Posts by Dinanziame 1150 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
To me, that question is the flip side of what "equality" truly means, and is the criterion that determines if we are allowed to call policies that discriminate against us "unfair".
You are allowed to call them unfair, the same that rich people can complain that anti poverty programs only give money to poor people, never rich people, which is clearly discriminatory.
How about asking the people whose name are on the patent to document their work?
That said, it's entirely possible that they also developed this independently from his work. That email from the VP sounds a lot to me like "thanks for the suggestion, we already had the idea and we're working on it". It does happen to me that people come with a grand new suggestion, and it can take quite a bit to convince them that we are already implementing it, no we don't need their design doc, and please don't take credit for it.
I remember I used to draw fractals when I was learning Java. The computer would stop drawing regularly for garbage collecting, and I eventually noticed a squeaky sound coming out of the tower and stopping at exactly the same moment. I've never really figured what was causing the sound, but I guess it could technically be used as exfiltration mechanism...
What I find fascinating is that only in the US would people accuse their government of prolonging the lockdown in order to seize freedoms from the population at the cost of destroying the economy. Even French people don't do that, even though they were in full-blown protests for the whole of 2019.
This dispute is about whether Google should be able to scrape large chunks of content off these sites in the name of search but then stitch them together as a freebie news site, thus alleviating punters of actually having to go to the source at all.
Well see, that experiment has been done already. Publishers have had the possibility for a while to allow Google to display snippets or not (in Germany at least, France could easily get the option if they haven't already); and all publishers ended up allowing the snippets, because removing the snippets brings less traffic, not more.
"Illegally"...? Completely legally, and with the permission of the content creators. Publishers have the possibility to prevent Google from displaying their snippets. They choose not to do so, because they know it would bring them less traffic, not more.
The problem of any negotiation is that Google can just say "how about zero? Is zero a good price for you?"
If you let the market decide how much Google has to pay publishers, the answer will be negative. Publishers would totally pay for traffic, and everybody knows it. In fact, they are already doing so, and it's called advertising. Google has some experience in that business as well.
Of course, if the government decides to set a price for those snippets, chances are that Google will just stop showing them altogether... Which usually results in less traffic to publishers (because users are not enticed by the links) rather than more (because users already know what the article says and don't need to follow the link).
I do wonder whether there is a measurable effect to this data sharing or not... In the first place, there are good chance that this privacy option they just removed was off by default, which means the vast majority of users did not turn it on.
I'd be extremely surprised if this materially moved Twitter's revenue in any way.
So how are those countries getting the data? Google location services can be turned off, as well as location usage in search results. I heard Switzerland is using cell phone operators, which have a rough location from the cell mast users are connected to, and that cannot be prevented (though not as precise). Some countries force people to install an app, which I guess can technically be fooled by a GPS spoofer.
Ah well. There's always ankle monitors like for prisoners on supervised release...
'In a clinical trial, absolutely none of the people treated with cyanide died of the Coronavirus! Feel like giving it a try? Or maybe we should try homeopathy? There are no side-effects!"
There is no situation so desperate that you should try any random crap just because there are stupid people who think it works.
Even with a low-entropy number, it's still possible to identify people with a bit of detective work, so technically, it might be said to be "identification" data. Hell, just your first name is already identification data, and some first names are so common that they give less information than that...
there are plenty of people out-there fully capable of reading and understanding them
Understanding an algorithm developed by machine learning? Er, no. By design, they're a black box which you can only judge by comparing outputs and choosing the one that get better results... Which for Google, means more clicks, not any mushy stuff like quality.
By this point, Google themselves have no idea how the algorithm works and what it does. They only make sure not to give it access to weapons, just in case.
Seems to me they now have an excuse to check the ID of random people, for a "probable cause", which they would not have otherwise.
And yeah, from the point of view of cops, it's quite a success. If they were generally able to arrest one criminal for every six person checked, they would be over the moon....
Would be nice to know the rate of false negatives, of course. What percentage of people walking in London are are criminals, would you say?
The basic question is, will those businesses keep growing every quarter by this many millions (linear), or by this much percentage (exponential)?
I guess the expectation is that growth in sales should be exponential — the fact that Amazon growth so little compared to its current customers would indicate they have trouble finding new customers.
That is not a bad thing. Far better to have a three-horses race than a two-horses one.
Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: "I would sooner believe flat-earthers are attention-seeking trolls than they would truly believe the Earth is flat."
Or, to somewhat adapt Russel's chocolate teapot, the claim that somebody who is intelligent enough to drive a car and who has lived all his life in an industrialized country would really believe that the Earth is flat is so extraordinary that it can be discounted without evidence.
For the record, I also call liars people who claim to have seen a bigfoot, without feeling any need to provide a proof.
From somebody who's completely out of the loop: Can we look forward to a future where every cloud provider must be compatible with all the standards in order to have a chance, and most reasonable setups can easily change providers?
Or are all the big providers adding so much additional fluff that you'll be locked in no matter what you do, because your setup will always have to be "optimized" in ways that make a migration impossible?
Well, I'm no stock market wizard; but it sounds very unlikely that the same people are going to buy another phone again next year. So unless Apple comes up with something revolutionary, like "fuck it we're going five cameras", it seems like they're going to sell less phones next year.
Then again, it seems that they're gearing up for a cheaper phone this time. So Apple would have cleverly segmented their customers in two parts: those that'll buy the coolest phone no matter what it costs, and those that'll buy the cheaper version one year later. It sounds like a good strategy; though they'll probably make less money due to smaller margins, and the market will run in panic.
Let me tag this post so I'll find it again in one year: Nostradamus
To be honest, I feel it's almost not necessary to have such regulations anymore; the whole industry is already pretty much standardized (though I guess a lot of gadgets are still on micro-USB). We are very far from twenty years ago, when every single manufacturer had its own proprietary plug(s). Yes, Apple is still the exception, but it doesn't feel so bad.
On the other hand, I do wonder whether this will cause problems when the technology will have evolved, and it will be difficult to introduce a new standard...
(Wasn't there another article about this?) I'll reiterate: Google does not control the code that phone makers put on their phone, they all fork base Android. And threatening to shut phone makers out of the Google Play Services is an abuse of monopoly, and Google has been fined €4 billions by the EU last year for using that trick.
Regulators did not accept Google using its leverage to promote its apps, and they would certainly not accept Google using the exact same leverage to hinder phone makers from promoting their own apps. It would be a classic case of shutting out the competition in favor of Google apps.
How is making it easy(/possible) to uninstall software,"leaning on phone makers," ?
Just so that it's clear: Google does not in fact control the software on Android phones. Phone makers take Android, which is open source, and modify it to do whatever they want, be it supporting their particular type of camera or preventing users from uninstalling their crap.
If Google added modifications to make it easy to uninstall apps, phone makers could easily just remove these modifications. They can do whatever they want with the code they put on the phones they make, and Google cannot prevent them from doing it.
What people want Google to do here is to threaten phone makers, telling them that if they prevent users from uninstalling apps, then Google will stop working with them, will not let them install Google Play Services, etc.
Legally, I don't think it makes a difference. It would be way too easy for just anybody to claim that whatever it is they're doing is "for customer protection". In fact, it would certainly be in Google's interest to shut down phone makers' apps – they're practically all competing with Google's own products.
If the consumers need protection, the natural solution is for governments to do it. Not giant corporations with ulterior motives.
I meant that (in the EU at least) it is illegal for Google to lean on phone makers by abusing of its monopoly position. It doesn't matter why they do it. Laws don't stop applying when it is convenient.
However, it would be very simple and legal for governments, whose job it is to protect users, to make it mandatory to let users remove any app they want.
Google has the power here and yet they act like the victims.
I'd like to note here that Google got fined billions by the EU for wielding that very same power you want them to use now.
Well, they used that power to force phone makers to preinstall Google apps like Chrome and YouTube and Google Maps, but the mechanism is the same. I'm not sure that "the ACLU made me do it" is a valid counter to EU regulations.
If I understand correctly, they want Google to refuse to grace those phones with their apps, Google Play Services and the like, unless the phone makers accept letting users deinstall anything they want.
In fact, it's (ab)using Google's monopoly on their highly sought-after Google Play Services to force phone makers to do something they don't want to do. It's essentially the same thing that Google got fined billions by the EU for... Except that this time, it's for the good of users. Maybe.
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