Author asks 1 semi-security-related question, I think here we go, follows up with "so you guys acquired some unrelated product, how's that going?"
Wtf is this article even about, am I reading a random lunch conversation between old friends that was made more interesting by the guy coincidentally working in security (a hot topic) and being made anonymous (so that people would assume shocking secrets are to be revealed inside)?
Neither of these hacks involved "back doors" as they are normally defined. One was an authentication bypass; the other was a supply chain attack. Neither involved any sort of deliberate covert access mechanism.
Let me be cystal clear. I've worked in domestic violence. Cops will use various tools to stalk their ex'es despite your claims that back door or priveleged access will not be abused.
Jump over to healthcare, the worker with full access to the govt it system for cases WILL lookup their friend / family members / neighbors / famous person if they see them on site or realize they are in system.
I have one experience with a private health HMO. A close relative, senior doctor, absolutely knew they would be immediately fired if they looked up family records. It was crazy, they would not do ANYTHING related to family stuff even by request of person involved. Obviously this place had some type of audit trail, some type of monitoring team for non-assigned patient record lookups etc.
My govt IT job, to do billing you had to be able to see case notes, and the system was integrated across of a ton of agencies, so everyone basically had access to everything and because you had to share logins and passwords (it took like 6 months to get a new account setup) there wasn't any accountability (not that I think they monitored anyway).
I came away very unimpressed. We had to use outdated IE / Java combos etc. as well and block all system updates. The default landing page was an unregistered domain name.
I don't think OP meant to imply that backdoors had anything to do with this. It's meant to underscore the argument against backdooring encryption by pointing out that when you trust some entity with a backdoor, you're potentially opening that backdoor to anyone who can break that entity's security, which may be very, very flawed.
That's unrelated to backdoors (deliberate covert access mechanisms). All parties with access to data, regardless of whether it is via a backdoor, can put that data at risk due to their own security.
This is only unrelated if you don't consider government-mandated master key escrow a "backdoor," which seems deliberately obtuse to me. Regardless, the OP's point was that this is an additional argument against governments mandating a way to access your encrypted data, because you shouldn't be compelled to trust anyone else with a "don't worry, only we will have access" sort of system.
This is promising technology, but the words "just barely statistically significant" should probably be in the first paragraph of articles covering this - not halfway down the article.
"Just barely statistically significant" but the MLE is a 6x reduction in hospital visits. There's huge potential here, but our ability to know has been hampered by study size.
That's not quite the right takeaway. That 6x reduction is dependent on the p-value, which in turn is dependent on the sample size. The larger the sample, the smaller the p-value, and that 6x reduction will likely shrink as well. It's extremely rare for a treatment in medicine to have a 6x benefit.
> That 6x reduction is dependent on the p-value, which in turn is dependent on the sample size
No, the 6x reduction MLE is -not- dependent on the p-value, and this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the statistics. That said, the overall distribution of possibilities skews on the "lesser effect" side, so if you had to guess which way the estimate would move with another trial, you're more likely to get a smaller effect than a larger one.... 6x is still the most likely single value.
> It's extremely rare for a treatment in medicine to have a 6x benefit.
All kinds of drugs and treatments for acute disease have a > 6x benefit. We have plenty of conditions that have a horrible prognosis untreated and great outcomes treated.
Have a bad bacterial infection? Odds are abx will clear that right up and you'd die otherwise. Active TB has a ~60% death rate within 5 years untreated, while with normal treatment regimens only has a relapse (not death) rate of a few percent in that 5 year period. Most vaccines have high efficacies. Standard treatments can prevent the vast majority of malaria deaths.
That's for one of several results, and the whole point of those words appearing is to imply that it contrasts with the other results.
I mean, arguably reporting on things at this stage is super premature, the whole article shouldn't exist, we shouldn't be reading it, the whole news cycle is garbage, blah blah blah rant rant rant.... but it would be absurd to headline the article with "the least significant, of several significant results, was only barely significant".
They didn't tell us how many patients. Could be important, could be noise. Also, there were two serious reactions to infusion of one of the drugs.
It's progress. A few months ago nothing worked. It was just ventilators, supportive treatment, and wait to see who survived. Now, some treatments sort of work. Management of the disease is becoming possible.
In this study, the drugs were given early, and to patients who were not sick enough to require hospitalization. Not clear if this helps with the more serious cases.
That's an impressively long list but some of those entries are a bit of a stretch. Google Nexus, for example, was rebranded as Google Pixel. Most people wouldn't describe rebranding as "killing" a product.
Password Checkup: integrated into Chrome, Firefox has its own thing as well.
Google Photos Print: it's just no longer a subscription service that automatically selects photos (who would want something to pick a photo book's photos for you??). https://www.google.com/photos/printing/
Shoelace: Kind of disingenuous to include Area 120 projects, which are experiments by design.
Google Chrome Apps: Sunset in favor of PWAs which don't rely on Chrome Web Store? sign me up!
Dragonfly: Was never public so I don't see this as 'killed'.
I think these different announcement types should be noted or properly filtered, maybe by noting the app that replaces the app, eg "alternative: google meet".
The point is they create a huge amount of hassle for users by constantly killing/replacing/renaming products, and it also shows that they aren't doing any effective long-term planning. That's what makes people mad.
Angular: I agree that angular is not dead, people can still use v1 if they want to. This does not count.
Hangouts: the new version has different pricing, different features, different name, different URL, different apps... this absolutely counts (and is one of the most egregious examples)
Password checkup: the extension worked fine, but they intentionally disabled it. Any references to it on the web now have to be updated to refer to password checkup in the browser. Anyone who knows how to use the extension has to relearn how to use it in the browser. This counts.
Google Photos Print: yes the original was stupid, but it was still a product and is now gone. This counts.
Shoelace: yeah this never really launched in the first place. This doesn't count.
Google Chrome Apps: I mean really? Anything that requires rewriting parts of an app to make it work counts!
Dragonfly: this was never released, it doesn't count. But it is important that people know about this, it is an example of Google quite blatantly being evil.
> they aren't doing any effective long-term planning
They do, you just don't grok it. These applications are just toys. They are the result of the plan but not the plan itself. The plan is to just bury a ton of fiber, build a ton of computers, hire a ton of developers, and see what the heck happens. The plan is so successful that they can build and deploy these apps for almost no marginal cost, which is why they also probably feel free to just throw them away.
No - Google does not have some brilliant master plan we are unable to understand. If you're really arguing that their "plan" is to just spend money and see what sticks, then I'd say they absolutely deserve criticism for being fucking clueless idiots.
We are discussing the issue here in the very cathedral of "spend money and see what sticks". That's the whole silicon valley venture strategy. If you think of Google as a large-scale startup incubator with a very efficient private cloud in house, then you will understand the long tail of their product lineup much better.
AngularJS is dead. Angular continues. As a non-user, the impression I got on the release of Angular 2 was roughly “we’re making a new product that shares some similarities with AngularJS, and we’ll continue to maintain both indefinitely, but all active development will be on this new product that we’ve decided to name ‘Angular’ just to confuse everyone”.
Creator here. I was just trying to gather updated information on Hangouts a couple days ago. I try to keep the list as accurate as possible. I'm probably going to move it (or even remove it), but haven't had any solid info either way come my way. Thread from Twitter talking about Hangouts:
The only real issue I have with ditching chrome apps in favour of PWAs it all the lost work in making web apps look and feel native. Now we have to live with a half-browser wrapper that may or may not have the forward and back buttons as fallback in order to use PWAs that the developer never expected to be "installed" to a computer.
Same with Google Goggles, which was replaced by Google Lens. It wasn't just a simple rebranding as the two existed at the same time momentarily, but no functionality was really lost.
Currencies that are worth $1 more or less should round cash transactions to the nearest 10¢. Then we could simplify coinage considerably and we would all save time waiting in line for people to count out pennies and nickels over amounts that are immaterial.
True, but they don't need to relate 16384 types of data. It sounds like they were using one column per record, rather than one row per record. So if they had a sensible data model 2000 columns should be more than sufficient.
You're on to something. The number of tables in MySQL, SQLite, and Excel are virtually unlimited. It seems like that is the lowest common divider ensuring compatibility and data integrity when case numbers grow beyond bounds.
