I'd rather have commercial speech be confined to identifiable areas of the page, than have the content of a "news story" actually be commercially motivated.
Sponsored content is OK if I'm told in advance that it is. It's extremely deceitful and disingenuous to suggest that ad blocking justifies these sorts of shady journalistic practices.
I just read a part of the text, eventually started searching for the GPS keyword. couldn't find the connection between the title and the article other that the ad for a book thing.
It's worth pointing out that modern phones have at least a half dozen other means to determine your location. Not all methods require the phone to participate. Here's a few off the top.
* CGI/CGI-TA/UTDOA via the cell network
* bluetooth discovery
* wifi AP's
* audio via both mic and speaker, possibly ultrasonic: listen and emit to other devices in environment
* NFC
* magnetic field
If you don't like this, you should turn it off and keep it in a metal box.
Or leave it at home. I did this for many years. It works and is about as inconvenient as using a metal box. (Though I have to admit that surfing while commuting is great ..)
I figure the Man knows where I work already. I spend hours telling him about it on my taxes. It really doesn't give out a ton of new information if you commute with a mobile. Unless you speed, I guess.
I see the "if you don't like it, don't use it" suggestion quite a bit. Can't we advocate for better public understanding of, and decentralization of, location services while also acknowledging that the best way right now is to leave it in a metal box turned off? The concepts of privacy and location services are at odds with one another, but reducing it to "love it or leave it" leaves the potential middle ground of preserving some privacy while reaping the benefits of location-aware information unexplored.
The general public thinks Edward Snowden is a traitor who should be hanged. How exactly are you planning on getting them onboard this cause?
Hey guys - this is going to make a bunch of your apps work poorly or not at all, but it protects you from something you aren't informed enough or smart enough to be scared of in the first place. Please support me?
Oh, and by the way, it'll make your phone cost more money.
I'm not sure that what people believe about Snowden is inextricably tied to people's perception of location tracking. In fact, I speculate that there are probably some people who both think Snowden is a traitor and think that corporations or the government shouldn't be location tracking them. (That's ignoring the futility that is speaking in broad strokes about "the general public".)
Furthermore, I am not sure that any of those are necessarily a given. I'm not advocating for breaking apps or an abrupt shift to no location services, I'm not dismissing your average end-user's needs/desires or insulting their intelligence. I'm hypothesizing that there might be ways to get non-GPS location services out of the hands of a few big players. It theoretically wouldn't make your phone cost more money, but it might take the time-money-effort of people who build the systems (maybe open-source?). I'm trying to appeal to the people who build the systems and brainstorm ways to do that, not really rally the end-users to this particular cause.
>I'm trying to appeal to the people who build the systems and brainstorm ways to do that, not really rally the end-users to this particular cause.
The people that "build the systems" are paid for by those corporations who make money by tracking you. Who exactly do you think is going to:
A. Fund this new decentralized non-tracking utopia.
B. Convince users already embedded in existing systems to switch to something less functional in order to not be tracked?
EVERY project that's tried what you're describing has failed miserably because end-users just don't care. Can you cite even ONE example of a competing system that has focused on privacy that has garnered what can be considered even a modicum of success against an already entrenched player?
Fair points. Someone has to "pay", whether through effort or money, for the new systems to garner traction. I agree that it is hard to see where the momentum could or would come from, and no I cannot name an instance where something has garnered significant traction. Some of the alternative android location services are at least functioning for technical users. (https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_UnifiedNlp)
We return to my issue: does it being difficult and yet to be achieved mean that the people that are aware of potential drawbacks of the status quo should lay down and give up? That seems to be your implication.
No, my implication is it's (almost) an all-or nothing game. What good does it do me if out of all my friends and family, I'm the only one not using the popular services that track?
So... the 2 hours a day I'm not with a family member or coworker or friend I can't be tracked? And to do so I literally have to disable everything on my phone manually (no more bluetooth streaming in the car, manually turn off the wifi on my phone every time I leave the house, somehow magically prevent the cell towers from tracking me).
If you cannot get the general populous to agree and actively vote for privacy, you're fighting a battle that's already been lost.
Then again, he didn't work for the German government. I don't doubt that Germans have a different view on such issues than USians, I'm just saying it would be surprising if they cared enough about a US whistleblower to want Snowden killed.
> Then again, he didn't work for the German government.
As I outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272352 in Germany many people don't consider the government as "us", but as "them" (those who rule "us"). So I don't believe that there would be large hatred in the German population (in opposite to the politicians) if Snowden betrayed the German government instead.
So where's your public outcry to give him asylum? Sorry, what you claim to be the public perception, and the actions of your populace are completely misaligned. If the two prevailing mindsets were he's a hero and I don't care, then the he's a hero would be making a lot more noise, and the "I don't care" would probably give them half-hearted support just because they don't have a horse in the race and could therefore be easily convinced.
> So where's your public outcry to give him asylum?
So where's the public outcry to jail the traitor? Just live with it, Germany's mileage varies drastically from the US, and the main reason is experience with the Nazis and the GDR. We know something you absolutely do not, and the world us asking Germany to learn from it, instead of the other way around, at its own peril.
Uhm, that was referring to Germany. I know that about the US, it's pretty hard to avoid. But anyway, since what we are telling you about our first-hand experiences with the people we talk to, regularly or occasionally, is dismissed with
> If the two prevailing mindsets were he's a hero and I don't care, then the he's a hero would be making a lot more noise, and the "I don't care" would probably give them half-hearted support just because they don't have a horse in the race and could therefore be easily convinced.
Then what are the prevailing mindsets in Germany? And how much more noise would people be making, what is a "lot"? Can you quantify it? Or are you just making up stuff that sounds reasonable to you, which has no connection with the truth on the ground here?
> And how much more noise would people be making, what is a "lot"?
At the heyday of the Snowden revelations there was a large outcry.
When talking about opinions in Germany one always has to distinguish between the opinion of the citizens and the opinion of the government (these are often very different). Of course the German government has a very USA-bootlicking opinion about the Snowden question.
The fact that in Germany there (mostly) is free speech does not imply that the government is interested in your opinion. Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.
I know, and it matches my experience. But the user tw04 seems to disagree with more than flimsy reasoning.
> Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.
I wish I could find it now, but Sebastian Haffner mentioned this in one of his books... the German tendency to consider politics as something dirty the private person better keep out of, while both despising and admiring those nasty politicians. I think that sarcasm is a form of cowardice. The way I see it, either you're a responsible citizen or you're not, politics is way too important to leave it to professional politicians. But that's neither here nor there.. one thing is sure, if I had a cent for every time an American or right-wing European tells me some nonsense about Germany, I could buy HN a pretty stylesheet.
> The way I see it, either you're a responsible citizen or you're not, politics is way too important to leave it to professional politicians.
The whole topic is a lot more complicated. It's rather hard to found a party: 2009 before the parliamentary elections I have been was sometimes at the regular meeting of the at that time new-founded Piratenpartei. Many attendees were paying for the election posters themselves (you can only get aids (Wahlkostenhilfe) when you already got many votes in a previous election - a chicken-and-egg problem) and were (in my opinion) working really hard alongside their regular job.
Also for most parliaments in Germany there is a so-called 5% barrier. That means that if you don't get at least 5% of the votes, you will get no seats in the parliament (except perhaps direct mandates - but for these you need a relative majority of votes in your district, which is even harder - nearly impossible for a new party). The 5% barrier means that you will need a program that attracts many voters.
That's kind of the opposite of what I meant. I say one shouldn't leave fishing to just people with a license, you understand everybody should get a license. The point is that politicians, in a democracy, if anything, should enact what consensus there is of politically active and informed citizenry, so to speak. Not sell their own ideas or even corruption to people who are rather disinterested in many vital areas. If people, every one of them, felt the buck stops with them, and saw absolutely no way to hand over their making up their mind about what the world is like and what should be done, then even just that would create so much pressure on political parties and corporations as to positively mold them. As it is, it's more the other way around, with all the lameness that entails.
> So where's your public outcry to give him asylum?
There were many demands to give him asylum. Here some German articles about this topic (if you want to know what happens in Germany you will not get around understanding articles that are written in German):
The reactions in Germany after the Snowden revelations:
Another article from 2rd of May 2016 on occasion of that there was a live link with Snowden on the re:public. This article [even its headline] nicely brings across the completely different opinion that the German government and many German citizen have in the whole Snowden question:
I think Snowden is smart enough to know that the only place he's safe right now is Moscow, Russia. Even if Germany or any other country offers him asylum, the US machine does not care. They'll find a way to get him, either while enroute, or as soon as he lands.
I live in a country with almost 80 million people and 99% percent of the population (this is optimistic) has never heard of Snowden. The country is Turkey therefore this may sound irrelevant but actually it can suggest that the real source of harm is not the opposing people, but the ignorant.
> Can't we advocate for better public understanding of, and decentralization of, location services...
No. It's a futile effort. There's too much to know about too many things in this world, and of the important things that people should know, this is pretty low on the list. It's up to the professionals (ie. us) to make decisions on behalf of those who can't, don't, and won't be able to understand the ramifications of those decisions (be it because they don't have the time, capability, capacity, or willingness to understand).
> There's too much to know about too many things in this world, and of the important things that people should know, this is pretty low on the list. It's up to the professionals (ie. us) to make decisions on behalf of those who can't ...
Agreed. That also is what government is for, to protect citizens from abuse and dangers, via regulation. Banks and automobile companies can't sell fraudulent or dangerous products to everyday consumers, for example.
I think this is so far beyond what your average professional politician is capable of understanding that it is hopeless. Their only choice is to believe the loudest voice.
The guy does have a point, yet is bring downvoted into oblivion.
Government can play a role in the improvement in the everyday life of it's citizens. As an example, I pay 25 euros/month for 200mbps fibre internet thanks to my government's antitrust laws.
> Their only choice is to believe the loudest voice.
Almost everything politicians - as well as other decision makers from CEOs to investment advisors to you and I - decide is outside their personal expertise. We all retain experts, one way or another, to research and report on the technical details, and our analysis isn't at all limited to the loudest voice.
Governments regulate airplane safety, but the politicians aren't aeronautical engineers and pilots. It doesn't just regulate but operates entire militaries, soup-to-nuts, with incredibly advanced technology, complex situations, and high stakes, yet it is civilians who are in charge (in the U.S. and most advanced countries) - the likely next U.S. Secretary of Defense will be the first ex-military officer since 1951.
Almost everything politicians - as well as other decision makers from CEOs to investment advisors to you and I - decide is outside their personal expertise
That's not the same. It's one thing to have advisors, it's another to be so far out of your league that it's not even debatable nor discussable for you. So you try (ideally) to put people in their best positions to make the best decisions, and hope you have critically thoughtful people. But at some point they don't even know what questions to ask any more.
Military: We have a bunch of super expensive airplanes that nobody wants.
Security: We have a former presidential candidate who though she was "above" security protocol and kept her own email server.
Personal privacy, Finance: Well, you get my point.
These bad decisions come about because the interested parties have access "loudest voice" and can spin the conversation. Such has always been the case, but now we are getting to an age where a preponderance of decisions require some sort of technical understanding.
I'm certain sometime in our past the leaders went from being the ones who could yell the scariest to the ones who could write. In this age we will be better served, IMHO, if we require our leaders to have some numeracy and some technical literacy.
> Military: We have a bunch of super expensive airplanes that nobody wants. Security: We have a former presidential candidate who though she was "above" security protocol and kept her own email server. Personal privacy, Finance: Well, you get my point.
I disagree with these claims. Ironically, do you know anything about them, or are you repeating what has been said with the 'loudest voices'? For example, I actually do know a little about the F-35, which I assume you are referring to, and though there are reasons to criticize it most in the U.S. military (and in others) desperately want it.
Also, what about other things I mentioned such as airplane safety? Food safety? Public health? These are unqualified successes, though of course flawed.
Problems and flaws are the nature of every human enterprise and institution; there is no solution that won't result in them. But we still accomplish a heck of a lot. Sure, more numeracy and technical literacy would be great, but the idea that our government can't function has little foundation - it's just someone yelling loudly.
That's the funny thing about transition- sometimes you don't see it coming. And it's hard to argue with the fallacy of the consequent: we are here, therefore it's the right answer.
But I'll try to articulate it from something small and (hopefully) that we can relate to and leave aside public health questions like climate change and so on. Again, this isn't the world-beater issue, but it's just an illustration of why I think that we should try to have more scientifically literate people in our government.
When I go to a gas station, there is a sign that says things like "don't smoke, discharge static electricity, fill portable tanks on the ground" and such with is all good advice. But they also have one that says "turn off your cell phone." Now, one of the stations I use that has this sign actually has a television atop the pump. But the kicker is, the whole gas-station-blowing-up thing was an urban legend. The original story was in the '90s, circulated via email, and was about a BP station in Britain blowing up because of someone using a cell phone. I have a tendency to check up on these things (IIRC "snopes" wasn't "snopes" back then; I think they changed their name or else the site I relied upon went out and snopes came in) and found that yes, the story was bullshit and there was no truth to it.
Nevertheless, it became a regulation to turn off your cell phone. Even though they don't cause sparks. And there's a TV set atop the pump.
more numeracy and technical literacy would be great
Agreed.
but the idea that our government can't function has little foundation
> Nevertheless, it became a regulation to turn off your cell phone.
Gas stations put up signs because there is little cost to them if the advice is unnecessary, and a high cost if it is necessary. These signs do not indicate a "regulation". (Usually, when they do, they don't merely tell you not to do X, but specifically reference the fact that it is illegal to do the particular prohibited thing.)
Have you ever paid to have a sign made? It's not willy-nilly. There is a cost. And, I believe, there were regulations. It was ubiquitous- nearly every station had it. Probably still do.
I agree that the professionals/us are the ones that need to make the decisions, though I might not go so far as to say that public education is completely futile. Though re-reading what I wrote, it seems I misleadingly implied that this is a bottom-up issue rather than a top-down issue. I totally agree on the "can't, don't and won't" aspects.
I was just musing earlier today on what if IEC, IEEE, IETF, ACM, leading schools, etc., came out and drew the red lines of what engineers are willing and are unwilling to do. That's all it takes.
Since when is voting with your wallet a liberal thing? If anything, that whole concept is a strong argument against traditional regulation (driven by actual votes), trusting the market to take care of it.
I'm guessing parent meant liberalism as the term is used in Europe. Roughly, liberal(EUR)=conservative(US), although mostly I see both terms used with the "neo" prefix nowadays.
Economic liberalism i.e. lowered regulation and absence of tariffs. "Liberal" the way Americans use it is an Americanism, and "neoliberal" was a term invented to talk about economic liberalism in the US.
Yes! It's an important difference. In Denmark for instance, the term "liberal" in politics denotes free-market enthusiasm and almost nothing else.
I can imagine this would cause some misunderstandings when read into an American context.
Tracking people is a technological thing, but the power to do anything with that information is a legal and social thing.
The information's out there, and it'll never go away. What we need to do is work to steer the societal expectations that one's location is private, important, protected by law, not divulgable by the phone company except under penalty of law, not sellable for marketing purposes, etc.
> Can't we advocate for better public understanding of, and decentralization of, location services...
Could you clarify what you mean by this? Positioning technologies in general are decentralized. You don't have to rely on the GPS L1 signal, most receivers support GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo outside of the box. You don't need to use WiFi positioning, Bluetooth ranging, or cellular positioning. These tools just give you finer granularity for your current position, minimizing Dilution of Precision.
While the poster your responding to mentioned a number of technologies, let's look at CGI/CGI-TA/UTDOA via the cell network, as that's what I have experience with.
While I'm honestly not that familiar with CGI-TA/UTDOA, the CGI is referring to the Cell Global Identity, which you can think of as a unique identity for every cell in existence (tower + direction + frequency IIRC). This might cover a very large area (a rural cell site might be 10+ km's away), or very small area (like an in building wireless system). The carrier tends to have a database of the location of each CGI, along with GPS coordinates of where the cell is located.
So, what happens, is by standard your CGI (or technology equivalent, because different technology use slightly different terminology), get's included in most messaging the cell network sends internally. While not perfect, this can be used to make guesses about your current location.
This is actually important for the cellular network, because if you have millions of devices, every message you send to the wrong location costs you money. So whenever your radio active (on a phone call, downloading a web page, your email in the background), all of the data for these services is sent to the cell servicing you. There isn't enough radio bandwidth to deliver this somewhere else or to a wide area.
It also get's used when you're radio inactive, to keep track of how to page you. Paging, is when the network needs to notify your UE (User Equipment), that it needs to do something (incoming call, sms, or data). Again, from an efficiency perspective, I don't want to page Vancouver when you're in Toronto.
So one of the way's the network does this, is even when you go radio idle, it remember's the cell you were last connected to. Because when the network wants to page you, it thinks the best location is the same location it saw you last. Now I don't remember UMTS as well as I should, but in LTE there are a few gotcha's. When the device is idle, it only needs to re-register every 1.5 hours, which means the device will also talk to the network every 1.5 hours to say, I'm still registered, don't clean up your resources, which will include the CGI. There is also a rule, that say's when you exit your tracking area list, you must notify the network to register with the new tracking area you can currently be paged at.
The Tracking Area, is a way to group cell's together into usually a relatively small area, but will be based on what the engineering group at your operator has decided. And you can have multiple of these assigned to the device. The idea basically is, you can make small movements around the network, but don't need to update the network for every cell change when idle. The network paging algorithm, will then page your last registered cell, followed by the tracking area list (and possibly some other heuristic features), to find your device and deliver your call.
From a privacy point of view, you can then imagine what this allows, was your phone near your girlfriends all night, or your own residence. However, if your local store is close enough, it might not be able to tell if you walked over to the corner store, especially if the CGI doesn't change (1.5 hour re-registration timer), someone might think you were just sitting at home if each registration is at the same location.
So, while this is all public standard, it's definitely difficult to articulate in terms, even technologists can follow, because cellular technology is it's own complicated piece of technology. This is why I believe it generally get's distilled down to the if you don't like it don't use it argument, because it's too difficult to articulate accurately, and in the end the cell network tracks the relative position of your phone in order to just service you as a customer. Even some of what I just said is likely slightly wrong / miss-leading / only applied to the network...
Thank you, this is fantastic. I had no idea how things worked from the cell carrier's perspective. I never really believed that the cell network has GPS-accuracy location information for every device for every minute, but I also understand the feeling of not knowing where to start to look for the middle ground.
I would throw Google, Apple, ShopperTrak (first result for in-store location analytics), etc. into the "far more afraid of [than] any state" bucket. I am of the impression that those are groups that, through the use of location services which most people with smartphones have enabled, can collect the sort of minute-by-minute, down to the meter, location information that is of value/a potential concern to privacy.
* Inertial navigation, using gyro and accelerometer to approximate movement since last known position.
* Pressure sensor can give approximate Z axis (altitude). This is significant if your X,Y says you're in or near a tall building; combined with the Z, you confirm the building and the floor +/- a few floors.
Also worth pointing out, my phone's location history regularly places me in a small Iowa town 53 miles away from my actual location in Nebraska. also often shows me making a trip through that Iowa location and on to another Nebraska location for a 113 mile trip at 241 MPH average speed, even though my actual trip was 12 or so miles all within Nebraska. I suspect, but cannot prove, that a wifi access point previously located in that Iowa town may have moved to my city but google still thinks it is in Iowa. Not particularly concerned.
GPS isn't possibly tracking mechanism because it works via passive reception of a satellite signal.
Wireless networking in mobile devices is a tracking mechanism. It works to an extent without help from GPS data. Even with GPS off, your device can know quite accurately where you are based on other environmental information.
GPS works entirely through passive reception from satellites. No other connectivity is required. With true GPS, it is impossible for the satellites to know where you are, or even that you are using it. (That also makes it infinitely scalable, as users consume no satellite resources.)
Assisted GPS is an "improvement" which depends on additional data from the cellular network. Which means the cellular network knows you are using it, knows where you are, and can track you.
Edit: Back in my Nokia days, I had phones with true GPS and 100% offline maps, which would work perfectly well for navigation far from any hint of connectivity. No idea whether Android's "Device only" mode is GPS or aGPS.
In one type, the cellular network (or some other network) is used to download a copy of the GPS almanac faster than it would have been received from the satellites. The almanac is globally valid (it's just a bunch of high-precision data about the GPS satellite orbits, the signals they're transmitting, and ionospheric conditions), so this doesn't leak any information about the receiver's location, beyond what's inherent from being active on a cell network.
In another type, the receiver sends a portion of the GPS signal it's received to a server, which calculates a position fix and returns it. Obviously, this lets the server discover the client's location.
My understanding is that the second approach is largely obsolete -- modern GPS chipsets are small and cheap enough that there is no advantage to offloading the calculations.
The fact that data is downloaded for A-GPS doesn't cause the ability for the mobile network to track you.
A-GPS just downloads some information that you would otherwise get from the satellites, which describes where the satellites are along with some technical data. This information doesn't depend on your location and in fact, as your phone is requesting it, it doesn't know where it is yet. That's the whole point!
The mobile network can track you because you have a constant connection to it. Not because of A-GPS.
Found it interesting that they have a device which uses X-Rays to look inside a property? What about the health risks to over exposure of X Rays?
Based on some of the things that have been done to me, namely drugging of food perhaps to induce psychosis or something else, being injected with something like a steriod causing me to lose my temper, I wouldnt rule much out when it comes to Govt and all that it enshrines including big corporates fufilling Govt contracts, military depts and so on.
Basically if you can think it, chances are they have already done it.
Thing is, if we are going into a Grand Solar Minimum, the food & fuel security is going to be the main issue so finding ways to control the population is going to be paramount. After all the last time a Grand Solar Minimum happened was over 500 years ago long before scientific meteorological offices existed, and back than it caused things like the Irish Potatoe Famine, French Revolution, Great Fire of London amongst other things. Read Professor Brian Fagan's book on the Little Ice Age https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Little-Ice-Age-Climate-1300... could give you an insight into not only why the big brother tech is really coming out into the open, because back then its thought/estimated 25% of the planets inhabitants died due to famine or cold. Fast forward to today with a great population and you can see why Big Brother is now on steriods.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 97.5 ms ] thread> Excerpted from PINPOINT: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/bluetooth-surveillance2...
http://www.skyhookwireless.com/about-skyhook
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha... tv-tablet-and-pc/
http://newatlas.com/magnetic-anomaly-indoor-positioning/2325...
Hey guys - this is going to make a bunch of your apps work poorly or not at all, but it protects you from something you aren't informed enough or smart enough to be scared of in the first place. Please support me?
Oh, and by the way, it'll make your phone cost more money.
Furthermore, I am not sure that any of those are necessarily a given. I'm not advocating for breaking apps or an abrupt shift to no location services, I'm not dismissing your average end-user's needs/desires or insulting their intelligence. I'm hypothesizing that there might be ways to get non-GPS location services out of the hands of a few big players. It theoretically wouldn't make your phone cost more money, but it might take the time-money-effort of people who build the systems (maybe open-source?). I'm trying to appeal to the people who build the systems and brainstorm ways to do that, not really rally the end-users to this particular cause.
The people that "build the systems" are paid for by those corporations who make money by tracking you. Who exactly do you think is going to: A. Fund this new decentralized non-tracking utopia. B. Convince users already embedded in existing systems to switch to something less functional in order to not be tracked?
EVERY project that's tried what you're describing has failed miserably because end-users just don't care. Can you cite even ONE example of a competing system that has focused on privacy that has garnered what can be considered even a modicum of success against an already entrenched player?
We return to my issue: does it being difficult and yet to be achieved mean that the people that are aware of potential drawbacks of the status quo should lay down and give up? That seems to be your implication.
So... the 2 hours a day I'm not with a family member or coworker or friend I can't be tracked? And to do so I literally have to disable everything on my phone manually (no more bluetooth streaming in the car, manually turn off the wifi on my phone every time I leave the house, somehow magically prevent the cell towers from tracking me).
If you cannot get the general populous to agree and actively vote for privacy, you're fighting a battle that's already been lost.
At least in Germany there is hardly anybody who says something like that about Snowden. There are mostly two opinions about Snowden in Germany:
1. He is a hero - the opinion of the minority
2. They hardly care (but also have nothing negative to say about Snowden) - the opinion of the majority
But there is hardly any opinion that he is a traitor (or even should be hanged - death penalty is a red line in Germany) - quite the opposite.
As I outlined in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272352 in Germany many people don't consider the government as "us", but as "them" (those who rule "us"). So I don't believe that there would be large hatred in the German population (in opposite to the politicians) if Snowden betrayed the German government instead.
So where's the public outcry to jail the traitor? Just live with it, Germany's mileage varies drastically from the US, and the main reason is experience with the Nazis and the GDR. We know something you absolutely do not, and the world us asking Germany to learn from it, instead of the other way around, at its own peril.
edit, just as a bonus, though I think the Spiegel isn't really that great: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-2013-45.html
This and variations of that exist aplenty.
In the US? All over the place. Fox News on pretty much a weekly basis. It was all over the campaign trail this last election as well.
> If the two prevailing mindsets were he's a hero and I don't care, then the he's a hero would be making a lot more noise, and the "I don't care" would probably give them half-hearted support just because they don't have a horse in the race and could therefore be easily convinced.
Then what are the prevailing mindsets in Germany? And how much more noise would people be making, what is a "lot"? Can you quantify it? Or are you just making up stuff that sounds reasonable to you, which has no connection with the truth on the ground here?
I outlined them above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13271448
> And how much more noise would people be making, what is a "lot"?
At the heyday of the Snowden revelations there was a large outcry. When talking about opinions in Germany one always has to distinguish between the opinion of the citizens and the opinion of the government (these are often very different). Of course the German government has a very USA-bootlicking opinion about the Snowden question.
The fact that in Germany there (mostly) is free speech does not imply that the government is interested in your opinion. Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.
I know, and it matches my experience. But the user tw04 seems to disagree with more than flimsy reasoning.
> Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.
I wish I could find it now, but Sebastian Haffner mentioned this in one of his books... the German tendency to consider politics as something dirty the private person better keep out of, while both despising and admiring those nasty politicians. I think that sarcasm is a form of cowardice. The way I see it, either you're a responsible citizen or you're not, politics is way too important to leave it to professional politicians. But that's neither here nor there.. one thing is sure, if I had a cent for every time an American or right-wing European tells me some nonsense about Germany, I could buy HN a pretty stylesheet.
The whole topic is a lot more complicated. It's rather hard to found a party: 2009 before the parliamentary elections I have been was sometimes at the regular meeting of the at that time new-founded Piratenpartei. Many attendees were paying for the election posters themselves (you can only get aids (Wahlkostenhilfe) when you already got many votes in a previous election - a chicken-and-egg problem) and were (in my opinion) working really hard alongside their regular job.
Also for most parliaments in Germany there is a so-called 5% barrier. That means that if you don't get at least 5% of the votes, you will get no seats in the parliament (except perhaps direct mandates - but for these you need a relative majority of votes in your district, which is even harder - nearly impossible for a new party). The 5% barrier means that you will need a program that attracts many voters.
There were many demands to give him asylum. Here some German articles about this topic (if you want to know what happens in Germany you will not get around understanding articles that are written in German):
The reactions in Germany after the Snowden revelations:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_Snowden&ol...
[TLDR: They were very positive towards Snowden]
Fears that Germany would extradict Snowden if he came to Germany
> http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/antrag-auf-asyl-warum-deu...
USA threatens Germany if they give asylum to Snowden:
> http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/snowden-asyl-usa-solle...
> https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Asyl-fuer-Snowden-US...
A very recent (22th of November 2016) article about whether Snowden could nevertheless get asylum in Germany
> https://www.vice.com/de/article/so-bekommt-edward-snowden-do...
Another article from 2rd of May 2016 on occasion of that there was a live link with Snowden on the re:public. This article [even its headline] nicely brings across the completely different opinion that the German government and many German citizen have in the whole Snowden question:
> http://www.rp-online.de/digitales/internet/edward-snowden-au...
I think Snowden is smart enough to know that the only place he's safe right now is Moscow, Russia. Even if Germany or any other country offers him asylum, the US machine does not care. They'll find a way to get him, either while enroute, or as soon as he lands.
Some reports:
About freedom: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/turkey
About education: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf
Not really:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/22/most-young-a...
Views are even better abroad.
No. It's a futile effort. There's too much to know about too many things in this world, and of the important things that people should know, this is pretty low on the list. It's up to the professionals (ie. us) to make decisions on behalf of those who can't, don't, and won't be able to understand the ramifications of those decisions (be it because they don't have the time, capability, capacity, or willingness to understand).
Agreed. That also is what government is for, to protect citizens from abuse and dangers, via regulation. Banks and automobile companies can't sell fraudulent or dangerous products to everyday consumers, for example.
Government can play a role in the improvement in the everyday life of it's citizens. As an example, I pay 25 euros/month for 200mbps fibre internet thanks to my government's antitrust laws.
How are you doing on this front, Americans?
Almost everything politicians - as well as other decision makers from CEOs to investment advisors to you and I - decide is outside their personal expertise. We all retain experts, one way or another, to research and report on the technical details, and our analysis isn't at all limited to the loudest voice.
Governments regulate airplane safety, but the politicians aren't aeronautical engineers and pilots. It doesn't just regulate but operates entire militaries, soup-to-nuts, with incredibly advanced technology, complex situations, and high stakes, yet it is civilians who are in charge (in the U.S. and most advanced countries) - the likely next U.S. Secretary of Defense will be the first ex-military officer since 1951.
That's not the same. It's one thing to have advisors, it's another to be so far out of your league that it's not even debatable nor discussable for you. So you try (ideally) to put people in their best positions to make the best decisions, and hope you have critically thoughtful people. But at some point they don't even know what questions to ask any more.
Military: We have a bunch of super expensive airplanes that nobody wants. Security: We have a former presidential candidate who though she was "above" security protocol and kept her own email server. Personal privacy, Finance: Well, you get my point.
These bad decisions come about because the interested parties have access "loudest voice" and can spin the conversation. Such has always been the case, but now we are getting to an age where a preponderance of decisions require some sort of technical understanding.
I'm certain sometime in our past the leaders went from being the ones who could yell the scariest to the ones who could write. In this age we will be better served, IMHO, if we require our leaders to have some numeracy and some technical literacy.
I disagree with these claims. Ironically, do you know anything about them, or are you repeating what has been said with the 'loudest voices'? For example, I actually do know a little about the F-35, which I assume you are referring to, and though there are reasons to criticize it most in the U.S. military (and in others) desperately want it.
Also, what about other things I mentioned such as airplane safety? Food safety? Public health? These are unqualified successes, though of course flawed.
Problems and flaws are the nature of every human enterprise and institution; there is no solution that won't result in them. But we still accomplish a heck of a lot. Sure, more numeracy and technical literacy would be great, but the idea that our government can't function has little foundation - it's just someone yelling loudly.
Fair point: I only know what I read in the paper.
airplane safety? Food safety? Public health?
That's the funny thing about transition- sometimes you don't see it coming. And it's hard to argue with the fallacy of the consequent: we are here, therefore it's the right answer.
But I'll try to articulate it from something small and (hopefully) that we can relate to and leave aside public health questions like climate change and so on. Again, this isn't the world-beater issue, but it's just an illustration of why I think that we should try to have more scientifically literate people in our government.
When I go to a gas station, there is a sign that says things like "don't smoke, discharge static electricity, fill portable tanks on the ground" and such with is all good advice. But they also have one that says "turn off your cell phone." Now, one of the stations I use that has this sign actually has a television atop the pump. But the kicker is, the whole gas-station-blowing-up thing was an urban legend. The original story was in the '90s, circulated via email, and was about a BP station in Britain blowing up because of someone using a cell phone. I have a tendency to check up on these things (IIRC "snopes" wasn't "snopes" back then; I think they changed their name or else the site I relied upon went out and snopes came in) and found that yes, the story was bullshit and there was no truth to it.
Nevertheless, it became a regulation to turn off your cell phone. Even though they don't cause sparks. And there's a TV set atop the pump.
more numeracy and technical literacy would be great
Agreed.
but the idea that our government can't function has little foundation
Maybe that's why nobody said it.
it's just someone yelling loudly.
Um, yeah, ok.
Gas stations put up signs because there is little cost to them if the advice is unnecessary, and a high cost if it is necessary. These signs do not indicate a "regulation". (Usually, when they do, they don't merely tell you not to do X, but specifically reference the fact that it is illegal to do the particular prohibited thing.)
I wouldn't stand for this in a politician, so I can't be surprised when people say they don't trust I.T. professionals.
It's the liberals standard reply: vote with your wallet. This way of thinking sometimes reduce democracy to economics.
What an odd thing to say.
Tracking people is a technological thing, but the power to do anything with that information is a legal and social thing.
The information's out there, and it'll never go away. What we need to do is work to steer the societal expectations that one's location is private, important, protected by law, not divulgable by the phone company except under penalty of law, not sellable for marketing purposes, etc.
This is a social problem. We fix it with laws.
Could you clarify what you mean by this? Positioning technologies in general are decentralized. You don't have to rely on the GPS L1 signal, most receivers support GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo outside of the box. You don't need to use WiFi positioning, Bluetooth ranging, or cellular positioning. These tools just give you finer granularity for your current position, minimizing Dilution of Precision.
While I'm honestly not that familiar with CGI-TA/UTDOA, the CGI is referring to the Cell Global Identity, which you can think of as a unique identity for every cell in existence (tower + direction + frequency IIRC). This might cover a very large area (a rural cell site might be 10+ km's away), or very small area (like an in building wireless system). The carrier tends to have a database of the location of each CGI, along with GPS coordinates of where the cell is located.
So, what happens, is by standard your CGI (or technology equivalent, because different technology use slightly different terminology), get's included in most messaging the cell network sends internally. While not perfect, this can be used to make guesses about your current location.
This is actually important for the cellular network, because if you have millions of devices, every message you send to the wrong location costs you money. So whenever your radio active (on a phone call, downloading a web page, your email in the background), all of the data for these services is sent to the cell servicing you. There isn't enough radio bandwidth to deliver this somewhere else or to a wide area.
It also get's used when you're radio inactive, to keep track of how to page you. Paging, is when the network needs to notify your UE (User Equipment), that it needs to do something (incoming call, sms, or data). Again, from an efficiency perspective, I don't want to page Vancouver when you're in Toronto.
So one of the way's the network does this, is even when you go radio idle, it remember's the cell you were last connected to. Because when the network wants to page you, it thinks the best location is the same location it saw you last. Now I don't remember UMTS as well as I should, but in LTE there are a few gotcha's. When the device is idle, it only needs to re-register every 1.5 hours, which means the device will also talk to the network every 1.5 hours to say, I'm still registered, don't clean up your resources, which will include the CGI. There is also a rule, that say's when you exit your tracking area list, you must notify the network to register with the new tracking area you can currently be paged at.
The Tracking Area, is a way to group cell's together into usually a relatively small area, but will be based on what the engineering group at your operator has decided. And you can have multiple of these assigned to the device. The idea basically is, you can make small movements around the network, but don't need to update the network for every cell change when idle. The network paging algorithm, will then page your last registered cell, followed by the tracking area list (and possibly some other heuristic features), to find your device and deliver your call.
From a privacy point of view, you can then imagine what this allows, was your phone near your girlfriends all night, or your own residence. However, if your local store is close enough, it might not be able to tell if you walked over to the corner store, especially if the CGI doesn't change (1.5 hour re-registration timer), someone might think you were just sitting at home if each registration is at the same location.
So, while this is all public standard, it's definitely difficult to articulate in terms, even technologists can follow, because cellular technology is it's own complicated piece of technology. This is why I believe it generally get's distilled down to the if you don't like it don't use it argument, because it's too difficult to articulate accurately, and in the end the cell network tracks the relative position of your phone in order to just service you as a customer. Even some of what I just said is likely slightly wrong / miss-leading / only applied to the network...
I would throw Google, Apple, ShopperTrak (first result for in-store location analytics), etc. into the "far more afraid of [than] any state" bucket. I am of the impression that those are groups that, through the use of location services which most people with smartphones have enabled, can collect the sort of minute-by-minute, down to the meter, location information that is of value/a potential concern to privacy.
Wireless networking in mobile devices is a tracking mechanism. It works to an extent without help from GPS data. Even with GPS off, your device can know quite accurately where you are based on other environmental information.
That's only one component of the GPS system. It also pulls data from the network based on your location; look up Assisted GPS.
EDIT: I don't mind the downvotes, but someone please educate me and everyone else if the statement is incorrect.
Assisted GPS is an "improvement" which depends on additional data from the cellular network. Which means the cellular network knows you are using it, knows where you are, and can track you.
Edit: Back in my Nokia days, I had phones with true GPS and 100% offline maps, which would work perfectly well for navigation far from any hint of connectivity. No idea whether Android's "Device only" mode is GPS or aGPS.
In one type, the cellular network (or some other network) is used to download a copy of the GPS almanac faster than it would have been received from the satellites. The almanac is globally valid (it's just a bunch of high-precision data about the GPS satellite orbits, the signals they're transmitting, and ionospheric conditions), so this doesn't leak any information about the receiver's location, beyond what's inherent from being active on a cell network.
In another type, the receiver sends a portion of the GPS signal it's received to a server, which calculates a position fix and returns it. Obviously, this lets the server discover the client's location.
My understanding is that the second approach is largely obsolete -- modern GPS chipsets are small and cheap enough that there is no advantage to offloading the calculations.
A-GPS just downloads some information that you would otherwise get from the satellites, which describes where the satellites are along with some technical data. This information doesn't depend on your location and in fact, as your phone is requesting it, it doesn't know where it is yet. That's the whole point!
The mobile network can track you because you have a constant connection to it. Not because of A-GPS.
Based on some of the things that have been done to me, namely drugging of food perhaps to induce psychosis or something else, being injected with something like a steriod causing me to lose my temper, I wouldnt rule much out when it comes to Govt and all that it enshrines including big corporates fufilling Govt contracts, military depts and so on.
Basically if you can think it, chances are they have already done it.
Thing is, if we are going into a Grand Solar Minimum, the food & fuel security is going to be the main issue so finding ways to control the population is going to be paramount. After all the last time a Grand Solar Minimum happened was over 500 years ago long before scientific meteorological offices existed, and back than it caused things like the Irish Potatoe Famine, French Revolution, Great Fire of London amongst other things. Read Professor Brian Fagan's book on the Little Ice Age https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Little-Ice-Age-Climate-1300... could give you an insight into not only why the big brother tech is really coming out into the open, because back then its thought/estimated 25% of the planets inhabitants died due to famine or cold. Fast forward to today with a great population and you can see why Big Brother is now on steriods.