asuffield

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google. I don't know what's going on in this particular case, and I don't really want to, because it's probably a huge pile of lawyers.)

> It is 'reasonably possible' for Google to give this person access to his data.

This is not necessarily true. For example, the data might contain material which is illegal to distribute. I'm not sure what can be done in a case like that.

The status quo is that the company whose questions you leaked will never hire you again in the future, and other tech companies who find out about this while researching you as a possible hire might also decide to never hire you.

It's the difference between a polite "this offer doesn't work for me at the moment", and burning your bridges.

(However, this particular article doesn't seem to discuss any specifics of technical questions, so I don't see an issue here)

The only plausible way for this to happen is for you to check all the "privacy" buttons in the settings, so that no recruiters can find you. Otherwise you should expect to receive a lot of recruiter spam.

Citation needed. The following sources disagree strongly with your claim:

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhea...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/sep/19/scientists-a...

http://www.cdc.gov/narms/animals.html

Antibiotic use in humans has rarely been a problem, it's the way that "restricted" antibiotics are used on lifestock freely and in large quantities that keeps screwing us over.

The reason why governments force construction companies to do this is because if they don't, it causes ghettoisation, through precisely the mechanism you describe.

As a society, we have experimented sufficiently with ghettos as a city design strategy, and determined that they are terrible in all ways. We do not need to repeat that experiment.

You don't solve the problem of high housing costs by getting rid of the poor people (if you are in the US, you may read that as "black people": that's what this policy has always turned out to mean in that country).

If you want to reduce the cost of living, build more houses.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

Google's been trying to do this for years, but the Mountain View city council keep blocking it. :(

This only works for services using TOTP mode; HOTP prevents replay/cloning attacks.

Detail: Google Authenticator is TOTP or HOTP, depending on how the service owner set it up.

> When you make something difficult to tamper with, you usually just increase the potential payout of tampering.

The real goal is to make the cost of tampering exceed the payout. The standard mechanisms for increasing the cost are computational power needed (cryptography) and ability to participate in mainstream society (legislation).

Nobody would survive that with today's technology. This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

What you want to be thinking is: all of the attachments including malware. Safebrowsing is an anti-malware system. Large collections of unfiltered email invariably contain malware.

(I can't say much more than that, sorry)

Well, it sort of works: massively increasing the wealth of any third world country will shift it from "if you're poor then you starve and die" to "if you're poor then you are begging on the street and sometimes working a lousy job for little money".

It's not much of an aspiration, but it is, strictly speaking, an improvement. It's also not a hypothetical: supply-side economic demonstrably works, to some extent. It just doesn't work very well, and we should be able to do better.

As somebody who has done this a few times: you run all the tests of all the projects on your change, and you don't feel bad if somebody has code that breaks and doesn't have a test that caught it.

I would agree with you here, and I think most googlers would too. We trust people to make sensible choices about this, and tend to be quite angry with blatant abuse, because it's abusing the trust as well as the perk.

> The food though...seems like everybody does it.

The people who work here are the sort of people who don't, and that's intentional. Enjoy the things that are provided, but understand the context and intent behind them and don't abuse them. We get to have these things because we collectively take responsibility for not abusing them. That's how you avoid the tragedy of the commons - if everybody abused them then we'd have to stop having them so freely available.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> sometimes mining information to leak to organizer friends

> After 9–12 hours on campus I would fill my Google-issued bag with Naked juices and to-go containers of food for my roommates

So... deliberate violation of the corporate NDA (which is massively disrespectful to the other people who work here) and stealing food from the cafes. I'm happy to work at a company that fires people who take something offered in good faith and abuse it. It is a part of our company culture to give people broad freedom to do what they think they should, on the understanding that they will act responsibly and not abuse the privilege.

(I can't comment much on the rest of the article, except to say that I feel a person who has openly admitted their tendency to dishonesty is perhaps not best afforded a high level of trust in the claims that they make)

It used to be a slightly different app on a different link, but that's gone now; this one is the replacement (and what the reception displays now use).

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

One might describe it as a social botnet: somebody convinced a bunch of people to execute some code on their computer that sent automated search queries.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66357?hl=en

"Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google."

Intentionally using a tool to send automated search queries is pretty clearly prohibited.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

It's just displaying this: https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&nco...

There's a more compelling argument: if any of the large state actors were involved, they'd probably have done a more competent job of it. This all sounds pretty amateurish to me.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

I can happily endorse the company's public statements on this subject: personal data will be deleted within the timeframes specified (for obvious technical and that's-a-bad-idea reasons, it's not instant). Part of SRE's function is to arrange for SLAs to be met, including deletion SLAs.

I don't understand where you think you can find the slightest shred of liberalism in this piece of legislation. This is very much old labour: maximising state power and control over individuals, because the state knows best.

A liberal bill would minimise the state's authority to do this sort of thing.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

We run everything on prodimage, so operating system compatibility isn't really an issue.

Realistically, any time somebody sends me a code review with a shell script in it, my first comment is going to be "Why is this a shell script? Rewrite it in a supported language."

It's clearly a hug. Has been for decades. Just start reading it that way.

That depends primarily on what alternative you are proposing. If you aren't discussing a specific alternative, then it's just the kind of unproductive sniping that I object to.

Yes, it is precisely that. It's very easy to take shots at extremely rich people, because they won't bother to show up and defend themselves and nobody else will either.

The main problem I have with this is that it's not very interesting and doesn't solve anything.

Strongly correlates with socioeconomic status. This research is telling us: wealthy children grow up to be wealthy adults.

I might be wrong, and somebody who can speak for the company might contradict me in the future. I can only say anything with this proviso.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> I've also heard that at Google they require assert isinstance for every parameter of every function.

This is not true.