Customers don't give a damn if there is an API. Just a tiny tiny % of geeks care. But that tiny tiny % are developers. And customers like what developers create.

Customers don't know how the magic black boxes work. But they sure benefit from the magic created when those who do know can do their thing.

Also - for a company who "doesn't give a damn about open source", they sure do a lot of it.

I am fully confident that it will. Until the next joker either misunderstands the Secunia data or uses it to troll others who don't understand it.

In my view, that "maybe" is important. Spending more money on "security" may or may not actually improve security posture. Money spent in fear without understanding isn't guaranteed to go towards sane, educated decisions.

Yet either way, the "protest" ends up looking bad in the media. Go figure.

I highlighted the important part that you should have been paying attention to.

That's because Profiles are no longer available to Apps accounts. Convert and voila - profile goes poof. G+ is dependent on Profiles. Google says they're doing something special with Profiles for Apps users and will be available Soon. Suspect it might be related to G+ Organizational / Business accounts.

Not impossible at all. Kismet provides data in various different formats. And even then, if what you're doing is extracting particular pieces of data from the traffic capture but not paying much attention to everything else, it isn't unreasonable to not really notice what else you've captured.

I used to occasionally run Kismet during my commute. I was curious about what access points I could see during my route and what state of configuration they were in (with the expectation to scoff at all the default unsecured - actually surprised that those numbers had fallen out in the real world). After doing this for a few months, I was going back through my directory to clean up. Just for giggles I decided to actually look at the caps I had collected and see if there was anything interesting in the packet payloads. Most of it was junk; driving around isn't a particularly good way to snoop on a network. But I did find one email password from a slice of captured POP traffic. So I did end up with someone's sensitive data sitting on my drive for possibly several months despite the fact that I wasn't particularly interested in it or being aware of it.

I suspect this is more or less what happened with Google. Scanning through the Google van captures might have turned up nothing. But Google was doing this on a larger scale so the odds were in the favor of something turning up due to the sheer amount of unsecured traffic out there.

The problem is that we have people using bullhorns to communicate and don't realize the implications of doing so. Then they're all shocked when people can hear what they're saying just by listening.

I expect I'd be upset if I thought Google was actually logging the data in the sense of trying to catalog and use it. The fault that I lay at Google's feet is to not have realized the potential sensitivity of what they were collecting and done proper cleanup afterwards. As for Apple.... unless I'm missing something, Apple was not doing the exact same thing as Google was. The method and intent is likely as important as the resulting data. And so to decode the "nerd hypocrisy", you probably have to go in to the details.

The tool is perfectly suitable for what they need. The problem is that they didn't scrub the data they collected and then destroyed everything else collected.

If I'm walking past a security camera in a public location and it gets pictures of me naked because I'm wearing no clothes, I have little reason to be upset about my nudity being captured. What the TSA is currently doing is taking steps to expose me beyond what I've chosen to expose in public. The problem here is that there's a large population who think they're wearing the finest new Emporer fashion and don't like the idea that they've been naked all along.

I don't have much say on the management issue but I'd imagine if I'm a big believer in PM processes, this would irk me. As I noted, I think the real problem here is that Google didn't properly handle the data. Either the people running the project or some layer of management should have realized the potential of the data they were collecting and ensuring it was handled more appropriately.

But the analogy only works in so far as there are a limited number of rabbits to be had and hunting on a systematically large scale depletes the populations. Meanwhile, systematic capturing of broadcasted, unencrypted network traffic does not decrease the availability of that traffic (although if it did - it'd probably be a Good Thing... security awareness).

The analogy would be different if having a large amount of rabbit from various locations easily accessable would be an issue.

I think the real issue here isn't that Google was able to record this information (any wifi device does this as the most basic level). The problem is that Google didn't realize the significance of the junk traffic and systematically scrub / destroy it (where wifi devices differ is comitting data to long-term storage). It appears that Google won't continue that particular behavior.

You don't write your own software. You use a common off-the-shelf app that provides a data dump with everything you need. It's called Kismet. You should take a look at it.

Not if your discussion is being done via bullhorn.

I've used Kismet to do site surveys before. By default, it's dumping packets for anything it can find. I could probably go through my laptop and find old caps with fragments of data from neighboring networks that had nothing to do with the entity that I was surveying. With that in mind, it's not particularly shocking that Google has done something similar. But do keep trying to push this as an intentional, malicious, or at least "dumb" act. Because everyone likes ignorance if it's packaged in snark.

So what you're saying is that you've never used off-the-shelf software to do something and you have absolutely no experience using Kismet.

So what you're saying is that if I whip out my phone in the streets of NYC, snap a shot of traffic, and fail to then photoshop out all the license plates before posting that shot on the web, I'm being morally indefensible?