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Comment Re:Obviously didn't work so well... (Score 4, Interesting) 103

That's the problem isn't it?

Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.

Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein.

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BMO

Comment Re:Well I guess it's a good thing... (Score 3, Interesting) 203

But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.

This.

And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run /only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.

Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?

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BMO

Comment Re:Chromebook Shmomebook (Score 1) 169

Why doesn't RedHat, or Oracle, or SUSE, or someone else run Linux through the compliance tests?

Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).

Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.

Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.

Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.

Comment Re:Chromebook Shmomebook (Score 4, Informative) 169

Wake me up when they post a useful article on how to run Unix on my Macbook Pro.

Mac OS X *is* UNIX. It's certified. Wake me up when Linux passes conformance testing.

PS: We even put UUCP on the damn thing to pass the tests; it's definitely UNIX, so feel free to spin up your own NetNews node on your MacBook Air.

Comment Re:Popcorn time! (Score 1) 376

All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, December 25, 1783

Comment And now... 3... 2... 1... (Score 2) 110

And now... 3... 2... 1...

(1) Find a journalist you don't like who has linked to a vulnerable site they don't control
(2) Replace the content at the link target with illegally obtained material about someone powerful
(3) Sit back and watch how well the new SWATting works!

Journalistic shield laws anyone? The new first amendment-resistant law enforcement looks like we need something to replace the old antibiotics...

Comment Re:Bye_bye, Blackberry (Score 1) 307

No one wants to switch from a Mac/Windows to a Windows/Mac system if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work.

Most businesses use this same example:

"No one wants to switch from a Windows XP system to a Windows [inset non-XP Windows here] if their files or programs are not 100% guaranteed to work."

Comment William Gibson and others have prior art. (Score 1, Insightful) 171

If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.

William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.

The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reason involving reported accident rates. Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".

Comment The conclusions are bogus. (Score 5, Insightful) 210

The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.

One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.

They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.

His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".

It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.

But I'm sure he got a lot of clicks out of this.

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