I would think that most people, after looking at the facts, would conclude that neither Google nor Microsoft have any real concern about fighting for their users' privacy. Do you not have any recollection of Eric Schmidt's famous quote, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place"?

Google and Microsoft are effectively in the same business as the NSA. The only reason to have any sympathy for them is that instead of competing against another business, they are competing against the US government, which basically nationalized their data collection mechanisms for their own purposes.

And to top it off, Larry Ellison's Oracle team has been caught cheating... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/26/us-sailing-americascup-cheating-idUSBRE97P0LD20130826

Ellison is real piece of work.

That's not my experience. I've been involved in two class action lawsuits, one against the old IDS investment company (now integrated into Ameriprise), and one against Smith Barney. They were basically shareholders who claimed that their brokers were ripping them off in various fees or misrepresenting their products. I didn't even know of these claims until I received letters from the lawyers. I filled out some forms and later was pleasantly surprised to receive over $600 from IDS and $500 from Smith Barney as a result of the lawyers winning their cases.

The ridiculous love store and accompanying saccharine soundtrack unfortunately was standard Disney fare. Turned it off after 30 minutes.

If corporations are really people, maybe they should take a look at the concept of civil disobedience.

What exactly would happen if Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft told the NSA to fuck off? There might be a few high-profile arrests. Internet services could be severely disrupted. But these companies have the greatest platform for expressing their views and fighting back since the beginning of history. Can you imagine the effect if Google dedicated their search portal to explaining what they were doing, why the Internet was suddenly broken, and urging ordinary people to flood Congress with demands to restore our civil rights?

These are huge public companies, but at least at Facebook and Google, most of the voting shares are controlled by the founders. They have almost complete control over their companies, and with that kind of power, they should perhaps consider exercising some responsibility.

Seriously, imagine how the engineers at Google must feel. They built this magnificent infrastructure for gathering personal information from their users and thought they were going to become the benevolent caretakers of the world's information, organizing it for the betterment of mankind and making a decent buck while doing so.

And in the end it was all taken from them by the US Government, along with the trust of their users.

My fantasy is that Mozilla will someday support something like the old Google Sharing Firefox add-on -- run a server that pools all your search requests, mixing your cookies with other users, and replacing your IP. This makes it look like you're running from an organization's NAT'ed local network, with no ability to track your real IP and identity. In addtion, Google Sharing would allow you connect to Google with HTTPS, so that the Google Sharing server can never know what you're searching for, while Google can't find out your identity.

The original Google Sharing was implemented by Moxie Marlinspike and was then taken over by Abine.com in some transaction that I don't understand. Since then Google Sharing has become very unstable and pretty much unusable, and Abine makes no mention of it on their web site. Anybody know what happened?

Thanks for highlighting that link. I just contributed. It's time for slashdotters to put their money where their mouths are.

When I was working on this stuff at Sun 10 or so years ago we had high hopes for predictive tracking as the cure for latency sickness. We used linear and least squares interpolation through the last few head and controller positions and orientations and extrapolated the curves a few frames into the future. But it still had a number of disorienting effects due to intermittent errors in the prediction -- better in some cases then no prediction, but not good enough to enable it in the production code.

I think it's more likely that the latency problem will be solved by faster hardware and more accurate tracking then through predictive techniques, which will always be an approximation. 20ms is an awfully short amount of time to get accurate 6DOF information for both a head tracker and a controller, update the model, execute non-related behaviors, and provided two separate synchronized renderings of a complex world, but we'll get there eventually.

Are you also filtering out Intel updates to your CPU microcode?

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/your-computer-may-already-be-hacked.html/?a=viewall

So very true. For those that remember, the Great Usenet Namespace Wars is the canonical example. Every newsgroup had a hierarchical name that was supposed to exactly describe what discussions would take place within that group. This worked pretty well for the tech-oriented groups, but when it came to the soc.* hierarchy there were huge fights between the news admins and users over what to call them.

These wars were eventually what drove people like me away. Since then the web happened and it looks like people are still trying to start the same futile battles.

Also back during that time there were many immersive VR demos with glove input devices that used thumb-finger pinching to scale objects. It's a very intuitive gesture that should never have been considered for a patent.

I hate the idea of the touchscreen though. The last user interface I want to have while driving is one that requires me to look away from where I'm going to fiddle with a featureless surface that I can't operate by touch.

Firegloves: http://fingerprint.pet-portal.eu/?menu=6

I've used it and it works pretty well for a demo.