tylerl

I donno, I think this shows that Bloomberg has a knack for government work. Pay people an extraordinarily inflated price for something that sounds straightforward on the surface, only to have them execute on the letter of the contract in cheapest and most amateurish way imaginable. The man clearly belongs.

If it's true astroturfing then it is by definition a professional operation. Astroturfing has to be directed by an institutional authority, otherwise it actually is grassroots.

"Astroturfing" is a political concept. It's about making a top-down initiative appear to be a bottom-up one instead. Fake "grassroots". AstroTurf, see?

What you're talking about, as best as I can tell, is called "fanboyism" -- individual devotion characterized by unusually strong vocality and blindness to contradictory evidence.

Fanboys are extremely common in tech, but usually associated with companies that make products with particularly elegant design (Apple, Tesla) or with a strong sociopolitical component to their identity.

Google has a long history of pushing back for on government requests for data relating to its customers, and they have years worth of history establishing that initial government requests are always overreaching.

Is anyone surprised that they'd push back on requests for their own data, especially when it's run by state AGs (i.e. politically motivated) and involves turning trade secrets directly over to competitors?

> “To date, Texas has requested, and we have provided, over 100,000 pages of information,” the spokeswoman said. “But we’re also concerned with the irregular way this investigation is proceeding, including unusual arrangements with advisers who work with our competitors and vocal complainants."

Ya, concrete details were conspicuously missing. Like petabytes? Exabytes? I suspect that the "largest dataflow job ever" is significantly smaller than the kind of crap Google regularly throws at the backend that dataflow runs on. With that infrastructure at their fingers, I suspect engineers regularly fire off jobs orders of magnitude larger than necessary simply because it's not worth the 3 hours of human effort it'd take to narrow down the input set.

Except no. That's where the regulators fundamentally agree with the regulated company.

This is a different but also common phenomenon. Well established companies tend to favor strict compliance requirements with harsh penalties and difficult targets. The big companies can hit those targets because they can afford to sink time and money into activities that don't make money. Small companies can't.

It isn't necessarily about being anti-competitive. The requirements may be the right thing to do, and better for everyone. Except startups generally can't afford it. In fact, startups are usually absolutely crap at privacy, security, and other elements of social responsibility.

Say I was a freelance salesman. I buy and sell expensive things that I can't afford. I line up the deal and make it happen. This month it's a cruise ship. It costs $500 million from the manufacturer in Amsterdam, but I can get a client in Dubai to pay $504 million delivered. I get a short term-loan which costs me $200k, plus short-term insurance for $400k. I buy the boat where it is for asking price, and pay $2.7mil to deliver it to the customer.

I made $700k on the deal, not bad. I moved more than half a billion. The _revenue_ number is huge but mostly irrelevant from my personal perspective. Almost all of it was money that was never mine, that I never made.

> "Serverless" is just "someone else's servers".

Clearing that bit up:

Cloud is "just someone else's servers".

Serverless is "someone else maintains the infrastructure." It's one step further in the same direction.

"You should not trust them because they show ads that are easily mistaken for legitimate content!"

... Declared the news site, in a paragraph sandwiched between two ads carefully disguised to look like legitimate content...

You can debate about whether you believe the message, but there's no reasonable argument that you should believe the messenger.

WTF, journalism. Seriously.

Sounds a lot more like abuse detection signals firing based on Apple Pay using virtual card numbers.

Apple says that their virtual card numbers protect your privacy because they're untraceable. Ok, but that also means that your using Apple pay is mostly indistinguishable from credit card fraud.

But, you ask, does Google really have to worry that much about fraud? Do people really phish known-good Google accounts, add a stolen card, and then buy a whole bunch of ads?

Well.... yeah. That's actually one of the primary uses for stolen credit cards.

To the extent that Google has any of that data, they have it because the user wanted them to retain it. You probably never read your old email drafts, but people would be upset if Google deleted it without them saying to do so.

Everything Google knows about you is available for you to retrieve, delete, and often even change. You totally can selectively edit your location history. It's not a forensic log because that's not the utility users get from it. The fact that courts want to use it as a forensic log is their own damn problem.

If you're using a service hosted by someone else, then it doesn't matter if it's open source; you're using someone else's closed environment. In that case you're just as well off using Google or Microsoft. Probably better off, since they aren't aren't hosting on a shoestring budget.

The point to having it open is so that you can host it yourself and modify it yourself.

This want a case of "purposely hinder", but rather the zfs nodule broke because of some kernel changes. The kernel is careful to never break userspace and never break its own merged modules. But if you're a third-party module then you're on your own. The kernel developers can't be responsible for maintaining compatibility with your stuff.

Right, because they should instead publicize all their discoveries except for the Apple ones. Because obviously.

Sounds like a lawyery money-grab.

> ...John Yanchunis, the attorney bringing the suit, told Business Insider, adding that "all indication is that the security is lax on these machines."

"These machines" are only ever popped by the customer sharing their password. If you can sue a company for their customers' bad decisions, then we've got problems.

I'm confused by the tagline: ”Zwitterion lets you get back to the good old days of web development."

Like, what made the good days go bad? What is this supposed to be better than?

Bear in mind that the very worst accusations against Google have been for considering possibly working within the demands of the Chinese government in the future, with the whole dragonfly thing.

You're saying that the Chinese government is more ethical, themselves.

> Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?

So that coworkers don't schedule you for meetings during your doctor appointments.

This strikes me as a whistleblower fail.

The story isn't, "I know that something bad happened", as whistleblowing is supposed to mean. Instead they complain that essentially, "I am not personally privy to the consent requirements and privacy protections required, nor do I know what has been implemented." Which... congratulations on not being important, I guess?

But in particular, this person gives an emotional plea that people must be given the explicit opportunity to "opt-out", not from the medical research in general, but from any subset of research conducted in collaboration with Google, specifically because it's Google, rather than another research contractor.

I donno. Should Internet users be given the opportunity to opt-out from having their IP packets transit fiber owned by AT&T? I mean, sure I agreed to a bunch of stuff when I signed up with my ISP, but my provider is Comcast. They never mentioned AT&T. And some of those packets might not me encrypted....

I first saw this in the Linux kernel style guide back in the 90s. The idea was that you should be able to read a function without scrolling. So that meant it would fit on screen in a standard terminal. It's a bit extreme for practical use, but the concept is important to keep in mind.

I was helping a Jr programmers with a code review a few months back. He'd been told that a particular chunk of code was "unclear", with specific emphasis on 4-line bit of logic in a 30-ish line function. He had no idea how he could make the code "more clear". It did what it did; the logic was a bit complex but the code was exact and correct.

The solution: factor out the 4 lines of code into a function. It was only ever called from that one place, but by making it a function you give the code a name, with clear inputs and outputs. Nothing changed about what the code did, but it became a lot easier to reason about.

It's a helpful lesson that generally doesn't really sink in for the first few years.

Losing access to ALL Google services happens because of abuse signals. I don't know of any other instances where global bans happen.

That's not really the question. You kinda missed the whole point.

These companies exists because they serve a need. There's proven demand; killing Facebook will create a Facebook-shaped hole, which will immediately be filled by the most capable alternative.

In today's climate this almost certainly means that any American tech firm you destroy or break up will be replaced by the Chinese state-controlled equivalent, because at the moment they're the most capable existing competitor in most cases.

There are a few alternate potential outcomes, but all of the likely ones are just as bad or worse. The "break up tech giants" concept is very much like the "war on drugs" from years ago; it sounds like you're doing something good, but the end result can only be unmitigated disaster.

Right, because the web activity itself can contain location information independent of the _explicit_ collection of location history.

It comes down to the granularity of privacy concerns and the complexity it introduces.

If you disable the direct collection of location history, should you, the user, be allowed to turn on the collection of other information that can contain location data? That would include all location-enabled service histories, of which search and app history is the most obvious example. Or should Google treat your setting as a prohibition against all possible sources of location data regardless of your other preferences?

Well that's ... nifty.

The previous uproar on this location history thing was us getting all up in arms about how search history and location history were combined; turning off one would turn off the other. Now we're furious that they're not combined: turning off your map location history won't turn off your search history.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Before you get all excited about something "obvious" here that's clearly being overlooked, remember that if you decide to use location-sensitive search, you'll get different search results depending on where you are. Search for "voting" with location enabled, and the results will focus on what's relevant where you are, not just nonspecific voting trivia. You can't store location-sensitive search history without making it possible to derive location based on search history.

Location, history, and how location affects history are distinct concepts that can't be combined without limiting the granularity of your privacy controls, but can't be separated without limiting the clarity of your privacy controls.

Sure, but there are tradeoffs to consider: JSON may be difficult and inconvenient to use for human interaction, but on the other hand it's also really slow for machine reading and writing. Plus you have the added bonus of it being an inefficient use of bandwidth.

My 5th grader has never had homework. Each year the new teacher says the same thing: homework has been conclusively proven to not only provide no benefit, and actually to increase negative outcomes. Each teacher says she stopped assigning homework about 5 to 15 years ago, and the result has been categorically positive.

Bed times aren't mandated by a government board. School start times are.

Also, later school start times have in other states led to better academic performance, better behavior, etc., independent of any control for bedtime.

This decision has no downside. It's like mandating that hot dog vendors not sell disguised dog turds.

Yep, a solution exists through. Here's how you get there:

* Strong identity: employees must be strongly identified before acting.

* Multi-party authz: nobody ever acts alone. One person can't be trusted, two people might be, M of N effectively represents the company.

* Noisy security: making a change to security parameters notifies all relevant parties in a way that intentionally avoids notification fatigue. You can't sneak a change through.

* Full auditability: even after the fact you can readily unravel what was done, seeing what the old state was, what was changed, who made the change, and who approved it.

Get those points, and a few other minor details, and this larger problem actually becomes tractible.

"Google is willing"? You make it sound like there's a person making a decision. The system is automated, there's no mechanism for employees to be unwilling.

A lot of effort goes in to ensuring that audit trails are non-optional.

I think that misses the point. There's a mile of difference between adding sufficient accessibility to serve a demographic vs adding new legal requirements.

(Especially new requirements for which customers are financially incentivised to file suits, and for it's trivially simple to code up automated scanning to find businesses you can target.)