No, that's not at all like that. First off, they are proposing them to actually be standards, not just proprietary extensions that no one else can use, like Microsoft was doing.
Second, WebM is actually open source, not proprietary.
2,080 karma · joined November 14, 2013
Second, WebM is actually open source, not proprietary.
If anything Russia and China will charge them more than the French now, to "guarantee" there's no backdoor, and since they are in a better negotiation position now than they would've been if UAE reviewed their offers pre-accusing France/US of backdooring the other offer.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140105/DEFREG04/3010500...
That's a great point. America doesn't do wars anymore. They do conquests. And the American public at large seems perfectly fine with it (or they wouldn't allow it).
So the logical conclusion is to request the removal of the CFRG chair, too, and replace him him with someone who will remove the NSA co-chair. Or just start boycotting and ignoring everything this group is proposing from now on in cryptography - whichever way works.
> Should we then eliminate all individuals affiliated with the NSA from participating?
Um - hell yes?! After all that's happened and everything NSA has been trying to do to undermine the security of the web and US infrastructure, too? Of course the answer to that is YES! Otherwise, I personally have no trust in everything this group or IETF on the whole, will be releasing from now on, if that's their attitude about this.
International security standards should be created without the involvement of spy agencies - especially when they've already been discovered to be trying to implement hardware backdoors on multiple occasions (even in the recent UAE satellite). NSA is hostile to security and to security standards. They've proven it already. So treat them as being hostile.
I think Apple's ecosystem will inevitably fall to second place in 2 years time, when all developers wake up to the fact that Android will be by far the world's largest platform (and yes, it should be better paid, too, by then, as it already almost caught up with Apple in revenue/app).
[1]- http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/07/gartner-2-5b-pcs-tablets-an...
Of course, I don't think even he believes that, because he knows exactly what NSA is doing, but it's good to know for a fact that NSA does spy on US Congress, too. Maybe this information will make the undecided politicians to take the right side.
That being said, I think the only solution to beating Google is developing something disruptive, and I mean that in a very classical and traditional sense (not the way disruptive is used to mean anything these days). It means you have to build a type of a search engine (or search solution) that Google not only has no interest in pursuing (due to conflicts of interest/opposite business incentives), but probably can't pursue, or not without employing dramatic shifts in how they do search (which again, makes it even less likely for Google to pursue and try to beat this new "disruptor").
And no, don't look at Bing to provide that. They're a "direct competitor" to Google, and they will always be, because they want to be "in the exact same business" Google is, and therefore, I don't think they'll ever radically change the way they build a search engine compared to Google.
So what can such a disruptive solution be? I can't say for sure, because it probably needs more factors/benefits on its side than just one, against Google. Social "may" be a way to disrupt Google, although I think Google is already rapidly adapting to this attack vector.
I think another could be "extreme-privacy", which Google wouldn't pursue anytime soon without really rethinking how its search business works.
Disruption also means attacking incumbent companies with much fewer resources through innovative business models and cost structures. Do something that would make Google's billions of investment in infrastructure irrelevant. A P2P search engine like YaCy or Faroo seems to be part of that solution. Perhaps what can/will kill Google is a crowdsourced super-search engine, that ends up surpassing even Google in most capabilities, because Google would be just one company, fighting against the whole resources of the world.
As in classic disruption, you also have to consider this new type of search engine will be much poorer than Google in some competition factors (at least initially). I think that is the "relevance" factor. As the op mentions, it's going to be very hard for anyone or anything to beat Google in relevance. They have too much of a headstart. But perhaps there will be such a thing as "good enough" in search, too. Maybe we're not there yet, but perhaps we will be in 5 years, or 10 years. Until a few years ago we kept wanting faster and faster Intel processors. Now we think mobile ARM processors are more than good enough for most of our daily activities.
A crowdsourced P2P search engine powered by billions of people could perhaps reach that point, too, while offering some of that "extreme privacy" and other benefits that Google can't offer.
Still, how do you get that first "10 percent" of users, that end up changing the paradigm, to start using a service that's much less relevant than Google today? You do it in the same way other disruptive technologies win out against incumbents. You promote the other benefits, that Google can't and won't match - benefits that will be important to those "first 10 percent", until you reach critical mass, and then you should be fast approaching that "good enough" relevance, too, and get even more users after that.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
If they plan on continuing to make money from tracking users, then they'd better figure out a way to do it very securely and without invading user privacy, otherwise they're going to feel an increasingly bigger pain in terms of public perception of Google over this, which could lead to them losing money in the long term, too.
I would also forget about tracking "everything possible" until then, and encrypt end-to-end stuff like chatting and video-calls (maybe they can do this one less costly through P2P or a hybrid system). I very much doubt they see a ton of money as a return from tracking and data mining people's chats online. And the downside is quite huge, because those online chats can be abused by the governments. So why not secure them properly? A little cost to them, huge privacy benefit to their users.
The goal should be to only track public, and not private information (at least in the short term, and then they should use homomorphic encryption for public information, too, as that will become increasingly more revealing, too, in the future).
I would also pay a lot of attention to what the Dark Mail Alliance is doing with e-mail encryption, and I would at the very least implement their protocol as an option for people who want to talk securely with others, from inside Gmail. They don't necessarily have to make all of Gmail encrypted by default, although that would obviously be very nice, but probably not very practical until they figure out homomorphic encryption.
There are also other things they could do to make e-mails a little more secure against abusive governments. In the US, ECPA allows the government to take the e-mail after 180 days without a warrant. So how about you ask people to give a password to G-mail, that's locally stored, and can automatically encrypt emails older than 179 days. If you need to access your own 6+ months old e-mails, then you're just asked to insert your password to access them. I don't see this as a huge issue for convenience, since the vast majority of 6+ months old e-mail is never accessed again by most people anyway.
The memories of a privacy-focused Google are certainly getting blurry, but I seem to remember there was a time when Google really cared about user privacy, and didn't have the same mentality as NSA for "collecting it all", storing it forever, and using it forever with data-mining.
Google has a lot of very smart people working for them. I'm sure they can come up with many more and much better solutions than even I proposed here. The problem is they have to want it. If it doesn't come as an objective from the top, then it's not going to happen.
From Wired, last year:
> 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.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...
Google needs to lose that attitude. Adapt or die, Google. And by adapt, I mean having their business incentives once again aligned with those of their users, or it's not going to end well for them.
Nobody would trust this. Bitcoin works because people trust it, because it's built on open source and P2P principles, so they trust it because it's "trustless". That's where most of its value comes from. People also trust the US dollar because it's been around for so long, and nobody even thinks about it anymore.
So yes, the Fed Reserve could come out tomorrow and say that 1 FedCoin = $1, and dollars are gone from existence (unless you're suggesting FedCoin should compete with the dollar? But then what's the point?), all of them being replaced by trillions of FedCoins. And the next day FedCoin would drop in value by half, taking the US economy with it.
That's why it's so important to fight for such changes, and not get trampled by the corporations and governments wishes for complete knowledge of a user/citizen. If Google doesn't like it, too bad. We'll just have to start supporting privacy-focused companies, and let Google die. That's capitalism, no? Adapt or become a dinosaur and die.
Porn filters are always abused (intentionally). Always. I can't stress this enough. You should've learned from the Australians who tried implementing this sort of filter before, too, and it ended up a miserable failure. Not only can you not implement such a system without a ton of "unintended consequences", but it's also very trivially abused, too, by those in power, and they could abuse it for many years before the public even realizes it.
David Cameron is nothing short of a dictator. It's just that he doesn't have all the dictatorial powers he would like yet. But he seems to be working hard to get them, and this porn filter, the charging of friends of journalists with terrorism, and other such things are only the beginning. Throw Cameron David and his party out of office, and go to the streets and demand the banning of the porn filters at the next elections. Otherwise, expect much worse to come over the next years.
The NSA has already admitted that they are especially holding on to encrypted data for longer periods of time (and after the Utah data center, probably forever). In 20 years time they can start decrypting all that data with a quantum computer.
Think about it. Today's 20 year olds, could be tomorrow's 40-50 year old politicians. All sort of juicy data could be abused then to discredit, or worse, blackmail those politicians.
Right now the best weapon against it seem lattice-based encryption, so we should start working on it, so we can start using lattice-based cryptosystems within 5 years, which is a pretty small amount of time to verify this type of encryption and make it very usable, but I don't think we can afford more than that.
Homomorphic encryption using lattices is something companies like Google should already be researching and trying to implement, if they really care about user privacy (and they should, because I predict an increasingly hostile movement towards Google's data mining in the future, and they need to take steps to "fix" all the privacy invasions they are currently doing with their data mining).