Anyone going to say it? DuckDuckGo searches are still really low quality. I WANT them to be a legitimate competitor in the space (in fact, I've been having similar hopes for Bing for years) but it's just not there yet.
I'm surprised not many people are pointing out the antitrust concerns here...There are a few competitors in the space, but there may be a strong case that Google is essentially buying out that Waze's capabilities and niche are only rivaled by that of Google.
This is junk -- there is absolutely nothing that the companies can say to satisfy the critics. We're not going to get at the truth via conspiracy theories and making connections in the language of the denials. "Non-denial"??? If you were in the CEO's shoes, and knew that the PRISM issue was false, what would you say DIFFERENTLY?
What frustrates me is that this comes from the assumption that Yahoo & co. are absolutely without a doubt guilty.
"We categorically are not making data available voluntarily or under duress to any government or company or organization."
Of course none of them can say that because they're all sharing stuff with someone(s) and who knows where it ends up - Right Media, Twitter button and ScoreCard Research are all on Yahoo's homepage and except the Twitter button, inside Yahoo Mail.
To be honest I'm still catching up on a lot of the details with these stories, but it's this comment that made me wonder if there is a bit of hyperbole going around. Companies make leaks all the time on the most mundane things (hell Apple can barely contain the new iPhone that is usually coming out.) I'm hesitant to believe all the conspiracy theories going around that the companies willingly did this, or that it's as easy as it sounds.
> “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” said the “career intelligence officer” who gave documents describing PRISM to the Washington Post.
Think of the engineering needed at multiple endpoints to allow something like this...I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)? I'm only being slightly pedantic here. If this is "literally" possible, then the amount of work needed for the collaborating companies is non-trivial. It's one thing to pass along uber-authentication credentials allowing an NSA-agent Zuckerberg-like privileges...that could be something implemented with as few as a couple people. But to bake in something right out of a hacker movie?
It just makes a few of the claims sound a bit suspect...because what is terribly frightening is the government's ability to aggregate and analyze this information in bulk, not to peep in on you as you're typing in real-time, which would be one of the least efficient ways ever to spy on the general American public's online activity.
And no, I'm not being an apologist for federal expansion of powers. I'm pointing out that some of what this source is leaking seems to be beyond reality, not because of technological sophistication, but because of the number of mundane moving parts and actors that would seemingly have to be involved (theoretically, wouldn't they have to have as many datacenters as all the companies they're vacuuming from?). The entire PowerPoint slide set looks like something a get-rich-quick contractor would whip up to win a fat contract that would never actually be scrutinized for viability.
But still, even if the government doesn't actually have the capability as described, it is wrong for them to not disavow it...it's not any good if their mindset is: "Oh we're not doing that...yet...but we would love to, some day)
I think "as you type" means different things to an intelligence officer and a programmer. The intelligence officer probably means "real time" (no need for a judge/approval/etc). A Google Wave like interface is probably not in the backend, but if the FISA route took weeks and the new kit takes seconds I could see "literally as you type" being a description that fits.
Yes...maybe I reacted too strongly to the often misused "literally."
But even real-time interception would not (seemingly) be that valuable to analysts. Assuming that suspects aren't dumb enough to use their own personal accounts and to talk of their plans explicitly, it seems analysts would want the historical aggregate of which alias accounts talked to which other alias accounts.
Hell, Facebook can already figure out if you're connected to someone even if you've never directly interacted on the service...if the allegations are true, I wonder how much of the requested data comes with pre-baked network-calculated goodness?
Obviously all conjecture here, but what came to mind for me is things like having a keyword filter on a bunch of accounts (whoever you're watching). The moment they Google for something you want to see you get an alert that it happened.
You do not need to have belief systems; knowledge is more powerful. And conspiracy theory is a loaded term. Remove both from yourself to process information better.
They lend their face and their bullshit smile to the government towards which many people have a much more healthy distrust. I agree that this doesn't make them the main culprit, but they don't get to completely wash their hands of it either. Big (monstrously huge, actually) corporations make the job of tyrannical governments much easier; how about we chop them into more manageable bits without having personally hard feeling towards them, and deal with the government(s) at the same time?
No, it's absolutely productive and helpful. We the people have no voice. Companies like Google who makes billions are the ones with a voice. If a million people left Google in protest you could expect action. If a million people signed some bullshit online petition nothing at all would happen.
I agree 100% in theory -- but it's still a nice essay to have on HN given the million of other blog posts about the complete opposite reaction to Facebook that get upvoted to obilivion when they're also all pretty much annecdotal.
Essentially I upvoted the article because it's nice to know that HN isn't completely a sound-proof echo chamber =)
Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved
There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.
I'm pretty mixed. I have friends working there, but I think Zynga is a blight on humanity. I feel the same way about casinos and tobacco companies: they are essentially exploitative. So I hope that their ships all sink, but that the people working there get in lifeboats and land on some wholesome shore.
Some of the discussion here may be PART the reason...but only a small part. If you really think about what Facebook and Twitter are trying to do, they're trying to construct 'graphs' -- a social graph or an interest graph, depending upon which suits your cup of tea; and graphs are based upon connections. When you "like" or "retweet" or "follow" something/someone, you establish and create a link in this gigantic web of connections. Think of it like developing a system of telephone wires.
Therefore, in this model, it doesn't REALLY make sense to have a dislike or a 'dis-retweet' option because you can't create a 'non-connection' more than leaving a void space between you and said other object. That's why these words aren't in the vocabularies of these tools mentioned.
At least that's the visual mental model that I have, and I would encourage others to consider this.
