If this is true, smart investors are no doubt buying much of this subsidized Helium, and storing it for when prizes go up.

"Sweden" didn't do any of this. Individual prosecutors did.

The Swedish justice minister and other cabinet members are constitutionally prohibited from being involved in any way in individual cases. They occasionally do anyway of course, but if discovered they get in deep legal trouble.

So it is very unlikely that the Swedish government is involved in this.

There were personal computers before the Macintosh or even the Apple II.

You mean the Apple I?

Just so we're clear, this huge discussion is based on the alleged number of subscribers to an internal Google mailing list?

I've yet to see anyone accusing Google of lying about this explain why they would want to get this data?

It's hard for me to think of anything more useless than tiny random snippets of unidentifiable wifi traffic from German roads. What do the conspiracy theorists think Google is using it for? What would be a possible business plan to monetize it?

I can see how some angry kid would equate these two incidents, but I'm shocked that something this idiotic would get voted the top comment of 110!!

Both the Facebook chat bug and the Google recordings are unintentional mistakes. If they show anything, it's that completely bug free engineering is hard to do. I think we knew that already.

The Schmidt quote is just a statement about how this flawed world is, not how it should be.

The concept of privacy in these times and the future is a very interesting topic, but this post is just a whiny mini rant, not a serious attempt to understand the real issues.

Did Google deliberately send out vehicles, specially equipped to capture this kind of information, systematically over a period of several years? We know they did.

How do "we" know this? The Google blog post states the opposite. What other information source do you have about this software?

How exactly is this not obtaining the data with intent?

It's described in the Google blog post. If you refuse to believe it you don't have to, but it does describe a version of events where there was no intent to collect this data.

If there was intent, what would the motive be? It's hard to imagine any more useless data than random intercepted traffic fragments like these. Organizations that actually do record people's internet traffic don't do it this way. They don't write public blog posts apologizing for what they do either.

Those are valid questions if anyone knows the data is there.

If, as Google claims, they just reused some code they had lying around, and it stored more data than they were aware of or wanted to use, I can see how no one would have noticed. Their system worked, and an extra 600GB of disk space will hardly raise any alarms at a Google data center.

UK Law: ...uses wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of a message ... of which neither he nor a person on whose behalf he is acting is an intended recipient, or

If you read the actual Google blog post, it's made very clear that getting content was not intentional. They're only after IDs and locations of the wifi spots.

You've clearly never worked at any "of the most high-tech companies in the world", if you think this kind of accident couldn't happen in such a place.

The most amusing is that the federal government have been running immigration status checkpoints inside the US for years, and nobody knows and/or cares about it.

Witness: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us-population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone.ars

Or am I missing something about this new law that's substantially worse?

...any experts care to comment... ?

The reason for any over reaction was that there are no experts on this very rare flying condition!

It's only happened 1-2 times before, so no one really knows much about it. And when you don't know, you have to be extra careful.

Here's my simple theory:

Americans travel very little to other countries, and are therefore very rarely exposed to other currencies. When you've never seen any alternatives, you're very reluctant to change what you have.

So the treasury is very slowly introducing slightly colored bills, over the last decade. There's some grumbling, but it's being accepted. This will solve the problem of having to read to know your bill.

Different sizes, dollar coins or plastic bills will probably not come around for a long time.

One of the main mechanisms in "Regulatory capture" is that in order to have competent regulators, they must be hired from the same skill pool as the people working in the industry.

So the main career path for those working at the watchdog agency is to work for one of the companies they're overseeing, or less commonly, the other direction. This will at least breed an atmosphere of "being on the same team", and also gives strong incentives to outright corruption.

They are targeted merely because the president says they are engaged in combat operations against the United States.