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I would never use Google Wallet though, I like digital money as long as it is handled by real banks and government, not some big advertising corporation.It should come as no surprise to hear that Google, a search company, has morphed into an advertising company. And what marketers really, really covet is your location and buying habits, amongst other personal details that help them best target you at the precise moment in which you'd be likely to pull the trigger on a purchase. By extension, Google's likely to start using Android (and Google Wallet, which is also available on iPhone) to act as a tracking method for your purchases. Granted, there's consumer up-side: by enabling Google to track purchases, Google can funnel coupons and other great deals directly to you. It's very possible for the scenario to be win-win, but privacy advocates are still a bit shaky on what it all means.
They are getting desperate because most real and true coders have woken up and they need to con more idiots (like myself) to get into coding servitude... and that, fast! Well, to hell with them. To hell with them all!Code.org's Hour of Code initiative, which kicks off this week, has received endorsements from no less than President Obama, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Hour of Code seeks to motivate students at 33,000 schools to give programming a try by using tutorials on the site or by attending sessions at locations like Apple or Microsoft retail stores.
When asked for comment, Google told us that the feature had only ever been released by accident - that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it. We are suspicious of this explanation, and do not think that it in any way justifies removing the feature rather than improving it.
The disappearance of App Ops is alarming news for Android users. The fact that they cannot turn off app permissions is a Stygian hole in the Android security model, and a billion people's data is being sucked through. Embarrassingly, it is also one that Apple managed to fix in iOS years ago.
Facebook released a study last week indicating that the company is moving into a new type of data collection in earnest: the things we do not say. For an analysis of self-censorship, two researchers at Facebook collected information on all of the statuses that five million users wrote out but did not post during the summer of 2012.
If coding for some reason sounds pointless, or not worth the time investment, consider the fact that services like Facebook and Dropbox began with a single line of code, and now, companies like these are worth millions, or even billions. Not too bad for something that can be created at home, is it?
That's the cool thing about coding: It's not just a job, it's an art. Like a painter who can produce a beautiful scene on canvas, or a woodworker who can build a functional piece of furniture, coding allows you to create, or craft, something that others can make use of. I can imagine there's little that's more rewarding than building a piece of software that ends up being used, and loved, by a great number of people.
...Mary Maxwell Gates was appointed to the board of directors of the national United Way in 1980, becoming the first woman to lead it in 1983. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, her son's company. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives.
A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft...
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The carrier wants to charge websites for carrying their packets, but if they win it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it
Think of all the things that tick you off about cable TV. Along with brainless programming and crummy customer service, the very worst aspect of it is forced bundling. You can't pay just for the couple of dozen channels you actually watch. Instead, you have to pay for a couple of hundred channels, because the good stuff is scattered among a number of overstuffed packages.
Now, imagine that the Internet worked that way. You'd hate it, of course. But that's the direction that Verizon, with the support of many wired and wireless carriers, would like to push the Web. That's not hypothetical. The country's No. 1 carrier is fighting in court to end the Federal Communications Commission's policy of Net neutrality, a move that would open the gates to a whole new -- and wholly bad -- economic model on the Web.
As it stands now, you pay your Internet service provider and go wherever you want on the Web. Packets of bits are just packets and have to be treated equally. That's the essence of Net neutrality. But Verizon's plan, which the company has outlined during hearings in federal court and before Congress, would change that. Verizon and its allies would like to charge websites that carry popular content for the privilege of moving their packets to your connected device. Again, that's not hypothetical.
ESPN, for example, is in negotiations with at least one major cellular carrier to pay to exempt its content from subscribers' cellular data caps. And what's wrong with that? Well, ESPN is big and rich and can pay for that exemption, but other content providers -- think of your local jazz station that streams audio -- couldn't afford it and would be out of business. Or, they'd make you pay to visit their websites. Indeed, if that system had been in place 10 years ago, fledglings like Google or YouTube or Facebook might never have gotten out of the nest.
Susan Crawford, a tech policy expert and professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, says Verizon wants to "cable-ize the Internet." She writes in her blog that "The question presented by the case is: Does the U.S. government have any role in ensuring ubiquitous, open, world-class, interconnected, reasonably priced Internet access?"
Verizon: the new Standard Oil
Verizon and other carriers answer that question by saying no.
They argue that because they spent megabucks to build and maintain the network, they should be able to have a say over what content travels over it. They say that because Google and Facebook and other Internet companies make money by moving traffic over "their" networks, they should get a bigger piece of the action. (Never mind that pretty much every person and business that accesses Google or Facebook is already paying for the privilege, and paying more while getting less speed than users in most of Europe.)
In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously remarked that upstarts like Google would like to "use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it."
That's bad enough, but Verizon goes even further. It claims that it has a right to free speech and, like a newspaper that may or may not publish a story about something, it can choose which content it chooses to carry. "Broadband providers possess 'editorial discretion.' Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others," Verizon's lawyers argue in a brief (PDF).
That's so crazy I won't bother to address it. But the FCC has done such a poor job of spelling out what it thinks it has the right to regulate and how that should work that the door is wide open for the carriers' bizarre -- not to mention anticonsumer -- strategies and arguments.
I don't want to get down in the regulatory weeds, but there is one bit of legalese that's worth knowing: common carrier. Simply put, it means that the company doing the shipping can't mess with the contents. A railroad is a common carrier, and as such it can't decide whose cargo it will carry and whose it won't.
Before railroads were common carriers, they did things like favor products made by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which made him even richer and also led to the creation of a wildly out-of-control monopoly. (Yeshiva's Crawford has an in-depth but readable explanation of these issues in her book "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age."
But the FCC has never ruled that ISPs are common carriers, partly because it's afraid of the power of the lobbyists to influence Congress and partly because its directors lack spine. And now that lack of spine is about to bite the butt of everyone who uses the Web.
According to people who follow this stuff closely, because ISPs are not common carriers the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., are looking askance at the FCC's defense against Verizon's lawsuit, although a verdict isn't likely for months.
Here are the stakes: "If Verizon -- or any ISP -- can go to a website and demand extra money just to reach Verizon subscribers, the fundamental fairness of competing on the Internet would be disrupted. It would immediately make Verizon the gatekeeper to what would and would not succeed online. ISPs -- not users, not the market -- would decide which websites and services succeed," writes Michael Weinberg, vice president of Public Knowledge, a digital advocacy group.
A taste of the Web's future: The Time Warner vs. CBS dustup
You don't have to wait for the Verizon verdict to get a taste of what the New Web Order would be like. Time Warner Cable and CBS just had a dustup over how much Time Warner would pay CBS to carry its programming. When the pair couldn't agree, the cable giant stopped carrying CBS programming in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas. CBS then retaliated by stopping Time Warner subscribers from streaming its programming over the Internet.
They settled after about a month. Staying true to form, Time Warner refused to give customers a rebate as compensation for lost programming.
That's not exactly the same issue that we're facing in the fight over Net neutrality, but it should give you a sense of what life is like when the giants fight it out over what you're allowed to access and for how much. Users get caught in the middle, and the rights we've taken for granted simply disappear.
A top Ford executive made a startling admission about the amount of data the auto maker tracks from its customers at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show this week.
"We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it," Ford Vice-President Jim Farley told a crowd in Las Vegas during the show. "We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing."
The global marketing and sales division chief was trying to make a larger point about the amount of real-time data Ford has on drivers that could be used in the future to alleviate problems like traffic congestion.
"By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone," Farley said according to a Business Insider report.
Of all mass-produced vehicles in 2013, about 96 percent had computers recording and transmitting the type of data Farley was talking about. Police have even begun using such data to investigate car accidents.
Last month Ford unveiled a self-driving car equipped with a LIDAR (light radar) mapping system and onboard cameras - location and visual technology that is likely to find its way into more and more future models.
Though his point shouldn't come as a surprise, it also comes after half a year's worth of revelations about the length and breadth of previously unknown National Security Agency surveillance programs, many of which have since been deemed in clear violation of privacy and civil rights laws by state and federal courts and legislatures.
Until those programs leaked thanks to former agency contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA consistently obtained secret warrants to access the private user data housed by internet and telephone service providers by falsifying or misrepresenting information.
Certain documents allege some of Silicon Valley's largest companies gave the NSA direct access to their data stores, and when the signals intelligence agency didn't have that, it hacked in with questionable legal justification and took what it wanted anyway.
After such recent federal privacy and surveillance concerns, it isn't unimaginable that companies like Ford could be subpoenaed, solicited or hacked for the real-time user data of millions of drivers in much the same way.
"These cars are equipped with computers that collect massive amounts of data," Khaliah Barnes of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the New York Times last July.
"Without protections, it can lead to all kinds of abuse," Barnes said.
Google CEO Larry Page has rapidly positioned Google to become an indispensable U.S. military contractor.
Google recently purchased Boston Dynamics, a robotics pioneer that produces amazing humanoid robots for the U.S. Defense Department.
This development invites attention to Google's broader military contracting ambitions - especially since Boston Dynamics is the eighth robotics company that Google has bought in the last six months.
Just like drones are the future of air warfare, humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles will be the future of ground warfare according to U.S. defense plans.
There are many other reasons why the U.S. military is on path to become Google's single largest customer. Likewise these reasons indicate Google has a closer working relationship with the NSA than it acknowledges publicly.
First, consider the military value of Google's research and development efforts and the military contracting pipeline revenue it could represent.
Page created Google X, which is Google's secretive research and development lab tasked with pursuing "moon-shot" technology breakthroughs. So far, Google X is best known for its earth-bound self-driving cars and Google Glass.
Tellingly, the purpose of the original "moon-shots" by the Soviet Union and America was military. The two Cold War superpowers were in a "space race" to publicly showcase the technological and military supremacy of their rival ideologies.
Simply, America's Cold War "moon-shot" was about winning the military space and arms race with the former Soviet Union.
Even more tellingly, the greatest application for most all of Google X's "moon-shot" technological efforts - are military. Like drones, self-driving vehicles, and robot soldiers could enhance military surveillance and payload delivery while reducing risks to military personnel.
Google Glass' advances in wearable augmented reality could offer American soldiers tactical advantages over enemy combatants. Google's Project Loon could quickly provide a supplemental battlefield bandwidth advantage in remote areas.
Second, Google's personnel hiring signals its aspirations for a closer Google-military relationship.
In 2012, Google hired Regina Dugan, the head of DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), DOD's in-house "moon-shot" idea factory. At the time a Google spokesperson said: "Regina is a technical pioneer who brought the future of technology to the military during her time at DARPA. She will be a real asset to Google."
Simply, few people could have a better insider knowledge of the U.S. military's future technology needs that Google could exploit than Ms. Dugan.
Third, Google has a long history of working for, and with, the NSA and the other U.S. intelligence services.
In 2004, Google purchased satellite mapping company Keyhole, which was strategically important enough to be funded by the CIA's investment fund In-Q-Tel.
Google turned the aptly-named "Keyhole" surveillance capability into the wildly popular Google Earth and Google Maps service used by over a billion people and over one million websites.
In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that U.S. spy agencies use "Google equipment as the backbone of Intellipedia, a network aimed at helping agents share intelligence." The article also reported that Google had a support contract with the NSA.
In 2010, the Washington Post reported that Google worked with the NSA to figure out how Chinese hackers broke into Google. The New York Times later reported that those Chinese hackers stole Google's entire password system called Gaia.
Fourth, Google has too many unique capabilities and metadata sets that are of strategic value to the NSA to believe Google's denials that it does not work closely with the NSA.
Snowden's NSA revelations have underscored the high value the NSA puts on collecting the metadata of who is communicating with whom, when, where, and how much.
Remember Google is metadata central. It is veritable surveillance catnip for the NSA.
Think about it. Google's cookies track the Internet behavior of nearly 2 billion people. Over a billion people regularly use Google Search, Maps, Android, and YouTube. And about a half billion people use Gmail and Google + social media.
Former NSA Director Michael Hayden has said "Gmail is the preferred Internet service provider of terrorists worldwide."
Thus Google has the unique capability to surveil for the NSA the online behavior of a targeted group of people by country, language, interests, keywords, names, communications, physical location, movements, time and more.
Simply put, Google's world's largest computer already can do what the NSA wants to do most.
Add to all this Google's unique capability to instantaneously translate 80 different languages across applications, and why wouldn't the NSA covet a close working relationship with Google?
Finally, the behavior of America's greatest military rivals, Russia and China, speaks volumes about the likely extent of unreported close cooperation between Google and NSA/DOD.
Remember it was the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that invented the Internet in the early '70s. It is no coincidence that Russia and China have been the most hostile to allowing Google's Internet dominance to extend into their countries.
In summation, the accumulating evidence indicates that the U.S. military is on path to become Google's single largest customer.
Page's strategic positioning of Google's biggest investments to strongly align with future U.S. military needs is no coincidence. It is likely tacit confirmation of a much stronger relationship than Google has acknowledged to date.
Page's creeping militarization of Google will increasingly become problematic for the privacy of Google's foreign users, which generate over half of Google's revenues. While U.S. law purportedly prevents the NSA from surveilling Americans without a warrant, the NSA's official mandate is to surveil foreign signals intelligence.
In short, Google's creeping militarization means Big Brother Inc. aspires to work more closely with Big Brother government.
