Android

[sack]

Piracy was very social and very 'phisical', you literally had to 'take your bike and go to meet in person some people in sometime strange places' to get your floppy disks or tape with the SW, the biggest piracy thing I can remember was when the Super NES came out with that thing with the floppies, that was the last 'biggest piracy traffic of stuff' I can remember of and proportions were really 'big'.

Sometime it really was 'go in that hour in that bar in that place wait for that guy, order something and someone will join you and will give you some floppies under a table'

Surely the simplest answer was to just join your local computer club?

[Darkflame]

Copying Commodore tapes was easy

I just don't trust random people on the internet.

Apple are hardly random though.

You did hear of this right:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/ ... n-hacking/

Big does not mean trustworthy.

Only if the target is foolish enough to agree to it. Otherwise it's very dirty.

If you buy a fishing magazine, you will get fishing related advertising in the magazine.
Surely thats ok?

I can certainly agree how sites tracking where you have been on other domains is bad - but that goes way beyond targeted advertising and isnt how googles adsense system works.

The way Google make money is by selling information collected on users to firms you've never heard of,.

Utter myth as always, Google sales the ad-space not your information.

Who are these mysterious companies supposed to be anyway? Ad-agencies in competition with Google?

Also, do you use PayPal? Because they give your information to 3 different marketing agencys..tells you right in the EULA too.

Facebook I think is quite different. They often seem as annoyingly intrusive, but in ways that are largely open: thing you do, things you like, even off FB, appear on your wall/timeline. Until you remove them which you can. And they've been pro-active in revising their policies to fix problems, such as games spamming your wall, and have introduced much finer controls over who can see what.

All in a response to Google Plus, which had those features from day1.

Also Google has for a very long time been completely open and giving you control over your data:
https://www.google.com/dashboard/
I dont see how facebooks recent introduced features are better then this stuff google has had for years :-/

In regards to webtracking also, you should be very afraid of Facebook - how many sites have facebook logins these days??
Give me OpenID any day, at least then all my eggs dont have to be in one basket.

[disciple]

'Evil' is a bit old fashioned, and the FTC is not the Catholic Church, but it's $22.5 million worth of illegal, the largest fine issued by the FTC, so about as bad as it gets.

Pardon me if I LOL again.

This is as bad as it gets? Nowt could be worse then?

this that, using hacks to circumvent privacy settings, and so on

I'm not arguing that behaviour's correct. In the case of circumventing Safari's default block policy I'm arguing that it is (or was) "relatively" common. As mentioned you can find plenty of Stackoverflow posts discussing how to commit "the act of ultimate evil", it was even on Facebook's (who you consider to be "un-evil") publically available external best practice document.

I'm just trying to add a bit of perspective and context here, because much of what you write has very little. Whether or not it's intentional I don't know but you're not telling the whole story. (perhaps you didn't actually know any of this?)

[pogo]

I'm just trying to add a bit of perspective and context here, because much of what you write has very little. Whether or not it's intentional I don't know but you're not telling the whole story. (perhaps you didn't actually know any of this?)

Please enlighten me ! Seriously, if there's anything I've missed out then point it out. But I do look at it a particular way: I look at the company as a whole, it's attitude, it's philosophy, it's goals. Those are far more important than individual products/policies, which a big company is bound to get wrong from time to time.. So when a company is again and again on the wrong side of the law for infringing people's rights it's impossible to ignore. Once could be a mistake, but to do it repeatedly shows it's part of the company's makeup to put profits ahead of respecting people's privacy.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/ ... n-hacking/

Yes, but Amazon and Apple's mistakes arose from trying to make it easy for users to resolve problems. It took some clever social engineering that exploited holes in both companies policies to perform the hack. And both companies once informed took immediate steps to deal with the problem. Compared to say Google which still hasn't deleted all the data its Streetview vehicles deliberately and illegally collected from individuals' WiFi.

[zip accident]

both companies once informed took immediate steps to deal with the problem.

Did they? I didn't read that at all. I read that they carried on in the same unsafe way in general, and cleared up the accounts of the one individual who'd been victimised.

Amazon will still give out the last four digits of your credit cards to anyone who asks, and Apple will still take the last four digits of any credit card they already know as proof of ownership of that card. Which is a stupidly dangerous combination. Giving out four digits of a sixteen digit number might be safe enough if it was guaranteed that the others couldn't be generated from those (which I would assume to be the case, without really knowing that to be true), but taking four of them as proof of knowledge of the whole sixteen is weak even if they are guaranteed unknown, but when they are known to be publicly available, it's criminally irresponsible IMHO.

[pogo]

The last four digits of your credit card are not 'publicly available'. It was a flaw in Amazon's systems that made them so, as the hacker pretended to add a credit card to the account (using a fake, generated number), which once added he could use to get into the Amazon account (by supplying the full credit card number) from where he could read off the last four digits of the valid credit card. This was then enough together with other information to persuade Apple to give up a password.

Apple's mistake was thinking this information was sufficiently secret. Amazon's mistake was to not treat it as secret. I.e. there was a mismatch between their policies/expectations on what information should be private, a mismatch the hackers cleverly exploited. Both companies made mistakes but neither I think is criminally irresponsible, and both have since acted to fix the problem:
After Epic Hack, Apple Suspends Over-the-Phone AppleID Password Resets
Amazon Quietly Closes Security Hole After Journalist’s Devastating Hack

[zip accident]

The last four digits of your credit card are not 'publicly available'. It was a flaw in Amazon's systems that made them so

Either they are or they aren't. If so, then so.

Apple's mistake was thinking this information was sufficiently secret. Amazon's mistake was to not treat it as secret. I.e. there was a mismatch between their policies/expectations on what information should be private, a mismatch the hackers cleverly exploited. Both companies made mistakes but neither I think is criminally irresponsible

Criminality would be in not fixing it now it is publicly known. In my opinion, Apple's mistake was a sillier and worse one than Amazons, though neither of them should have done what they did do.

and both have since acted to fix the problem:
After Epic Hack, Apple Suspends Over-the-Phone AppleID Password Resets
Amazon Quietly Closes Security Hole After Journalist’s Devastating Hack

An Apple worker with knowledge of the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Wired that the over-the-phone password freeze would last at least 24 hours.

24 hours is over now, is the ban on over the phone password changes still in place? They could restore it if they took the whole credit card number not just the last four digits, but would that be too inconvenient for their customers?

[gravy]

Do you think you might be being a bit mental here Zip Accident?

Any form of retail has associated risks but the real risk to you by letting Apple have you credit card details is really, really low.

[adam]

& you don't have to pay any transaction you don't make on your card, if it's a credit card, everyone i know who's had any kind of fraud on their account has always had the charges waived.

[pogo]

Apart from the complexity of the hack the other unique feature of it is it wasn't for monetary gain. I mean the main reason someone would want to worm their way into your Amazon or iTunes account and access your credit card information is to steal from you. So I suspect the systems in place to protect against that are much more robust. In particular for a mail order company like Amazon adding a credit card probably didn't raise any red flags: for that you might have to change shipping information at the same time, as that would allow you to steal stuff by ordering it and shipping it to another address.

But the hacker wasn't interested in stealing anything of monetary value. They weren't out to destroy Honan's data either: they locked his devices and triggered a wipe to cover their tracks/slow down anyone trying to stop them. As Honan admits he was very mistaken not to have backups of his data (which is of course a reminder to us all: back up everything of value before hardware, software, hackers or natural disaster cause you to lose it).

[gilesgoat]

Piracy was very social and very 'phisical', you literally had to 'take your bike and go to meet in person some people in sometime strange places' to get your floppy disks or tape with the SW, the biggest piracy thing I can remember was when the Super NES came out with that thing with the floppies, that was the last 'biggest piracy traffic of stuff' I can remember of and proportions were really 'big'.

Sometime it really was 'go in that hour in that bar in that place wait for that guy, order something and someone will join you and will give you some floppies under a table'

Surely the simplest answer was to just join your local computer club?

There were no "computer clubs" around my places, we were not so evolved

Plus jokes apart piracy always been illegal, in those time in a way 'even more', SW was *NOT* free, you had to pay MONEY to have it but it was quite cheaper than the original stuff that was VERY expensive.

I am not talking here about "download this somewhere have it for free" I am talking about "pay me $5 per disk instead of $30" but was still $5 and was still money someone was putting in his pockets ( never seen/met a female SW pirate ).

It was a market, it wasn't free, some few people even ended up in jail for that - very few but there has been some, I am not sure if they manage to charge that for SW piracy ( that in that time wasn't actually a crime ) but if someway they managed to pass something as stealing and/or sale of stolen stuff and/or illegal duplication and/or sale without a license and/or tax evasion and/or a combination of some of them.

Most of it actually was 'duplication from real media', someone was buying a copy of something from price X and was selling N copies of that for a quite reduced price, no internet to download stuff really.

Not as a big as the market of copied VHS tapes but it was significant.

[adam]

in the uk it was more people copying tapes in the 8 bit days, no money being made and schoolkids are often below the age of criminal responsibility, think it's 10 before they can be charged

and i think that was the case in the 16 bit days too, i didn't have st or amiga... most of the kids who did just bought their games, no double disc drives or hard discs, one or two copied things because they knew someone who could do it, this was in a small town, a friend who lived in a city used to go on bbs's etc on the amiga and i expect there was more pirate software on those, and the grown ups probably copied things

then the consoles came, most people couldn't pirate the cartridges, my chinese friend had a magic drive and something for his snes and a boxful of games on floppy from his cousin in hong kong, streetfighter 2 came on 2 discs, there were shops in hong kong that copied games for £1, all his discs had printed labels.

he had some really good arcade style joysticks as well iirc

little bit after this, 1992-1993 there were some scares with pc games with viruses attached, infected leisure suit larry was one that caught lots of companies out

the macs at college had tons of pirate graphics software on, not cracked, just installed beyond the license, doubt money had changed hands

and round 1995 i heard about copies of 3d studio selling for £30, that was a £3000 app though, there are some computer shops now that sell pirate software, mostly creative stuff

obviously this isn't an objective view of piracy in the uk, just the piracy i've encountered, or some of it, left out chipped consoles, warez on newsgroups (blue dolphin software was a name a lot of traders used, seen some on ebay selling blue dolphin "oem" versions of things) and a few other things.

edit... left out traders with dvd-r's at car boot sales, that probably still goes on... also at computer fairs, there was a crackdown apparently but it all got more crafty as a result, "tick these boxes and pay and discs drop through your door days later"

piracy now is a whole other world really... seems like the people who are into it are really into it

[zip accident]

Do you think you might be being a bit mental here Zip Accident?

I think that's always a possibility.

Any form of retail has associated risks but the real risk to you by letting Apple have you credit card details is really, really low.

That's true for any one retailer. If you give it to all of the retailers you might buy stuff from, I suspect the risks add up (they might even multiply).

However I had moved on to examining the case of that reporter who had all of his electronic communications devices trashed so that the hackers could have uninterrupted control of his twitter account. That is a potential modus operandi for crooks too, trashing all of a victims electronics so they can't communicate when and if they discover their money is being stolen. I believe if there are several more cases like this one, Apple will lose more business through seeming to be insecure than they will through being a little more inconvienent to use than they currently are.

[RiK]

[gilesgoat]

@Pogo : have you ever considered the amount of information the government and/or The Illuminati could get from majority of people is "minuscule" compared to what people WILLINGLY ( and often quite carelessly ) are putting online nowadays ?

I think we live in an era where secret services are laughing their arses off and/or are almost in trouble maybe for the opposite reason of "they don't need them any more so much"

People seems to feel COMPELLED to put information about themselves, I am sure you can know much more today of anyone more than anytime in the history of the world before, I think with Facebook they created "the ultimate source of information".

Actually, for quite some "a drug" .. it kinda proves that "modesty" and "be restricted" is NOT natural in the human beings, quite opposite "show off" and "talk about me" is the thing I am sure for many people that's more important than any risk of whatever they are telling/showing about themselves.

In fact I belive certain "limitations" are imposed by societies and should be a way to "have a better control, perform better" which is probably true but the natural tendency of human beings is NOT that but to leave passions, addictions and any form of control, especially self-control totally out of the window.

Internet "is super perfect for that", "the ultimate escape zone" when you can do so much shit you want without, for the short term moment, any bad consequences.

If you ever read about stories of true experiments of brainwashing and mind control, NONE worked, actually NO cohercitive method even worked, INSTEAD it's possible to obtain a quite "extreme" level of control on people by "leaving them do what they think they are free willingly doing".

In other words "deception/misdirection/subtleness" is FAR more effective than any "front methods".

Let's put it this way, "I don't need to steal your credit card details to get your money when I can LOT more easily make you buy - and so willingly give you all your money to me - whatever I want making you feel it truly is your free choice".

Do I need to know how much money you have in your bank and how to get it ?

Absolutely NOT, when I perfectly know I CAN make you spend it ALL and even MORE ( putting you into debts ) with other tecniques, I show you so many beautyful toys not so far from your reach that you won't be able to resist.

You say "yes but you are loosing something you are giving me something in return".

Yes, but what you give me is even bigger than that, in the end I own you completely you'd do whatever I want you to do without the need of even asking for it, or better to explicitely ask for it.

NOW you can put the tinfoil hat on.

I don't need to read you mind, I can PROGRAM it from outside