There was a great post a few weeks back here about why whatsapp, viber et al had such a dramatic growth. Basically, the hypothesis was these apps have access to the entirety of the user's contact data on their phones, which allows them to reconnect with our friends automatically (or fallback to sms/email). Ironically, I think this is something where Google+'s circles could come in very useful for us (meaning, normal users): if Google stopped pushing Plus as an end goal unto itself and instead started integrating it at a lower level in android and provide APIs accessible to other websites, it could have massive privacy and usability advantages for us. Cyanogenmod is doing something similar, but I think they're implementing it as a everything-or-nothing switch for apps. Providing more granularity (and seriously, Google got the circles UI spot on, I'm very impressed) is something that's sorely needed if we want to move away from facebook's monopoly on our social graph.
I know the PSLVs have a reputation of being very reliable. Do you happen to know how much it costs, compared to the Protons or SpaceX's new design?
Also, it's very cool that India:s launching its own GPS alternatives. The article mentions that it uses the same L5 and S bands as GPS and Galileo: isn't there any potential of interference, and will existing receivers work as-is?
To play the devil's advocate, what exactly is the practical use of all this if most of your family and friends are on Gmail (and couldn't be arsed to figure out pgp)? From what I can see, your emails will now be sent in the clear over the internet, instead of staying within google's servers. Either way, the government's going to get your data, but at least you're protected against... /more/ unscrupulous people snooping on your stuff?
hmm, I wasn't aware you could sell your physical disks on the xbox store... that just seems like a recipe for disaster. It seems like such a corner case, though, that I think they could get away with only allowing downloaded games to be resold online. Physical disks would have to be resold through Gamestop or similar, which would actually act as an incentive to purchase the digital version!
Very simple. Keep the 24 hour restrictions as-is, but allow transition to an offline mode after notifying the mothership. This disallows all the family sharing features. Games installed using a physical disk would require the disk to be present, downloaded games are unaffected (since you can't sell them without connecting to xbox live.) This takes care of the submarine scenario. When you're back online, check for the disk again before allowing disk-less play. Make sure the offline transition can be done through smartglass, and you handle the hurricane/somebody-cut-the-fiber scenario as well.
So, in practical terms, how would this be more secure than what we have now? The main crux of PRISM is that they have highly automated mechanisms of accessing user data from many major internet companies. If you store your private keys alongside that, what are you trying to protect against?
I think that's a completely simplistic and disingenuous statement. The Chrome team have done a _lot_ the last few years to strengthen security on the web. And you're forgetting that the main attack vectors these days are through plugins, not the core browser itself. Chrome's decision to bundle their own secure version of Flash (that actually updates without a hassle) has probably done more good for people's computers than anything else peddled by other companies recently.
https://whispersystems.org/ has an excellent pedigree, but it's only voice and text, and only on Android right now (though I've heard an ios version is coming soon...)
This is one of the most cogent articles I've read today about this atrocious issue. At least, from a political standpoint. A lot of the technical details seems hokey:
> PRISM works well because it is able to handle several different types of data streams using different basic encryption methods, the person said. It is a "front end" system, or software, that allows an NSA analyst to search through the data and pull out items of significance, which are then stored in any number of databases. PRISM works with another NSA program to encrypt and remove from the analysts' screen data that a computer or the analyst seems to be from a US person who is not the subject of the investigation, the person said.
"handle different basic encryption methods": what does that even mean? Are they able to decode AES? Likewise, "remove from an analyst's screen"?? Seems exactly like technical mumbo jumbo to impress an illiterate journalist.
But the main point still stands: the administration is relying on more and more creative interpretations of words like "analyze" and "collect", and is not raising the specter of terrorism to cover their naked grab for power.
Agreed. I preordered one the day they announced it on HN, but they've been awfully silent since. After watching the Xbox announcement, the new kinect definitely seems more usable and interesting.
Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?
_If_ we manage to create transporters at all (never mind the next decade), the impact on religion and legislation would be far greater than on the transportation industry. If your body is destroyed and reconstructed, are you still the same person? What if you could make copies? It's just information, after all. And so on...
Do any of the Star Trek episodes investigate this aspect of the transporters?
Really? There are plenty of valid reasons why XMPP is not suitable for mobile usage (most notably, the proprietary push notification systems that all platforms insist you have to use), but XML isn't one of them. If you use TLS with XMPP (as gtalk does [1]), you get the compression protocol for free, but even if you can't, there's XEP-0138 [2], which specifies the use of zlib and has been in development for over 12 years now, and finalized since 2009. XML is fugly, but it works. At the scale Google operates, it is laughable that the use of XML in chat protocols could possibly impact their bandwidth accounting.
This is doubly true when it comes to Mozilla's Persona. I implicitly trust my email provider more than any other site's login system (at least, the ones that email password resets), so why not delegate to that all the time instead of insisting on a different username and password?
I think that is an unnecessarily harsh view. Even if Nokia shifted to Android tomorrow, their hardware pipeline is still months behind HTC and Samsung. There is no way they can compete against them, let alone HG and Sony. Their short term thinking in the 2000s cause them to land in this mess in the first place, sticking with Microsoft and its war chest is probably the best chance they have right now, at least until they get their manufacturing cadence up to speed with the rest.
You can absolutely shift your number off of google by paying $10, but since the real value add of Voice is not in the number, but the associated services, there is not much point. Skype doesn't even come close. Is there any other for personal use?
The writing is easy to understand, but is there any reason why you're just not using memcache's add method? For the price of a network call, you'll automatically get the LRU cache logic and a more deterministic behavior.
A thousand times this. Why does the OS not make the app permissions more granular than a bit flag? Every app and its dog nowadays require all these really invasive data permissions, and all the choice we're given is either "yes to all" or GTFO. Google went to great efforts to design the concept of contact circles (something that could easily have prevented the OP's problem), why is Android still stuck in the dark ages of data sharing?
Agreed, it'll probably settle down in a few seasons to something moderate (i.e., neither the garishness of apple's calendar, nor the usability nightmare of the WP8 app on windows.) I just wish we won't forget the lessons of these experiments, but most likely we'll just be reinventing the whole thing again and again. (Recent example: the horrible 90's emoticons craze is back in messaging apps these days, except they're now higher resolution and are called 'stickers'.)
Interesting he feels so strongly about that... but then again, he always kinda does. Not sure what to make of it. I used to follow Scoble's blog back when he was evangelizing for Microsoft, but he's abandoned his mediums so often and so vociferously that I sort of lost track. Is Google Plus his latest platform now?
Personally, I'm consciously trying _not_ to get stuck with a single company's ecosystem, so a lot of the advantages Scoble mentions simply don't relate to me. But then again, I never really ventured past search and Gmail... is the rest of Google's services really that good to justify buying into?