shops for authorities looking for personal information.

Have /. readers really thought about this? Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?

Submission + - Is it time to regulate Google?

Submitted by pcause on Monday December 07, 2009 @08:29AM

pcause writes: The Official Google Blog announces that Google will now offer "personalized" search results based on your last 180 days of queries EVEN IF YOU AREN"T LOGGED IN . This is just confirmation that Google is tracking you, even when you aren't logged in, and that it keeps at LEAST 6 months of history. We know from the event where AOL released data to search researchers that 6 months of data is enough to identify an individual despite the supposedly anonymous cookie.

Yes you can opt out of the personalization, but does that mean Google isn't still collecting data about you? I doubt it. Google has always invaded your privacy by tracking you, but they are now admitting it. There'd be huge flames here on /. if the government was doing this. Google is no more trustworthy than the government as they do all this to make money and are totally unaccountable.

Is it time to regulate Google?

Submission + - Adobe products the weak spot of the Internet?

Submitted by pcause on Friday December 04, 2009 @12:41PM

pcause writes: It seems like every week there is another major security vulnerability in Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat or another Adobe product. This weeks is in Illustrator. As Microsoft, Firefox and the other browser makers have gotten serious about browser security and as Microsoft has gotten more serious about OS security, it strikes me that Adobe is the main entry point for attack. Worse, Adobe doesn't seem to be taking this ongoing stream of attacks and vulnerabilities seriously enough. Remember when Microsoft sent all of their developers to school to learn how to write more secure code?

Is Adobe serious enough about the quality of their code and preventing attacks? Have they become the weak spot in the Internet ecosystem and the playground for attackers?

Submission + - Android Apps and Privacy / Security

Submitted by pcause on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @08:48AM

pcause writes: I recently got a droid and as I started downloading applications I noticed that many needed permissions to access to read "phone state and identity". For example, MixZing a popular media player needs to read this data. I can understand needing phone state to stop music when a call comes in, but why does this provide access to "identity". Is the security model of Android good enough to protect user's privacy and give them full control of who can access what or at least to give users enough information to know what an application is really doing?

Submission + - Is Apple a monopoly?

Submitted by

pcause

on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @01:24PM

pcause writes: "Apple reportedly owns something like 85% of the music player market and is #1 in sales of music. They've achieved this through a very nice vertically integrated system of the iTunes store, iTunes and the iPod/iPhone devices. The most recent attempt by a third party, Palm, to tie into this system has failed. Given its dominant market share over many years, in a consumer market, isn't Apple a monopoly? Is this situation similar to the old IBM and Microsoft situations and is Apple a monopoly that uses its power against the consumer and aggressively keeps players out of the system? Should Apple be forced to open up the interfaces so that alternative devices, PC software and stores can plug into the iTunes ecosystem? We'd get more innovation and competition and the Palm Pre is an Exhibit 1."

Submission + - PR claiming security replaces doing the work

Submitted by pcause on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @12:06PM

pcause writes: Google made a big splash about how secure the Chrome OS will be, but as this this article points out, Google just had a significant security hole in the Chrome browser. Shouldn't they tone done the PR around Chrome OS, since as everyone in the technical community knows, there will be bugs and security flaws in Chrome OS. Of course, Apple runs ads mocking Vista security while their OS has lots of serious security bugs and reports here on /. show that they are slower to patch them than Microsoft.

Isn't it time for honesty and education about security for consumers instead of the PR and unsupported and unsupportable claims?

Submission + - Court to Google: taking music is evil

Submitted by pcause on Thursday May 21, 2009 @10:51AM

pcause writes: Google has been told to pay up for use of music on YouTube. This is another in a continuing series of Court decisions that add up to telling Google that its business practices just aren't legal. This case, the suit by Viacom over pirated content on YouTube, the book scanning settlement, and the like, all point to the fact that Google takes the attitude that if the law is inconvenient to what it sees as in its business interests, the law doesn't matter. If you don't agree sue them.

This really raises the question of what the much talked about slogan, "Do no evil", really means. Perhaps the question no one has asked is "Who decides what is evil?" Seems the Google folks have a broken moral compass when it comes to rights of content owners. What should really worry /. is what they're really doing to your privacy.

Submission + - Smartphones need for "Javascript for Applicati

Submitted by pcause on Thursday January 15, 2009 @08:29AM

pcause writes: The advent of the smartphone revolution is a great boon for users and developers. But for developers, we have an environment where we have to right in C++ on the iPhone, Java SE on Android, C# on Windows Mobile, etc. What we really need is a common programming environment across all smartphones and one that opens these marvelous devices to the entire population of developers.

I recently saw the Palm Pre and they use Javascript/HTML/CSS as the application development environment. I thought "brilliant". No matter what you main programming language is (C++, C#, Java, PHP, Perl, ...) we all know Javascript, HTML and CSS. Why not have a common Javascript environment to build applications? We'd have to add I/O and file access, GPS interfaces, and a variety of other common libraries, but it shouldn't be a huge effort. The open source Javascript engine from Mozilla and the Gecko or Webkit HTML engines could be the base.

What do you think /. ?

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