Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police 203
bonch writes "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson."
I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't a defense of Google. It just seems that corporations are never called to task for deplorable behavior unless they forgot to grease the right wheels.
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Although Google is large, and does stand to get some bad publicity from this whole situation, it's not fair to lump them in with the same group of corporations responsible for bribing congressmen over automative safety, health problems related to tobacco, or nuclear power plant contamination.
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who cares about the line, erase the line [blogspot.com].
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
The downfall of the Athenian Empire alone proves that pure democracy (as you propose in your letter) is a bad idea.
Pure democracy can also be called "tyranny of the majority" as the minority voice is drowned-out. Or worse: Crushed. Just ask the Americans that were imprisoned during World War 2, simply because the majority decided they did not like the minority who looked different (i.e. asian). The purpose of a Republic is to have a Supreme Law that protects the minority from such abuses, and which no one, ideally, can remove by a simple 51% vote. The Law of Individual Rights reigns supreme even above the government or its representatives, and can not be revoked.
It isn't a perfect system, but it's certainly much better than a Democracy. Socrates was killed with a simply 51% vote. No trial; no lawyers; nothing to protect his right to speak his mind. The Demos killed him because they didn't like him. That's what a democracy gives you.
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Socrates is a really bad example in this case. Yes, there was a vote. There was also a trial and he did speak his mind. I'm not going to delve into the details of the whole trial and how Socrates acted, but while we, with todays values, may think he was unfairly handled, he very much caused his death sentence himself.
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The downfall of the Athenian Empire alone proves that pure democracy (as you propose in your letter) is a bad idea.
Uh, no. Athens was a republic or oligarchy depending on who you talked to, NOT a pure democracy. In order to have a vote you had to be a white male landowner. Giving the vote to the ostensibly most enlightenedly self-interested people didn't work there any more than it's working now (where only the corporations truly have a vote, especially Big Media, who decides which candidates the public will take seriously.)
WWII was started by the Germans? (Score:2)
World War 2, simply because the majority decided they did not like the minority who looked different (i.e. asian).
Dude, Krauts hate it when you call them Asians.
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The Demos killed him because they didn't like him
To be fair, Socrates spent most of his life drunk, having intercrotial "sex" with young boys, and publically humiliating anyone that could overlook his grotesque features. Plato was the philosophical and literary genius, while by all reports, Socrates was an unmittigated asshole.
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>I suppose you find it easier to just let government corruption continue unabated.
Strawman argument. I never said that, but I'd still rather have the protections given to me by the current Law of the Republic (rights to free speech, trial, privacy, etc) then to have a Democracy where my voice would be drowned-out by a 51% majority of uneducated boobs that would lock me up simply because I'm gay. Or black. Or asian. Or atheist. Or anti-War on Terror. Or whatever.
As for the problems we face today, most would disappear if we followed the 9th and 10th Amendments instead of ignoring them. No more bailouts of AIG, or forced purchasing of hospital insurance I don't want, or war on (some) drugs, or giving "stimulus money" to General Motors, and so on. Congress is forbidden, by the tenth, to do those things.
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right now your voice is being drowned-out by a minority with money.
I don't know, I don't think the godless, gay, black Asian pacifist community is very politically active to begin with.
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Cool, you want me to vote for Canadiate A? Give me 300 dollars.
*Walks into voting booth, and marks Candidate Bs name.*
Alright I voted for him, wheres my money?
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We don't have a 'democracy' in the US. Never have. Wasn't designed as one, won't function as one. We're supposed to have a representative Republic whose powers are consciously hobbled by power sharing among three branches of government.
The concepts of checks and balances is central to the appropriate function of the US Federal government. It works better or worse at times, isn't perfect
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>>>"Voting Exam"
We had these in the US (mostly in the Eastern member states). They lasted about fifty years until the Supreme Court declared them illegal and nulled them.
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"Corporations shall not donate money to candidates," seems like a simple enough law. And already-existing laws only allow $2000 per person to be donated, in order to avoid undue influence by any one man. So I don't know why this hasn't been fixed, unless it's because the politicians like to keep the current corrupt system.
They should also revoke those laws that forbid any other party from being on the ballot except Republican and Democrat. Now that we have electronic ballots, there's no reason why we can
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Where do we have laws like this?
I've lived in nine different states, and none of them restricted the ballots to Republican and Democrat.
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They don't explicitly restrict the ballots to R and D, but most states have laws making it very difficult for third party politicians to get on the ballot. For instance, they will require an obscene number of signatures for parties that did not get a certain percentage of the vote in the previous election. In Pennsylvania, the courts routinely kick third parties off the ballot for "fraudulent signatures." A few years back Nader got kicked off the ballot and *fined* for a few dozen fraudulent signatures..
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>ballots to Republican and Democrat.
In my state if you are a third party, like Libertarian or Communist or Constitutionalist or Green, you must either win 10% of the previous vote or collect signatures from 5% of the population. Since the standard is set so high, the ballot is effectively banned to anybody but the R and D parties. It's a way for them to maintain their control.
Ironically if the R or D parties don't meet these standards (don't get 10% of the vote, or 5% of signatures), it doesn't matter. They are automatically added.
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Which state is that? I'd like to know so I can avoid ever moving there.
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>>>Banana Republicistan
Try Socializing..... uh... I mean that is..... what we have to do is..... redistribute the wealth in Democrat-dominated Maryland. (Approximately 70% of the seats are held by the D's.) Maryland is a pretty nice state, so long as you avoid slum areas.
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO this all boils down to various Governments wanting to maintain their MONOPOLY on the right to spy. Take the example of Britain where Google got in trouble because their CameraCar caught somebody's wash hanging outside. First off Google did nothing wrong - if you have your undies in view of the front street, then you're just plain stupid. Second you have no right to forbid Google or Me or anybody else from photographing it.
But the UK government decided otherwise, ordered google to erase the undies image, and fined them. Meanwhile that same UK government has cameras installed on every fucking street that are capturing everything from Undies hanging in front yards to... well, fucking.
But that's okay. It's okay for the Government to maintain its Monopoly to spy on us.
Google and other private photographers get slapped down; but the government invades our privacy every day.
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The lady that sued Google was in Japan, it was probably because the UK press reported on that you remembered it wrongly.
The whole thing with streetview privacy violation thing is media hype. If you're doing things which can be seen in public, you have a very slight chance that somebody will be capturing it on camera. This something everybody have to accept when being in public view. There's a reason why people don't have sex in their front lawns. If you're transmitting data in the clear on unlicensed freque
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Where exactly does the dividing line between "spends millions on lobbying and campaign contributions" and "bribes politicians outright" get drawn?
Which line?
Campaign contributions by corporations are legalized bribing, nothing else. It is a clear violation of the basic principles of democracy that entities that have no votes can leverage influence on the political process.
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Every now and then, they are brought to justice even though they did.
It's not that it used to be any better. Power, influence and money have always managed to put themselves above the law, I doubt you'll find a period in human history where this wasn't so, or where common folks didn't dream of better times when it would not.
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Every smartphone with a WIFI finder is guilty of the same crime.
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Every smartphone with a WIFI finder is guilty of the same crime.
Or every Android device so long as you have WIFI and wireless location detected enabled. Every Android device is potentially a WIFI finder. Furthermore, some Android applications actively and periodically turn your WIFI on/off so as to collect and transmit this information to third parties. Shop Savvy is one such application. The Locale application doesn't turn WIFI on/off of its own, but it also reports applications, application activity, WIFI proximity, and geographic information back to third parties.
Before someone gives the reductionist answer (Score:4, Insightful)
that all Giggle was doing was recording aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum that was hitting their equipment:
What's the limit to that?
Is it also OK to record faint sound waves emitted from a given StreetView address?
Is it also OK to record GSM cell phone transmissions (recently shown vulnerable to cracking)?
Is it also OK to set up a listening device to log the electromagnetic signature emitted by monitors and keyboards, and then associate that with a given StreetView address in your database?
Would it also be OK to use a high-power lens to record photons leaking beyond a window that you thought you had pulled the curtain on?
Would it also be OK to record infrared heat signatures of building occupants walking around or doing whatever?
And if a "normal" person (not a corporation with cute logo) did all this, wouldn't he be arrested for stalking?
Re:Before someone gives the reductionist answer (Score:4, Insightful)
A reasonable limit might be to disallow recording of any sound (or sight) that is not detectable by human ears/eyes.
So if the sound is below, say, 10 dB then it would be forbidden by private persons/companies to record it. Or if the EM captured is below 50 lux(?) that too would be forbidden to record. That would stop them from using super-sensitive equipment to hear conversations in the kitchen, or take a peak into darkened bedrooms.
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A reasonable limit might be to disallow recording of any sound (or sight) that is not detectable by human ears/eyes.
So, telephoto lenses should be illegal? Directional microphones? How would you record a speech in a public place?
I recommend you watch a classic film from the 1960s, "Blowup" by Michelangelo Antonioni where a photographer unknowingly takes a picture of a murder in a public park. Even simple equipment may capture sounds and sights that humans wouldn't detect.
The rule should be expect no privacy in public places. And in private places be discreet. If the neighbors can hear your wife screaming while you have s
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that all Giggle was doing was recording aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum that was hitting their equipment:
What's the limit to that?
The limit is the expectation of privacy. I do not expect my 200ft range non encrypted WiFi to be private. I do not expect the SSID & MAC broadcasts of my router to be private. Turn on your wifi, view available networks. See any that arn't yours? Guess what? You just did EXACTLY what Google has done -- except that Google logged the WiFi data from all over the world. I don't expect sound, light and/or RF waves that can be clearly discerned from more than 200ft away from my house to be private -- T
damn str8! (Score:2)
the fcc regs give everyone to right to receive all e/m on the public airwaves...
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... I'm just wondering wtf Giggle is
What gives you the right to send signals... (Score:2)
If you are going to blast the signal to me I have every right to listen/decode/see what you are bombarding my property with 24/7.
If you don't want people to li
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Wardriving is one thing. Industrial strength wardriving is another.
Or do you think going fishing with your buddies on the weekend is the same thing as trawling nets across the Florida Keys?
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Wardriving is one thing. Industrial strength wardriving is another.
Or do you think going fishing with your buddies on the weekend is the same thing as trawling nets across the Florida Keys?
Whispering is one thing. Shouting is another.
Or do you think that shouting at your buddies loud enough to be heard in the next house over has the same expectation of privacy as whispering behind closed doors?
Wifi is shouting. Ethernet is not.
Shouting in a made up language that only you and your buddies understand gives you a degree of secrecy, but when doing so you must realize that everyone within earshot can still hear you. Additionally, if you begin the made up language sentences with a common address
Encryption broken? (Score:3, Informative)
“We succeeded in breaking the encryption behind the hard drives, and confirmed that it contained personal e-mails and text messages of people using the Wi-Fi networks,” said a [Korean] police official.
I was however assuming
1. that in such case Google would have been legally forced to provide the encryption key,
2. and anyway, that a HD encrypted by Google wouldn't be so (apparently) easy to break.
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They probably doubled the security by using ROT26!
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That was my first thought as well. Given how much most people know about encryption though, I'd be willing to bet that it wasn't even encrypted. There was probably some aspect of the data that was encoded in some way and the official(s) who wrote and/or gave the statement just said encryption.
Hang on... (Score:3)
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, but are unsure as of yet who that might be,” said a police official.
1. first whoever ordered and whoever developed are highly probable two different persons.Did both of them broke the SK law?
2. why they go after the "whoever ordered and developed" and not after "whoever used the tools"? Is it in SK customary to go after the person that manufactured the knife used in a stabbing?
3. the way I know, Google used some open-source components in putting the "tool" together. Is the original author of these components equally guilty?
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It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information...
I wouldn't raise the question if the wording would allow me. Let me quote again the TFA, with a bit of emphasis.
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, ...” said a police official.
Hmmmm... the police... to penalize [princeton.edu] more than 1 person... So, what's going on with the police in SK: investigates, judges and inflicts penalties all together?
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1. first whoever ordered and whoever developed are highly probable two different persons.Did both of them broke the SK law?
The "and" inbetween does indicate that, yes.
2. why they go after the "whoever ordered and developed" and not after "whoever used the tools"? Is it in SK customary to go after the person that manufactured the knife used in a stabbing?
Because that would mean going after the minimum-wage drones who rode in the streetview cars. That's not the people you want to punish for this.
3. the way I know, Google used some open-source components in putting the "tool" together. Is the original author of these components equally guilty?
Non sequitor. Nowhere does it say anything like that, or that they'd go after the manufacturers of the car, or the antennas, cameras, whatever.
Your trying to throw up strawman here to cloud the fact that as far as government reactions go, this one is actually a pretty good one.
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Not after individuals that got nothing to gain from the actions: I don't see how the developer (that made a honest mistake to capture more than necessary) and the manager (that didn't take enough care to double check the tools) can be more responsible than the "minimum-wage drones": I argue that none of them had something to gain from the excessive WiFi traffic collection (do you know otherwise?)
If you go after
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My dear latin speaking friend: if the law was broken by Google, you go after Google as a company.
Companies can not shield individuals from all responsibility, and that is a good thing. A crime is still a crime even if committed it wearing your business suit and a tie. Going after the company is certainly well and good, but we all know they would pay any reasonable fee out of the cookie jar.
If you go after individuals in this case, why not go after all the individuals that were part of the actions violating the laws? (since when not knowing that you break the law is a defence?)
Sure, but if you have to decide on some place to start, I think they could've chosen worse.
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I would submit that the makers of the tool are also the wrong people to punish.
Why not let them have their investigation to determine that? If the tool was made with the express purpose of committing a crime, then the tool maker can be liable.
Although, this sure doesn't warrant punishment in my book.
But your book doesn't matter, the book of law does. ;-)
Hard drive encryption broken? (Score:3)
"We succeeded in breaking the encryption behind the hard drives"
Wait, what? All of the solutions I know of to encrypt hard drives at block or filesystem level are prety well implemented. You can't just brute force them. So either:
[1] What the hell is up with these bullshit terror-inspiring names anyway? It sounds like a bunch of kids getting together on the playground and trying to think of the most kick-ass name for their dodgeball team.
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methematicians who can factor large primes in their sleep.
I'm curious to know if this was a typo or not.
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I'm curious to know if this was a typo or not.
It was, but now that you mention it, I wonder if any studies were ever conducted on meth as an aid to prime factoring. No? Well, how do they know, then?!
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I'm curious to know if this was a typo or not.
It was, but now that you mention it, I wonder if any studies were ever conducted on meth as an aid to prime factoring. No? Well, how do they know, then?!
Well, anecdotally, Paul Erdös was on meth constantly for the last 25 years of his life - and he was the most prolific mathematician of all time... So I wonder how Gauss or Euler would have fared on amphetamines...
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A postit note, pen and a rather older person who looked about 20-30 yo in May 1980 in the basement can do wonders with locals ie
please cooperate cryptanalysis.
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You break the encryption on hard drives in the simplest manner, that is to say, break the person on the other side of it. Where's that xkcd reference when you need it...
Broke the encryption (Score:2)
Google uses encryption that can be broken? WTF?
since google is in bed with the NSA (Score:2)
Encryption standards? (Score:2)
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Maybe the reporters are stupid and there either was no encryption, or Google was forced to hand over the keys.
Or maybe South Korea outlawed strong encryption, but I haven't read about that anywhere.
Re:Encryption standards? (Score:4, Interesting)
I RTFA, and the "breaking the encryption" was a direct quote from the police. So it's not the reporters being stupid.
However, it's quite possibly the police lying to sound more badass.
Full of shit (Score:2)
A large part of what you state is, for want of an elegant and non-insulting term to come to mind, bullshit.
1) Slander is oral defamation. Libel is written defamation.
2) Both apply only to persons. It is impossible to slander a nation or its government. It may be possible to slander corporations, due to connivance between governments and corporations whereby corporations are legislated to have many of the qualities and rights of a person. This is known as the "corporate shield," and is a powerful protect
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Bollocks. This is Google, not Facebook.
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Hi. I'm a software engineer. A few months ago, I dumped a few million social security numbers to a log file. It sure is a good thing I turned off that logging before I switched projects.... Of course, it was turned on for five days until that happened, and nobody realized that SSNs were part of that log.
Life with data is difficult. Fields of "arbitrary data" are logged, sometimes publicly. There's nothing any reasonable person or company can do to stop it. The best they can hope for is that they've hired et
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Hi, can you confirm that you reported your mistake to your employers and that your employers reported their mistake to anyone affected by your action?
I'm sure you'll come round with "but all the logs and their backups and so on were wiped!" - but since you made the mistake of logging the information in the first place, how can I trust that you didn't also make a mistake when wiping?
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It doesn't matter if I did or not (though I did), because in my company had contracts authorizing us to use the data however we wanted. I'm fairly sure we could run the SSNs across a 6-foot-tall marquee in the office and been legally clear, as long as no visitors were in the office.
All the logs were stored on encrypted volumes anyway, in known locations. Since the information never (because of preexisting security) left the company, no reporting was needed. Then there's the time where my team intentionally
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It doesn't matter if I did or not (though I did), because in my company had contracts authorizing us to use the data however we wanted.
1. "Only following contract/orders" is no excuse, as every single professional organisation will tell you;
2. SSNs/local equivalents are subject to regulation in many jurisdictions. The law trumps your contract.
All the logs were stored on encrypted volumes anyway, in known locations. Since the information never (because of preexisting security) left the company, no reporting was needed.
I see. So I'm supposed to trust your competence here even though you're demonstrably incompetent when it comes to the simpler task of correct logging.
The correct procedure is to issue a notice to anyone whose data you are handling of: (i) what you did wrong; (ii) what you believe the impact was and wh
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Personally I am not a huge fan of gargantuan multinational corporations, so if Google loses billions over this it wouldn't really bother me. But judging from the thoughts of people I know who actually work at Google (as opposed to someone whose handle is FuckingNickName), it's unlikely that the engineer who wrote the code was intentionally violating any laws. Even if he meant to collect the data, he probably didn't realize the implications of doing so.
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so if Google loses billions over this it wouldn't really bother me.
Oh but it might. I'm sure it's arguable by people in power that Google has become too big to fail. The economic prosperity of Google accounts for a lot of jobs that are still left this side of the Pacific. If these "slip ups" continue, it will get to a point that they deviate from their mission and end up like every other corporation before them.
I thought they were supposed to be better than that?
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Google have provided fuller explanations [blogspot.com] of what happened.
Is that an independent audit by someone with a recognised reputation, or the accused party giving its side of the story and your requiring us to beg the question?
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It was a pretty obvious accident, if you understood the technical explanation of what happened. The problem is, if you don't, it sounds like something that couldn't possibly be an accident. The crux of the matter is this:
They were gathering data on purpose. This was NOT the data they were trying to gather. They were trying to gather WiFi SSIDs for geolocation purposes. Unfortunately, the code was simply sloppy. It needed the first X bytes of the packet (which contain the SSID and ended up getting the
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I'm sorry, what? If I was trying to record SSIDs, I'd read the packet containing the SSID then extract and log the SSID. If I was trying to record the first X+64 bytes then I'd record the first X+64 bytes.
And if I wasn't Google and couldn't afford to employ a programmer with any training or experience whatever, who for whatever reason confused himself to the point that "log the SSID" is interpreted as "log the first n bytes of the packet", it'd've been caught in code review.
And if it wasn't caught in code r
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If you were writing the code from scratch for a single purpose maybe. If you were leveraging existing code that may, incidentally to your requirements, do other things you may not worry about them too much as long as it achieves, at minimum, what yo
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The software used here was configurable as to whether it logs the data frame (defaulting to capture).
So the kid just out of vocational college might forget to review a configuration file when running some software on his home laptop. The biggest data miner in the world with a challenging barrier to employment and multiple code reviews will not make this sort of oversight.
Uncaught bugs happen during software development and deployment all the time
One single review of the logged data would have caught this. Since it would be absurd to assume that Google didn't perform any reviews of logged data (even summary information on amount logged) during the exercise, we must assume that it w
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You're making a extremely dangerous assumption here in implying guilt for a crime that doesn't exist. You need to have a reasonable expectation of privacy to get protection from privacy law. It would be extremely difficult to argue that you can reasonably expect privacy when you are sending data in the clear on unencrypted WIFI networks. No doubt that in court, this will be thrown out after a bit of grandstanding from the prosecution.
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The contentious act is recording personal data relating to millions of people across the world without implied or express permission from those people.
It is not reasonable for Google to say, "They couldn't reasonably expect privacy!" Instead, the onus is on Google to explain how WiFi users gave Google permission to collect this data.
Having the ability to eavesdrop is not receiving permission to eavesdrop.
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"geolocation purposes" was a nice motive, yes they may have been 'simply sloppy", but they did know it was "a privacy issue".
Google just hoped laws would bend in some digital wifi gold rush and google would have a full set of early, ad/wealth maps of wifi geolocation in one early easy, pass.
A "half-assed job" would be a few cars/vans in some
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>>>you don't have a right to record it on a grand scale just because you can eavesdrop it.
Sorry bud but if your daughter strolls across your front yard completely nude or almost-nude bikini, first I will laugh, then I will record it. You don't have a right to privacy when your broadcasting your business within sight of my eyes or ears. As has been said many times, you don't have a right to free speech on a private website or forum. Neither do you have a right to privacy when dealing with a priv
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And that's a strawman. We're discussing whether (radio, sound) waves which can be picked up with suitably advanced tech should be recorded, not whether the behaviour of my eyes can be replicated.
For example, am I allowed to sit outside your house with an infrared camera and sensitive microphone to capture and broadcast your daughter masturbating in the shower?
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>>>And that's a strawman.
No it isn't. YOU'RE the guy who brought-up the recording of somebody's daughter ("upload video of your daughter on the toilet"), and I responded to that by saying, IF she's doing it in the front yard then yes a guy with a camera has every right to record it. There is no expectation of privacy in a public view.
Now INSIDE your house, then yes said "daughter" has a right to privacy. And I addressed that in a separate post: "A reasonable limit might be to disallow recording
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"On the toilet" is a British English version of "in the bathroom". I could have offered "in the loo", "on the bog", "dropping the kids off at the station", etc. In the 21st century, that means inside your house. And if Google can collect something leaking from your house around 100mm then I can record leaks of leaks between 1 and 350um.
But I'm glad we agree that any waves not detectable by human ears/eyes should not be recorded without permission.
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Being obnoxious doesn't make you right. Privacy violations requires that the victim have reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place. The courts usually decide reasonableness using a objective test (while negligence, for example, can be either objective or subjective). This is usually done by hypothesizing the stance of a "reasonable man" (or woman) with understanding of the subject, but not a specialist. In this case, it means that they should understand the fundamentals of how the apparatus they
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t. Privacy violations requires that the victim have reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place.
On the contrary, privacy should be default in a civilised nation. If you want to process personal data then you should have permission. The EU recognises this with the principles behind various member states' data protection laws.
You can argue that there are times permission is given implicitly: for example, if you are in the background of a photograph taken in a public park. "Some data was leaking through the house walls and I can afford equipment to receive it," isn't giving permission. And encryption is
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Ironic then that you are the one coming across as being so full of himself, claiming some insight into subtle intent that us poor idiots can't divine. You seem transfixed on "stupidity". I think it makes more sense to consider fallibility as an inherently human trait, present no ma
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Ironic then that you are the one coming across as being so full of himself, claiming some insight into subtle intent that us poor idiots can't divine.
You are asserting that it must be Google's stupidity. I am suggesting that it's better to be humble about your own abilities (e.g. to discern intent) while not assuming others are stupid.
I don't know precisely why Google did it, but I think it is the height of egomania to accuse them of gross negligence.
I think it makes more sense to consider fallibility as an inherently human trait, present no matter how "high up" people may be in a "large organisation".
This isn't an oversight of something subtle or complex corporate machinery repressing glorious logic. This is the professional fencer running around the streets waving his foil around and expressing shock t
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Talk about a double standard.
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Well, yes, you can find out some of what people across the world are doing with their own wireless networks, which is not the same as finding out what they're doing on the Internet while they use Google services or services supported by Google.
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More likely, in that case, is that Google just provided them the keys, but they thought it sounded cooler to say they "broke" the encryption.
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Re:The South Korean Government is no fan of Google (Score:4, Informative)
1. Serious instances of unfounded slandering against various people, especially celebrities.but not restricted to them. The aim is to encourage people to behave responsibly on the internet by tieing what they post or upload back to the individual, beyond that the SK government doesn't give a rat's arse what you do online or which sites you go to.
Case in point being, to continue with your example, that Google (or more specifically Youtube) was required either to have a system to point back to the real-person or alternatively restrict the ability to post or upload potentially slanderous material. Google chose the latter and it's worthy of note that people can do everything else, eg. view videos.
Basically it's the side effect of having the highest rate of internet participation in the world
2. Many government functions that in real-life require authentication are fully online. This is probably beyond the experience of most people on slashdot, but you can do all sorts of personal activities online (eg. taxation, etc) and by definition you can't take people at their word when talking about those. Therefore real-name identification is required there also, particularly as there's rampant attempts at ID theft from china for various reasons.
Ironically your post is a perfect example of scenario 1, ie. malicious slandering by people hiding behind internet anonymity, in the manner in which you deliberately twist the SK's request and google's actions with unsubstantiated additions like:
- It's no secret that the South Korean government isn't overly fond of Google
Hardly, the government has only required that google comply with the laws that were created to address the previously listed comments. Beyond that Google has been free to operate as it sees fit
We're not talking about china and it's so-called golden shield (or shower to be more accurate).
- Google chose to block posts to YouTube from Korea
No, google chose to remove the functionality to post without an account liked to a real person. To quote from the article:
YouTube has decided to restrict its video upload and comment functions in South Korea.” It also stated, “Because there is no upload function, users won’t be required to confirm their identification.”
Note that viewing videos is not restricted at all and uploads/comments to sites that are linked to a real-person are unrestricted beyond the uploader being aware that they should be sociable in their behaviour.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google simply didn't feel it cost effective to create complex functionality that would be country specific (with all the possibilities that different countries would then start asking for their own items) so it was easier to simply remove rather than add.
- while encouraging those users to change their country preference to somewhere else
Where exactly did they say that?
It's fair to say that your post is a perfect example of what the law is designed to address, slanderers hiding behind anonymity to post all sorts of lies and half-truths. We'd all like to think that this type of people don't exist, but unfortunately some people only feel better by putting others down, one only has to look a
Re: (Score:2)
10% is a very large proportion of people victimised by cowards .. people need to sit up and take notice.
Then don't give the cowards credit. I would guess that 99% of those were just trolls that would not do anything in real life, and like any other trolls ignoring them is the smartest option. If people can't learn how to deal with that then maybe offing themselves was the better choice.
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Wow. I knew we had Microsoft shills, and China shills, but shills for South Korea?
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There are lots of shills for the USA - they call themselves "patriots" and claim to support "freedom".
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There probably are shills for the US government as well, what's your point?
Of course, a lot of non-shills claim to support "freedom" as well. I certainly do. And I don't think the shills would know freedom if it bit them in the ass. For instance, a shill would claim that "freedom" means the government allows anyone of "good moral character" a license to put things on the Internet under their verified ide
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Parent is insightful and should be mod'ed up. Parent's respondent seems a bit off the wall.