asuffield

I don't speak for the company, but I don't think we're going to respond to an attack piece by the Mozilla CTO by disclosing how our search algorithm works. ;)

In any event I'm not a person who can decide to release that information. All I can do here is to ask people to think about what evidence has been offered and the motives behind this article.

Yes, you can. If you use a clean Nexus build then last time I tried it, the behaviour was that the first time I opened Chrome it asked me if I wanted to sign in to chrome to share my history and bookmarks between devices, and I had a simple yes/no choice. I don't think this needed any deep technical knowledge.

I'm not intimately familiar with the android chrome settings UI, so I apologise if I've missed an easier way, but in about 30 seconds of tapping I found the button to turn it off: main settings page, accounts, my google account, sync, uncheck chrome.

The answer given there is simply not correct. Click: settings, advanced sync settings, uncheck "history".

I am quite confident that the default behaviour when you install chrome is that you are not signed in. It definitely doesn't share any history when you're not signed in. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have a login box otherwise ;)

I also feel that the message you get when you decide whether or not to sign in to chrome makes the purpose of this feature quite clear: "Sign in to get your bookmarks, history and settings on all your devices." Here's the detailed page it links to: https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/chrome/browser/signin.html

I'm not sure what behaviour you were expecting, can you clarify?

Notice that this is a feature you have to turn on (try it!). Obviously in order to perform cross-device synchronisation, it's necessary to send this information.

I'm not free to discuss the details of how these systems work, but consider this: if both the statements "Google will store this information" and "the fact that you are using Chrome does not cause Google to receive any special or additional personally identifying information about you" are hard requirements, how would you implement this feature?

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on search quality)

This article makes a number of bold claims about the contents of data and code which its author hasn't seen, and is written by a company that is receiving a large amount of money from Yahoo. I would encourage people not to forget these details.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on chrome)

Google does not "track the full browsing experience of chrome users". Please read the privacy policy which is very clear on this subject: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/

I particularly draw your attention to this paragraph: "If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not cause Google to receive any special or additional personally identifying information about you."

Without commenting on the various claims about memes in this article, I can offer a hypothesis on the closing paragraphs: the most obvious reason why misinterpreted science is much more commonly seen is that sharing an unsupported meme takes far less time and effort (~few clicks) than finding the research paper and reading it, so we would anticipate seeing a lot more of the former.

The pithy version is "a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on", with thanks to Pratchett.

Huh. I never knew that was there. I'll remember this next time I'm around Charleston.

blaze is nothing remotely like the wall of cruft that maven forces you to climb for everything you do. I would describe it as "almost entirely unlike maven".

I'd like to make a subtle but critical adjustment to your statement:

"A union is a legal framework for the employees which has the ability to recast the power balance and can do it in their favour, if it so chooses."

Unions are definitely capable of doing this thing, and some do it. They do not necessarily do this thing, and some do not. The common failure mode is that an entrenched union is run by a group of people who act very much like company management, profit immensely from this arrangement, and remain in power by employing forms of the pirate ship loot splitting strategy.

(The pirate ship captain must propose a split of the loot, which the crew votes on. If they vote in favour, the loot split goes ahead, and if not then the captain is thrown overboard. The correct solution is to divide the loot equally between 51% of the crew including the captain, and allocate none to the rest.)

The worst unions are definitely not a framework for laziness, but they do tend to be bad for businesses as their primary function is to suck money out of the company and give it to union leaders. The best unions make everybody better off, including the employers. Some companies have internalised the functions of the best unions, because they realised that this makes everybody better off, so don't have any real need for unions. Some companies have internalised the functions of the worst unions and are engaged in an asset-stripping operation.

There is a tendency for older unions to be worse than newer ones. Setting up a union will almost certainly be good for the people who set it up. Joining an established union may or may not be good for you; if you're thinking about joining a union then research this union carefully and figure out if they're going to be good for you. Keep in mind that bad unions tend to be extremely political and will be surrounded by propaganda - look for clear evidence of outcomes.

If you're thinking about unionising in your workplace, please think carefully about this problem and how you're going to make sure that your union is one of the good ones. If you're thinking about running a company, please think carefully about how to be one of the companies that already does the work of the good unions.

Does anybody know what app this is? It appears to have a Firefox icon on it. My stock Nexus phone does not seem to have this app - swiping up from the home icon gives you Now.

Disclaimer: not representing anybody, my opinion not anybody else's. I work at Google, and my team looks after this.

Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWpBNm6lBU4

I can't tell you anything that's not in that video.

If there are people who are willing to give them more money to try again, why should the rest of us have any say in it? I probably wouldn't fund them myself, but if there's some investor who is fully aware of what happened here and still wants to fund them, I don't see a reasonable basis to object.

If they aren't lying to anybody, where exactly is the problem?

Yes, and it seems clear from the article that this was understood going into the project. They got screwed when their production volume dropped from 50,000+ (viable for injection moulding) to 2,000 (not viable for anything), after it became clear that the product they had designed was not sellable in the market.

I followed the thread a little further, and the response seemed reasonable: experiments were run on this idea, it didn't seem to help, and nobody (including phk) has offered any further evidence to the contrary since then.

I think you need to expand a little more on why you feel this is a "known flaw".

CAs are not magic decryption boxes. If you compromise a CA, you can generate a false certificate, but this certificate is non-repudiable: it is a sequence of bytes which you must present to the system you are attacking, and which is conclusive, independently-verifiable evidence that the CA has been compromised. While the NSA almost certainly could do something like this, they would run a very high risk of detection every time they did it.

Forerunner? It's a cut down version of https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms which has been in place for quite some time.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody other than myself. I work at Google, not on cloud, although I routinely fire my nerf gun at people who do)

That bit is about Chrome OS (ie, a chromebook), not Chrome itself. The bit about it being "non-unique" means it's not a GUID - other people's devices will send the same tag. It does not identify you.

> To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances.

I think the privacy policy is quite clear that Chrome does nothing here that other browsers don't do. Obviously if you have a Google cookie from signing in to the website then that's going to identify you pretty clearly, but that's just how cookies work, and would be exactly the same in any other browser. I'd like to specifically direct your attention to the first three paragraphs of the policy, and in particular:

"If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not mean that Google will receive any special or additional personally identifiable information about you."

> I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.

I wouldn't expect to find any information about how AdSense works in the Chrome policy. The privacy policy for ads is over here and discusses this topic: http://www.google.co.uk/policies/technologies/ads/

> Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.

If you read the very detailed Chrome privacy policy (https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/), you will see that it does nothing different to other browsers here (each server sees your IP address, cookies, etc). It does not send any form of uniquely identifiable ID with every request. Only some very specific cases (offline drive, google wallet, DRM auth, etc) send your signed-in userid, which they need in order to work at all.

Please read the privacy policy. People put a lot of time and effort into writing it and it answers all your questions.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing my employer, read the links for yourself. I work at Google, not on Chrome.)

> The value they get from knowing everything you do online?

This is a myth. Or less politely, a lie you have been told.

https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/ is very clear about exactly when chrome reports back data, including what happens when you sign in. It does not report your online activity in ways different from other web browsers. It sends just about the minimum possible to implement the features it provides.

I think the main problem is that if you want to play in the mobile space, you must invest heavily in lawyers:

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1153292 http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-i...

It's not the walls that keep people out, it's the sharks.

I do politics in the UK (and I'm deep enough in to know what's going on). I don't know if it's quite the same in the US, but as a broad description of how things work, this article rings true to me. There's no great corruption, but there's widespread apathy, getting things done is unreasonably difficult, and decisions tend to be made by whoever could be bothered to show up and sit through hours of tedious nonsense. The personal costs of getting things done are grossly disproportionate in comparison to the things you can get done, the pay is awful, and after you struggle for years to make things a bit better all you will get is bitching about how you didn't achieve more. That's why I won't take a job in politics, I just help/work with/fund people that do.

It's not a battle against people who are trying to abuse the system, it's a battle against people who don't care and don't see why they should bother, but whose assistance is needed for you to achieve your goals. The most common form of this is two groups of people who don't agree with each other, don't see why they should bother to reach an agreement, and don't care that the things you want can't happen until they do agree on what should be done.

Does -site:twitter.com count as an "opt-out"?

> Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth of the problems.

Personally I completely disagree with your priorities. I think a bug report is far more valuable, since people can act on bug reports and make things better, while I would not anticipate any meaningful action as a result of speculation about mission statements.

Sigh. Standard disclaimer: nothing I write here has got anything to do with my job, I'm not representing my employer in any way. I cannot talk about anything I know personally. I've also never worked on any of these projects. However, I can read, describe, and link to public material on the internet like anybody else.

In all honesty, I have no interest in the news archive projects; I read an HN link, followed some of the links in it, and said "this isn't what I was promised on the previous page". It sounds like you just made a second attempt at writing the article. I suggest you take the original one down and put this one up instead; it stands up to at least the completely superficial fact-checking of reading the links in it, which makes it a significant improvement - although it now appears to be a list of fairly straightforward bug reports. (I like bug reports. Bug reports are actionable.)

Engaging with the subject would require substantially more effort on my part to research and investigate what's going on here, because I don't know anything about it beyond what I read in links here. I'm not going to do that. However, I would encourage anybody with an interest in this subject to do the research and write up their findings.

Hang on, this article links to instructions on how to do some of the things it claims can't be done.

It complains that the news archives frontend is gone, but then links to the page which explains how to do the same things using search: https://support.google.com/news/answer/1638638?hl=en

It also complains that groups is dead because you can't search by date... but the exact same method used in those instructions works just fine: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agroups.google.com+a...

The article claims that books scanning is slowing and links to an article which says it's still going in some places, but explicitly says that it's slowing down because some of the libraries are running out of books that need scanning.

It links to an old quartz article from 2012 claiming that "20% time is dead". After the first three paragraphs, that article links to the rebuttals: http://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not-... http://qz.com/117164/20-time-is-officially-alive-and-well-sa...

I'm not all that interested in arguing the title point of the article, but when an article provides a whole stack of "evidence" and superficial investigation reveals that most of it does not support what the article claims, I question the motives of the author.

So we now live in a world where both monolithic and "microkernel" (hybrid) systems are commonplace - there's a bit shy of a billion devices running linux (android) and no shortage of windows and osx hosts around. What can we learn from this?

Well, it doesn't really seem to matter whether you use a monolithic or microkernel design. They both work well enough. Driver development is hard for reasons that have got nothing to do with this, and doesn't appear to change much between the platforms. Success/popularity of operating systems appears to be determined by other factors.

I'm not sure why people feel this is still worth debating. All the evidence points to it being completely unimportant.

The last ruby project that I worked on laughed at static analysis tools before pitching them into halting problems. You have to execute ruby code just to assemble the classes, it's quite resistant to static analysis unless you artificially restrict yourself to a subset of the language.

If you're going to limit yourself to the statically checkable part of the language then you might as well just use a language that was designed for it. The fundamental feature of dynamic languages is variations on the theme of self-modifying code - behaviour is determined at runtime. This feature is not normally considered compatible with static analysis, because you have to execute an unbounded amount of the program to find out what it does.

The important thing about static type checking on languages like ocaml is that it can be both "sound" and "complete" - any type error is an error in your program, and a program that type checks cannot go wrong according to the constraints of the type system. In order to make this possible, we have a body of theory on how to design type systems that are constrained just enough to be checkable while still expressing everything you want them to say.

This is for contributors outside of Google.

I don't know why this is needed, but glancing at the CLA the clause which is most obviously not covered by the Apache license is this one:

"You represent that you are legally entitled to grant the above license. If your employer(s) has rights to intellectual property that you create that includes your Contributions, you represent that you have received permission to make Contributions on behalf of that employer, that your employer has waived such rights for your Contributions to Google, or that your employer has executed a separate Corporate CLA with Google."

Linux requires a similar declaration to accept code, but many free software projects do not, and it's not a part of any of the usual licenses.

> Also, why it does not stop hosting malware?

Keep in mind that this is not reporting malware is currently present, it is reporting that at the last time it checked it found malware, which may have been taken down since then. It doesn't tell you anything about how long it stayed up.

> These web domains do not belong to Google. It seems google is downloading several pages onto its server for various purposes.

I have no specific knowledge of this, but my guess would be that these are just the targets of links.