devx

> Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.

I'm confident that wasn't just a joke. That's what Larry Page thinks is Google's direction, and I think he's wrong. I was just telling a Googler friend that this is the wrong way, and in the future they will face increasing criticism for it, especially if the Internet's users en masse decide to switch to a much more secure, much more private Internet, where user tracking would be very difficult.

When that day comes, Google won't be a friend anymore for web users. They'll be the enemy. And I'm saying that as a still somewhat loyal Google user right now.

The problem is Google has always "won" by being a friend to web users. If they are the enemy, they will lose. That's why it's vital for them to find a way to make money, that doesn't automatically make them the enemy of a much more secure Internet.

HTC may have fixed it with the latest update:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1og2h8/critical_and...

Google's Adam Langley has just proposed ChaCha20 with Poly1305 for TLS, and says the performance is pretty good (~5x faster than AES-GCM in software).

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/10/07/chacha20.html

Ironic that it's coming from the "Independent". They probably don't even realize the irony themselves.

Would the security of such algorithms improve dramatically if say 5 years from now we'd live in a world where everyone has a 64-bit device or machine, and the algorithms can be optimized for 64-bit? Are current algorithms limited by 32-bit a lot or not really?

> I think the tech will shine if they ever manage to fit 4K resolution in there.

That's probably going to take a few generations, and they might do it faster and with better results if they used this technology instead, which apparently doesn't give eye-strain like LCD's do, too:

http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-virtual-retina...

By the way, check out this Redditor's crazy story about falling asleep with the Oculus Rift, and waking up feeling like he was actually in there for the first couple of minutes:

http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1oe33h/so_i_fell_asl...

Sounds like we'll be on one hell of a ride in the next 10 years, if Oculus Rift gets so immersive, and hundred of millions of people have them, all preferring to be in their high quality virtual realities over real life, most of the time, and feeling "disconnected" when they aren't there, just like we feel now without the Internet.

Look at the trend for "real" (not nominal) salaries over the past decades, and you'll get your answer for how destructive inflation can be for the lower and middle class. Since the dollar has been dramatically devalued over the past few decades, while the nominal salaries have barely increased, that means people today are making a lot less money than their parents or grandparents used to make, and you can see an article about that every other week, because it's true, and inflation is the main reason for it.

Yes, in the end, companies are at fault for not increasing the salaries with inflation, too, but inflation is what enabled them to leave them as it is, because most people don't really keep track of inflation, and don't know when their salaries should increase and by how much according to the inflation. So the companies play this "trick" on them, by keeping salaries the same or increase them by much less than the inflation rate.

What feature would we need in Android by default, to make meshnets a lot more possible? Like some sort of auto-connection to whatever Wi-Fi is close to you.

I'm hoping that once the carriers themselves start to push users to use wi-fi for offloading from their network, the more Android and iOS and others will have features to make that easy, and the closer meshnets will be to reality.

If Apple moves to a 5" screen or something close next year, I'm sure they'll double up the resolution again to 2272x1280. That could force Android OEM's to think they need to go to 2560x1440 now, to be higher than Apple, but I agree that would be silly.

It could help devices like Oculus Rift, though, and it could also lead to 4k displays on 10-12" tablets and notebooks faster than otherwise ("only" 2x the pixels from the current resolutions for 10" tablets).

Then you move to the "next" T-mobile. The point is to encourage this behavior, and punish the bad one by leaving as soon as it happens (same goes for Verizon/AT&T) now.

So who started that war?

The hardware and the OS will hold the DRM, as far as I understand. That means that if say pirates break the DRM on Windows, Microsoft can patch it by next Tuesday.

That being said DRM by default in browsers (through EME) is probably the end of the "open web" - or at the very least the end of a "clean open web", meaning that everything will need to be hacked and cracked to make it work. Want to copy text or an image from a website? You'll have to find the crack for that website. Not to mention that doing that will be soon declared illegal (if it's not already from the moment DRM is applied to something).

The thing about visionaries is that they can see trends long before the others, too, while the others can look at the same thing and see nothing - and therefore think they're crazy.

They can see trends when stuff goes from 0.001%, to 0.002% the next year, then 0.003% the year after that and so on. Most other people see a trend only when it rises from 5%, to 10%, to 15%, etc.

People hear some police unit bought a tank, and think "ok, but it's not a police state". Then they see more units buying tanks and other war equipment, and they still think "ok, but it's not a police state yet". Then they see the police using the same equipment against protesters, and still say "ok, but it's still not a police state yet. America is not Russia! etc".

Then, they start barging into people's home for things they've searched online, and for protests they "liked" online, and start thinking "ok, maybe we are a police state now".

The problem is now it's going to be a very hard uphill battle to roll everything back. Now only do you have the police units wanting to keep all that equipment they bought, and thinking they now absolutely need it to "keep them safe", but you also have contracts lobbying to keep the police buying such equipment from them, and the federal government supporting it, too, and so on and so on.

And all of that perhaps could've been stopped early on 10-15 years ago, if people actually believed the people who started saying US is becoming a police state, and didn't wait until the very last moment, until nothing can be rolled back anymore, just like with the NSA spying.

There are at least 2 trends that are starting now, that you can start fighting early, before it goes too far: domestic drone surveillance, and NSA collaboration with domestic agencies.

These trends are very early, and most people are still probably thinking "ok, but let's see how it goes first, before we get outraged". Sure, you can do that. But before you know it, drones will surveil everything from the sky for the government, and NSA sharing with DEA, FBI, DHS, and even the police will be done "as a matter of fact". Don't believe me? Look how DoJ thinks about this:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/doj-if-we-can-tra...

You have to start fighting the abuses at the very first signs, not when the abuses are already an "entrenched system" and a culture of doing things for the authorities.

Well, for starters we only think it's so "precise" because that's the model we've constructed to understand the laws of physics. But once we fully understand what's happening at the quantum level, we might scrap the Standard Model altogether, and discard it as useless (for whatever we plan to make next with the new found knowledge).

Plus, it may be this "precise" in the same way Earth has "exactly" the things it needed to create life, and ultimately us, humans. That's to say it wasn't precise or exact at all. It was just a potential combination of stuff, out of trillions and trillions of other combinations, which may or may not have resulted with the same things.

So who's to say our universe isn't just one of the potentially trillions of trillions of other universes out there, and that other universes exist with life-forms that we can't even imagine (inter-dimensional/inter-universal beings, etc). We just turned out the way we did because that's what we "got" at the roll of dice (sort of speak).

I think more in terms of having a breakthrough in mindshare. A big game that is exclusive to Linux, at least for a few months or more, could give Linux the buzz and mind share it needs.

Saying "Battlefield 4 will be released for Windows/Mac/Linux" doesn't mean nearly as much for Linux as saying "Battlefield 4 will be released for Linux-only this year".

Why is this court even allowed to make such ruling anymore? Take the case straight to the Supreme Court. FISC is a joke that needs to be immediately disbanded.

I know Coinbase is trying to make transactions as easy as possible for its customers, and in order to do that they've started to "abstract Bitcoins away", but they may be going too far, to the point where it's pointless to even own Bitcoin on Coinbase. Maybe that will end up working for them. I don't know. But I don't think I like it - at least not as a Bitcoin service.

How about Microsoft and Apple? Do they get a free pass from this, because they're less likely to do it, so why even bother asking them?

I'm not defending Google, and I support EFF's request. I'm just saying this seems to happen quite often. For example, even though Apple was trying to make things better for Foxconn employees, they were actually the ones being targeted and criticized "for not doing enough", a lot more than the other Foxconn customers were.

Motorola already started that battle before Google bought them In fact, there were some theories that Google bought Motorola because they were about to attack other Android OEM's, too. I'm sure that's not the only reason, but it probably played a role. I know just weeks before the acquisition was announced, Motorola's CEO implied his intention of going after other Android OEM's.

So transparency is bad because the media can spin the info, and therefore governments should keep that info secret, instead of actually providing the facts?

I'm all for a "Star Trek economy", but I think that implies having very low costs on stuff, too, such as replicated food that barely costs anything more than the atoms needed to create it (energy to make it would be free/renewable).

But from what I hear prices in Switzerland are very high, and while I'm interested to see how this experiment will play out, I fear they will get even higher because of it, which could make the whole minimum wage raise pointless.

Apple and Microsoft do the same. Apple got a bit of flack over it, too. Microsoft not much so far.

The Chinese government should try and switch the Chinese faster to the new national OS, Ubuntu.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/ubuntu-to-become-the-offi...

Well I can tell you what I didn't like from the moment I saw the web page: I can't see or use the app in any way before I even register. As some random visitor coming to your site, why would I bother doing that, when I have no idea what to expect from signing-up (other than a bunch of words on a page, which I just skipped looking for the app screenshots/demo).

Here's one good reason why I don't want any piece of "Microsoft software" to be embedded in Android phones:

Microsoft Thinks DRM Can Solve the Privacy Problem:

> "Under the model imagined by Mundie (a senior advisor to the CEO at Microsoft), applications and services that wanted to make use of sensitive data, such as a person’s genome sequence or current location, would have to register with authorities."

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520226/microsoft-thinks...

Microsoft still has a lot of this "let's be dicks to make more money" culture inside the company, and until that changes, I want nothing to do with them anymore, and the fact that there are starting to be some serious alternatives to Windows now that are becoming increasingly more mature, makes me happy. I'd like it to remain that way, instead of having Microsoft crawl back to its former power.

You may think "Google does some bad stuff, too", but so far I've seen absolutely no evidence that Microsoft is better in any way than Google, and it's usually worse. So if that's the "choice" that's being offered (ironically by forcing themselves into our phones), then I want none of it. It's like saying Romney was a "choice" to Obama. Sure it was - an even worse one.

What I'd like to see more of is more open source operating systems becoming successful in the mobile world, like Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish or even Firefox OS.

It certainly should be, as well as most other such software funded by taxpayer money.

I'd be happy if they were actually "wasting it on technology", but this seems like corrupt money, going into the pockets of big corporations for very little and poor work. They probably charge at least 10x what it's worth on the market, and do work that is worse than the average on the market. It helps that the people signing these contracts are either clueless or don't care, since it's not their money.

It's bad enough that ISP's, wireless carriers and even the governments themselves are trying to turn the Internet into another TV medium, where only the broadcast matters, and with preferably a lot of "unlikable" content getting censored off the Internet (just like on TV), and with 10-tier pricing levels, so those corporations can squeeze as much money as possible out of everyone.

And now W3C wants to help this trend? No thanks. As a user of the Internet, which they say they put "first", I say I don't want the Internet to turn into TV and everything else that implies.

Ex-NSA? Are they sure about that one?

I think he was trying to slow them down. He asked that amount for only one person, while FBI wanted free access for everything. He might've known they either wouldn't accept it, or if they did, only for that guy (which could be somewhat reasonable with a proper warrant), but they'd definitely wouldn't pay $3,000 each of his hundreds of thousands of his clients.