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Comment Targeted advertising is snake oil anyway (Score 4, Insightful) 56

Ignoring privacy for a moment, Google and Facebook, and the parasitic targeted advertising industry surrounding them, have sold business leaders on this idea that âoepreciseâtargeting of ad messages is worth paying high premiums for. Iâ(TM)m not sure that the return-on-investment data truly supports this. However, the idea that there is a âoeneedâ for privacy-invasive ad targeting appears to have achieved the status of a tribal/religious belief.

Comment Re:How about not connecting cars to the Internet (Score 1) 39

A simple "emergency beacon" is a reasonable requirement. Having that same cellular radio be able to provide user input to critical vehicle systems? Bad idea. Nobody wants to thing they'll be the driver who runs off the edge of the road into a ravine in the middle of the night with no one around. But if it happened to be me, I'd be glad of the automatic emergency beacon.

Comment Licenses? (Score 0) 165

Could the extra attention on GitHib be due to developers being very lax about having licenses applied to the work there? I'm not hearing here about a similar plague at SourceForge, which has always required there to be a license for every project.

Comment Re:If you regulate properly, we'll stop our busine (Score 1) 286

Sounds like a serious threat. Better cave.

It sounds to me like the CEOs have been eating their Wheaties and reading up on their Ayn Rand... Seriously, though, I love how the letter makes it sound like all the brouhaha is coming from a "concerted publicity campaign by some advocacy groups". I just looked at the FCC's public docket for response to Wheeler's previous proposal, and there are at least 10,000 responses. Even my state of Tennessee, not necessarily the most friendly to to Federal regulation, had 500 comments. I looked at a random sampling from TN, and couldn't find one posting with any particular love for the current regime of large ISPs. Words like "oligarchy" and "monopoly" were quite common.

Comment Re:errr that's Unpatched not Unpatchable (Score 1) 120

I find this disturbing. I'm a latecomer to the Android phenomenon. As it turns out, I bought my daughter a Pantech Marauder phone (http://www.pantechusa.com/phones/marauder) in late 2012, which runs 4.1-JellyBean, and my sons just received Kurio 7 tablets for Christmas (4.0-IceCreamSandwich). Both devices are unlikely ever to get an official update to 4.2+. As far as I can tell, the patch in Android 4.2 is described here: https://developer.android.com/...

"WebView.addJavascriptInterface requires explicit annotations on methods for them to be accessible from Javascript"

Google appears to have treated this as an API issue. I.e., "the API up to 4.1 was insecure. We now will require method annotations going forward for the JS to execute them." I could care less if backporting this change to earlier versions broke a bunch of apps. It's an easy enough change for those apps to go and insert the explicit annotations. I think Google has made a conscious choice here to not cause apps to break in the name of security, so that their platform can appear to be "more stable".

Submission + - Self-Hosted E-mail Alternatives 1

Likes Microsoft writes: It seems likely that the NSA's PRISM program is an extension of previously known efforts to tap and record large portions of information-rich internet traffic. Namely, as discussed in Security Now #408, the NSA is probably tapping internet traffic close to where it goes in and out of the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as large ISP's. Most SMTP e-mail traffic is unencrypted in any way, and I don't like the idea that even without a warrant, the government can be snooping my communications in a catch-all dragnet.

I read the Slashdot discussion, Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives. However, I am mainly interested in getting my e-mail traffic away from the fat pipes that the NSA is most likely to be drinking from. I would be willing to consider a high-quality, low-traffic webmail service that might sidestep at least some of the surveillance. Of course, since I subscribe to one of those large ISP's (Comcast), and don't have much other choice in my location, I would need to be able to connect using well-secured SSL in the browser or with POP/IMAP.

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