Comment Re:If you read in between the lines (Score 2) 90
I was here before it was Slashdot...
Comment Re: If you read in between the lines (Score 4, Insightful) 90
What are you talking about? You might not have like the ads, but we never lied about anything. Our service was super clear about how it worked. And for those who didn't like the redirection, it has always been possible to create an account and disable that part of the service.
Comment Re:Business model (Score 5, Informative) 90
We have been building a data privacy and data usage policy document that we plan to release soon.
One of the many, many reasons to turn off ads is that we had to share some potentially personally identifiable information with ad partners (indirectly when making ad requests, they would just see it in the ad request), so by turning off ads, our privacy / data policy will be a lot more clear and will not need to have weird "certain third parties for certain services" kind of language to address the advertising business.
We're waiting to turn off ads, we'll get the document cleaned up, and we'll publish it.
-David
Comment Re:Business model (Score 5, Informative) 90
Nope. Never.
We wouldn't make such a case for turning off ads if this was our business model going forward. You could visit our site and see how we make money. We sell security services. We never could have done it without first being a consumer service, but we're not selling your data. Come on.
-David
Comment Re:If you read in between the lines (Score 5, Informative) 90
Nope. Never. We've never sold our data. We've never even used it for marketing purposes internally.
We've only ever made money from one of three things: Ads, selling individuals an ad-free version, and enterprise security services.
Today, most all of our revenue, and all of our growth, comes from selling enterprise security. If you work in IT, it's worth checking out to improve your security posture. There's a lot more to it than you might guess.
-David
Comment Re:OS X (Score 1) 611
Funny, I say the same thing about Common Desktop Environment on Solaris 8.
Comment Re:I believe it because.. (Score 1) 291
Nonsense.
I took my son to his uncle's wedding four national borders and 4000 miles away when he was 15 months old, and that took no noticeable extra effort.
Comment Re:Analogy cut short? (Score 1) 405
Market share is not capital.
Comment Re:Hachette Group isn't a tiny publisher... (Score 1) 405
Hachette is also well known here in its home country France for its frequent and long-standing collusion with the state. It holds an all-but-in-name monopoly over most schoolbooks, the purchase of which is mandated by the public education system. In 2011 the European Commission started investigating Hachette, Penguin, Georg von Holzbrinck, Harper&Collins and a couple other big publishers for abuse of dominant market position and anticompetitive practices, especially in the electronic book market. Hachette also is forcing DRM onto e-book authors even in their outside deals with other publishers.
Comment Re:Timothy McVeigh (Score 1) 449
All it means is he has the balls to troll both online and offline.
Comment Right to be selectively remembered, rather (Score 3, Interesting) 370
It's fine by me if someone wants every mention of him/herself removed from a search engine. I have an issue with selectively removing just the choice stuff which they object to, though.
So this politician wants some details of his professional conduct unreported in a Google search ? Welcome to internet-non-existence. Your reelection-platform website, twitter campaign account and commentary blog get tossed along into a black hole.
And in any case, someone who really wants the information will find it eventually.
Comment Re:what could go wrong? (Score 2) 85
For an entertaining take, see Greg Egan's Distressed novel, which has a whole subplot about a rich family whose members have their entire DNS replaced by a "translated" equivalent made of artifical, new nucleobases, complete with updated enzymatic machinery. As a side-effect it turns their skin jet black and allows them to survive on a diet of tire rubber.
They then plan to release a superbug on their fellow humans (it cannot affect them since they have become, in effect, complete aliens) and keep the Earth for themselves.
Comment Re:This will be mankinds greatest mark on the worl (Score 1) 85
In a hundred years, bigsexyjoeJr will be ranting on
London Black Cabs Threaten Chaos To Stop Uber 417
Bruce66423 (1678196) writes in with news about a planned protest by London black-cab drivers against Uber. "London black-cab drivers are planning to cause gridlock in the city to protest against car service Uber. The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association complains that Uber's drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters. Transport for London has declined to intervene, because it disagrees that there has been a breach of the law. LTDA now plans to force the issue by holding the action in early June. 'Transport for London not enforcing the Private Hire Vehicles Act is dangerous for Londoners,' Steve McNamara, LTDA's general secretary, told the BBC. 'I anticipate that the demonstration against TfL's handling of Uber will attract many many thousands of cabs and cause severe chaos, congestion and confusion across the metropolis.'"
US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe 627
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post on the U.S. government's newest national assessment of climate change. It says Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. 'Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation.' The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. 'What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.'"
