Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.
It's not just four stacks (or more, because the article also mentions Apple Macs and BSD) that you have to "mess up". You also have to mess them up in such a way that you can exploit them without a disk even being mounted. That four/five/six stacks are all exploitable to this extent because of buffer overruns (or similar) seems implausible.
They were not "killing babies" they were "monetizing the vast network of uniformed African's who were potential baby killers". If they were technically doing anything wrong then Google wouldn't have partnered with them, because as Eric Schmidt said:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
If this malware is actually real then exploiting a large variety of different USB stacks (whether it's done via the the BIOS or OS stack) seems implausible. Maybe the flashed usb stick either:
1) Hides a bootloader on the devive that runs at reboot (assuming the BIOS allows it).
2) Pretends to be some kind of device (that most OS's have stock drivers for) that allows it to access main memory. Maybe it pretends to be a USB to firewire bridge (or something similar that gives it DMA).
3. Amazon gives preferential treatment to merchants using their auxiliary services. They already give preferential treatment to merchants using Amazon Fulfilment by writing off (at least some of) the bad merchant feedback caused by fulfilment issues. This effects customers (as well as merchants) because from the customers perspective failed fulfilment is the same no matter who does it.
The NSA shouldn't just be an attacker it should also provide defence. If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.
I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that a lot of exploits the NSA has discovered and not revealed (because it thinks they are "secret") have actually been sold to other governments by it's own contractors. By not revealing these exploits to citizens they are actually leaving them open to attack by foreign governments. Large companies trying to defend against industrial espionage are probably most at risk.
This is only tangentially related to the article but where I live there is a lot a wildlife, including many different species of birds. Some of these birds now sing songs that mimic common mobile phone ringtones. This is obviously not as bad as pollutants effecting birds behaviour but I think it's a great example of technology having strange, unintended consequences.
> Deconstructionism itself has some interesting ideas [...] like those pointing out that a work of art can mean two opposing things simultaneously. The problem, however, is that its sillier adherents—who are all over universities—take a misreading of Saussure Deconstruction to mean that nothing means anything [...]
Surely the point is that the meaning of the text is dependant on the context supplied by the reader. So for an analysis of a text to a mean something (rather than nothing) is must not only define the subset of readers it is confined too, but also offer some justification of why it assumes those readers supply a common context (and what that common context is).
Without this context an analysis of a text is a largely a polemic unless the analysis is so absurd (or dissident) that it becomes a satire. Assuming a wide definition of "a text" then the majority of the media have been effectively "saying nothing" for the last 30+ years and academia have been satirising them.
I think the most troubling aspect of this case is that the FBI modified the computers systems before Ireland seized them as evidence. It seems absurd that law enforcement can effectively tamper with evidence before it is secured, then use that tainted evidence as part of a prosecution.
I think it's like a teacher checking your bag (under the pretence of "finding drugs") in order to confiscate your camera that contains incriminating pictures of them.
YouTube also offers a Flash based API to show videos with adverts. If HTML5 wasn't feasible for Microsoft they could have paid Adobe for a licence to use the Flash runtime in their YouTube app.
Amazon is actually relevant here, because their Kindle Fire browser is partly cloud based. Microsoft may say that HTML5 on the Win Phone isn't feasible, but they own a giant cloud based server farm (Azure) just like Amazon. So if Amazon can make a browser that splits tasks between the cloud and the physical device why can't Microsoft handle HTML5 this way?
Google has obligations (both legal and moral) to both the content providers of YouTube and to the organisations who buy adverts on it. In order to 'not be evil' they have to take actions that respect these obligations.
Microsoft's original version of the app either:
a) deprived YouTube partners of their share of the revenue from adversing
b) caused advertisers to be charged for adverts that were not shown
The download feature also posed a problem to content providers who only hold a streaming licence to their content. If it didn't respect YouTube's no mobile flag (I'm unsure about this but it seems possible) it would also have caused issues for content providers who only held non-mobile streaming rights.
Microsoft now has a new version of the software that supposedly corrects these problems and is whining about openness and anti-trust. But why should Google now trust them? They treated not only Google, but also their partners and advertisers, like dirt. Now they want special treatment. It's like walking into someone's shop, insulting both their sales staff and their customers, then next week coming back and asking for discount.
How is Google being evil by imposing restrictions on a known bad actor in order to protect their partners?
> Their average may be comparable, but frequency * intensity produce wildly differing results.
I think this is largely an academic discussion. Some people drink a glass a wine every day, some people binge drink once/two times a week. If you consider alcoholism to be the point at which you can't withdraw without death resulting then both groups will pass. If you consider regular alcohol consumption as a potential psychiatric problem then both groups are suspect. But both groups still have:
A) People who just drink socially/for fun.
B) People who are alcohol dependant (in terms of a psychological crutch).
The same server(s) also control the JavaScript code run by the client/browser. They could serve special code (to any one the government wanted to spy on) that returned their password to the server.
Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.