Posts by JohnFen 5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"One population that is currently escaping the surveillance state are those people not carrying personal tracking devices, err, smart phones."
No, those people are not currently escaping the surveillance state. They have reduced their attack surface, which is good, but are still subject to quite a lot of surveillance.
"all the did that someone else couldn't do was to get a lawyer to write a letter for him for free."
This. And in the US, if all you need is a stern letter bearing a lawyer's letterhead, this can be done cheaply enough that pretty much anyone can afford it. If there's a legal assistance service in your area, this might even be as cheap as free.
If you need to go to court, of course, then you're talking big bucks.
I doubt it. I suspect the relevant distinction is who owns the device in question. If you appear on a surveillance camera that isn't yours, there is no fifth amendment issue (you aren't being asked to incriminate yourself), and there is no fourth amendment issue (the camera isn't your property).
Also, in regards to the fifth amendment, the prohibition is against forcing you to unlock it, not against obtaining the footage. If your phone isn't locked, then this ruling doesn't apply. This ruling wouldn't apply to third party cameras for the exact same reason -- you aren't being asked to unlock it.
"contractual agreements between the carrier and MVNO may prevent them from monetizing this information."
Maybe, but I have no visibility into what's in the contract between a carrier and a given MVNO, so that's something that can't affect my decision-making.
Also, even if I did have such visibility, I'm far from confident that the carrier would actually adhere to such contractual terms. Contractual protections aren't nothing, but they also aren't terribly reassuring.
"Last time I used CC somewhiles ago they had explicit provisions in their TOS saying that they do not collect location metadata unless you opt in"
But that provision says nothing about whether or not the carrier they're using is engaging in such collection.
"The only solution to not having private and tracking information not meander about is to never let it out."
And the only way to do that is to stop using a cell phone. Knowing where you are is an unavoidable part of being able to deliver cell service to you. Not to mention that (at least in the US), the cell companies are legally required to be able to geolocate you with a fair bit of precision.
"we have decided to eliminate all location aggregation services – even those with clear consumer benefits"
This makes me wonder which of those services they consider having "clear consumer benefits". It's location-based advertising, isn't it?
"Verizon claimed that location data was only sold if subscribers had explicitly agreed to it"
And by "explicitly agreed to it", do they mean that it was buried in the lengthy legalese called "terms of service" that users clicked an "I agree" button for?
"AT&T has no reason to believe that there are other instances of unauthorized access to AT&T customer location data,"
Yeah, but what about access that they authorized?
"there has been no response from Pai"
No response is needed. We already know what he'll do about it: his best to protect the carrier's ability to keep on as they always have been.
EULAs are contracts, nothing more. "Legally binding" merely means that they are legal contracts. None of that makes them laws.
"450 windows machines was shut down for 3 days, losing quite a bit of money, over a legally-enforced BSA inspection"
That has nothing to do with EULAs. Those actions are taken when the BSA thinks that they can make a case that copyright infringement has been happening. That's an entirely different kettle of fish from EULAs.
Yes, Devuan is the better solution, but Debian does provide shims that you can use to allow SystemD-dependent applications to run without SystemD being present. I have two such systems running right now (I haven't had the time to migrate them to a non-Debian distro yet).
"once you have the basics nailed it's loads better that init scripts"
I am pretty good at working with SystemD now, and I disagree.
"it's definitely not the rocket science"
That's true. My objection to it isn't the complexity in terms of using it. My objection is partly the complexity of its implementation, and mostly the fact that it does far, far more than it should in terms of replacing critical system components.
"For the past 20+ years my motto is "career for life - jobs come and go"."
Yes, this has been true for my entire career (spanning about 30 years now). It took me about 20 years to realize how true this was, and to realize that it's OK to quite a position that's making me unhappy. There's always another job.
"If you're doing the same job on the same product, new skills are of no use to you"
My mind simply cannot wrap around this statement. Learning new skills is essential whether or not you'll use them in you day job. It's not necessarily about the skills themselves, it's also about maintaining the ability to be a creative problem-solver. When you learn a new skill/language/technology, you are also learning things that make you better in employing the skills you already have.
The last time I worked for a Fortune 500 tech company (one that gets name-checked frequently here), they had a policy in place of laying off 5% of their workforce every year. The people were selected to be fired by upper management -- in-the-trench managers (the ones who actually know which workers are gold and which ones are lead) were not part of the decision-making and had zero say.
It didn't escape anyone's notice that the people fired were mostly the most experienced (and thus expensive) engineers. Everyone dreaded layoff day because it meant that, every year, there was a substantial loss of product knowledge and available skill, and it made life hell for those who remained while everyone scrambled to overcome the loss.
"If you fire people with outdated skills, you're likely to fire a lot of old people."
Maybe. But in my experience, age is not a good predictor of whether or not someone's skillset is up to date. Everyone in the industry (and particularly those who've been in the industry for a long time) with half a brain knows that if you aren't constantly updating your skillset, you become obsolete very quickly. Age has nothing to do with it.
"Older long term workers cost more than newbies"
That depends on how you're measuring. Per hour, yes, more experienced engineers are more expensive. However, if you measure the development costs in terms of work units, more experienced workers tend to be less expensive, because they tend to produce higher quality work in less time.
3 years is too short to be a test of what concerns me. I'm more interested in timeframes on the order of a decade or so.
But, really, life span is of less interest to me than failure mode. Can you tell when an SSD is about to die? If it dies before you can replace it, can you still engage in data recovery? Those are the issues that I'm most interested in.
"Pluck up the courage and try some SSDs."
I might, the next time I need a new disk. But I'm not going to replace serviceable platters with SSDs without a reason, and the performance increase is not something that I find incredibly compelling.
Also, I do have one test machine running a small SSD that I inherited. We'll see how that plays out over the long term.
I certainly back up frequently, and using SSDs won't change that. But backups are for disaster recovery (it's a pain in the ass to restore from backups), and I strongly prefer to avoid that disaster in the first place. Having lots of warning that a drive is going to fail is a huge part of letting me do that, as I can image the drive immediately.
SSDs still make me too nervous to actually use them. The thing that spooks me is that I've heard too many tales of them dying without warning.
Say want you want about spinning platters, but they're very reliable over the long term (my impression is that they live much longer than SSDs), they are likely to start giving you lots of warning before they actually die, and even after they die, you're very likely to be able to recover most of the data that was on them.
Google is stealing data about me, my online activities, my use of credit/debit/affinity cards in the real world, and my physical location (including my movements inside a single store for many of those stores that spy on their customers using WiFi/Bluetooth beacons). It's not a great leap to assume that if they're OK with doing that, they're OK with stealing everything else they can get their grubby paws on as well.
I'm holding at Android 5.0.1, but I'm running rooted (which certainly impacts this).
All data that apps save get saved on my SD card, aside from some apps that don't play well with SD -- in those cases, their config files and such typically have to remain on the internal store.
By "all data" I mean just that. Photos I take, anything I download, music, video, etc. I also store files directly to it through mounting on my desktop machine, through using SCP, and using an Android file manager.
I don't tend to install apps on the SD card because I swap SD cards too often for that to be convenient.
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