True story, when in Europe the cheerers are the ultras we all get it as a sign that something is not going in the "right" (ironically right) direction.
Anyway, too many actors, too many variables too many things to come. Just wait and see!
I'm back from that paranoia period, my conclusions:
- In real life you have no privacy, but still you don't think about it (white pages, community hall inscriptions, driving license, medical history, ...), apart of white pages try to unsubscribe from any of them and see what happens. Internet made it just easier to track you.
- your safety is based on 2 things your habits and the peers that know you and are willing to lend a hand (family, neighbors, friends ...)
- what makes me feel secure about Google tools, is his business model, if they have a breach and expose people's data, they simply bankrupt, so their business relays heavily in security. (as soon as you enable 2 time factor, it becomes incredible difficult to hack you)
- what I don't like of them, they are in EEUU soil and I'm European, so I don't know if I could eventually get into trouble (like is happening in Facebook, they simply don't listen to European cases about cyberbulling, something I didn't read yet from Google, maybe because they are not so popular, maybe because they are truly Not Evil).
- so yes, I'm a product, and it also unlocks me to easily backup and access my family photos, that I can share via chromecast, or get my mails free from non nice spam and eventually find nice new products and know that I can click without exposing myself too much.
- I do have kids, and what comforts me, I can delegate to Google the block of certain images/sites thanks to their advance AI, still is not perfect so by the time they start, I'll also keep an eye. It is different to explain something bad that he just accidentally found, that place them out of his way until he has the age to understand it.
- and don't get started with the zero days exploits, the wrong architecture of some open source apps, and even the abandonware you have out there for free.
At the end, you need to trade something because one person alone can't get everything, and trust between peers is essential. And money made that trust easy, don't trust people, trust that they want the money :)
In real life you have no privacy
Please remove all locks from your doors and give me your address so I can watch you and whole family 24/7. Privacy starts at home. It exists.
so yes, I'm a product, and it also unlocks me to easily backup and access my family photos, that I can share via chromecast, or get my mails free from non nice spam and eventually find nice new products and know that I can click without exposing myself too much.
With all their services google gets to know most of your thoughts. You don't care. It's okay, I don't blame you. But please do not tell others "there is no privacy" just because you threw yours away for some services that make your life a bit more comfortable.
maybe because they are truly Not Evil
'You have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it' - Eric Schmidt.
We (meaning mostly you) lost it a long time ago already. They sometimes show their evil face - you just don't remember/know/care.
delegate to Google the block of certain images/sites thanks to their advance AI
This is kinda 1984 7.0 - just wait for them enabling it for everyone. Page ranks can/could decide elections already - do you really want them having so much power over everyone? Just because their search results are a bit better (read: personalised) than duckduckgo/etc. ? I sometimes really understand the need for russian/chinese firewalls. Even Canada (reminder: member of the 5 eyes) refuses to send their country-internal internet traffic through the USA even it would be cheaper and faster at the same time. It's forbidden by law.
At the end, you need to trade something because one person alone can't get everything, and trust between peers is essential. And money made that trust easy, don't trust people, trust that they want the money :)
In my eyes, you trade away far more than they give you.
Well, one of my habits is to keep those locks and avoid giving the address unless is really necessary. Certainly you can eventually find where I live and pay a visit, but I can ask you politely to leave or call the cops on you if your intentions are hostile, otherwise we can go to a neutral place, have a nice beer and chat about the topic. I see you mix privacy with security, please don't ;-)
Your second point is quite vast to reply here, but one example: think one second of a daughter that she wants to find her favorite princess in the internet without filter you find quite some porn actress with those names, and because are popular ... paaaam first place. Now how I explain to an infant what those girls are doing, wouldn't be easier to wait until she gets the maturity and I can explain better?
The last point, is my opinion nothing more. Is always a trade, it depends how much you will trade.
Wrong, in real life random conversations are not recorded for an unspecified time.
The databases you mention have serious judicial requirements (in EU) and no free access by a company. Leaks of course happen, but they are treated seriously and are news items.
If Google had a breach, they'd do the same as everyone: cover it up or PR it down and fix it. They won't go bankrupt over even a string of break-ins.
There is less reason to trust them as they are an American company. In fact NSA had free reign over their data at some time and they didn't know about it.
While I would trust them much more than a random startup, trusting their database handling is different. Local, non collated data is often safest. Plus you're not a big target as a single person most of the time.
Well, real live conversations differ from digital ones. Granted that now we can talk about that topic without being in the same room, but depending the topic you won't word your opinion in certain channels, you self censored yourself depending where you are, that's why more than privacy or security what is needed is knowledge about the channel.
I might got wrong the reasons why Google is secure, but I found it convincing
> what makes me feel secure about Google tools, is his business model, if they have a breach and expose people's data, they simply bankrupt, so their business relays heavily in security.
I wouldn't disagree with a statement that Google pays a lot of attention to security, but I doubt it would go bankrupt if there were a breach. There are many big companies that have suffered data breaches but haven't gone bankrupt yet. They just move on with some impact and/or some compensation to their customers, like identity theft protection. <insert any "free+you're the product" quotes here>
I speak for myself. I find a bit against the Open Source culture.
Normally the Open Source projects start from a personal itch, meaning that nobody sits down and think I'll do this cool Open Source program that people will use. On my eyes, it starts the other way around, someone developed something that s/he needed on that moment, it gives him/her results and then decide to share it. If this project is really needed on large scale it will take off. (the Apache foundation got it right with the incubators).
In my case I will fund Open Source projects that gives me some benefit, so if I use any of them and I manage to get some income thanks to it, I'll like to give back some part of my benefit. But blindly fund an Open Source project if I don't see any usefulness it will be hard, but I wouldn't mind to join an organization that ask a fee and redistribute on Open Source projects.
I truly liked your point. Just one tiny detail: you don't really look to be against OS per se, but against the current movement that is basically pushing to open everything and do stuff that nobody really need.
I was thinking about funding projects (f.e.) like Grails, recently left alone by Pivotal and rescued by Apache. I am against funding blindly too, but my point is to fund projects that already have defined a list of features, milestones and delivery time.
Exactly, I'm in favor of open source, but I'm against of open sourcing something useless and drain funds that might be useful in somewhere else. The example I get in mind is the gnupg project, that guy almost got broke for such an important tool.
Your idea is nice, and I won't discourage to pursue, those projects might need some kind of air to survive until something/someone finds it back, and get them back to the spotlight.
An Open Source project can be a bold idea, or it can be an advance scam system, for the first possibility I'm not against as some good projects might come from a bold idea, who am I to close that, but the second one, the community has to protect itself.
Something I dislike from the current situation of the linux userland status is the amount of programs or libraries that you might need and for the next version, some parts of your code are incompatible, and no way to ask any fix as it is open source you can get the sources to fix it, but not the time to do it.
In my case I work in a small company that expects you to work 3h full, then 1 hour lunch, and then 6 hours full. Luckily is only about a week and I can leave and start in a normal company where everything is bit more structured. But now I understand why I was more productive during mornings than evenings.
Sometimes I learn something new, then I revisit any project I started and refactor it.
If you want to get some numbers to compare, you might look on lines of code removed, or timing the operation took. If it gets better, you can smile and say, I'm smarter than myself in 2014
Just to add my advice to the list. I'm 35, I went through a path to get to be a developer that took me long, I could call myself "software developer" round 30's, that's by the time I finish my Bachelor degree and found a job related to development. What I did in between was fixing computers, sysadmin, and netadmin .. I always got bored in those jobs as I knew I could do better.
Then I got into the devel world and I started doing the same as you do. But maybe because I became father in between, maybe something else ... I end up turnning off the media noise and add some behaviours:
1. Kill your ego, it just don't help you get better.
2. Read news about tech you find interesting, but just read them, if you feel like, just try them.
3. Start getting off the screen, walk around (meditate, sports, just walk surrounded by nature)
4. Start paying attention around you, what the people close to you struggle with, and maybe help them.
5. Don't reinvent, if you have a tech ich, just browse around, you might find a nice project you can use (open sourced) and maybe start helping there maybe not.
6. Just create a dynamic in you that gets you where you like to be.
After you get this kind of movement in you, success is a question of being in the right place at the right time.
From my side, just followed that list some time ago. Now I'm checking potential things about domotica and it might get me somewhere, might not ... but something I know, I'm moving because I have an ich. And I'm learning a lot!
Since all the scandals about security, I came up with a different approach, instead to increase cryptography, just build kind of a reverse surveillance. A place like gravatar that informs you who is accessing to your profiles on your social media. The idea is very simple, you provide a jpg that can send back a message every time it's being rendered by a client. It can be that it requires a new image standard that allows to send some info to the main servers.
What I would like to have:
1. a notification in real time:
"Application FooApp tries to access internet (ip, port, etc)" and options like "Allow Now | Allow Today | Allow Always | Never Allow" (in the gui...)
So I will get informed that an application is starting to send data.. and I could block it.
I think it's much easier to set the filters and k control list for the applications while you are using the pc rather than setting them up all at once.
2. "Internet & Bandwidth Usage Monitoring" similar to the Glasswire screenshots. (Stats, Application List that access the internet, hosts, etc) and feature to block with a click some of these (apps,ports,hosts) or all
That's a quite interesting concept, my way to do 'katas' is with projecteuler.net, now I'm getting some coding speed by reading a book about patterns or checking the wikipedia for software patterns. If you get to combine both, then sky is the limit!
PE has always struck me as more focused on math than programming. The easy problems handle brute force but the hard ones are generally bested by a mathematical understanding of the problem rather than programming prowess & algorithmic kung-fu. I've been meaning to check out Rosalind [1] to see if it opens up the door for more challenging programming or just shifts the problem domain to biology.
If project euler seems too "mathy" try some problems from Top Coder or similar programming challenges. I find they're pretty fun, and can be a bit of a puzzle to work out what's the most efficient approach.
I'm not saying that it's "too "mathy"", just that it's commonly trotted out as a good resource to develop programming skills when, IMHO, it's better suited to honing mathematical reasoning. All the single page programs in the world aren't really going to help somebody become better at writing real programs.
Anyway, too many actors, too many variables too many things to come. Just wait and see!