AirSage is very clearly offering non-anonymized (read: private) information about individuals. That is, they offer "insights like the home and work locations of people".
> AirSage uses its massive source data and patented algorithms to understand the movement of population and trips start to finish, origin to destination every day for the entire country. It’s not just about the where and when. Through years of research and development, AirSage also knows the “why”, or purpose, of the more than a billion trips made in the United States every day.
> Understanding populations as they relate to the physical world has been the core competency of AirSage since the beginning. For any physical point of interest in the United States, insights like the home and work locations of people seen in an area or duration of stay or frequency of visits are all characteristics that can provide a new level of understanding never before capable.
> Brands and Marketers recognize that the world is not just about what takes place on the screen of a tv, computer or mobile phone. It’s about how technology helps enhance our real physical world. AirSage is a leader in providing insightful information about the audiences advertisers want to reach as they relate to the locations and places that people spend their time.
I don't know what intention you had when you posted that link but it clearly disproves that anyone uses the terrible built-in RSS reader in firefox.
Here, just take a look at the first response:
>Literally 99.99% of Firefox users did not use the built in RSS support[1].
>I love RSS! I also never used the built in Firefox RSS support because it was not very good. Mozilla also compiled a helpful list of alternative RSS readers for the 0.01% of users that used this feature and made it easy to export your feed list[2].
Furthermore, the 12mbit/stat is for content that has been encoded in advance, ie nowhere close to real time. If they want to broadcast live sports in 8k, they're not going to get such good compression.
> In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of intitial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20:1; the ratio of debugging times over 25:1; of program sizes 5:1; and of program execution speed about 10:1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity. (Code Complete, page 548)
From what I can tell of the quote, it looks to be just the ability of an engineer to successfully code a new program? Does it touch on any of the other roles of a computer programmer, such as the ability to break a large task into smaller, incremental deliverables, arrange those deliverables in a way that allows parallelism, communicating with the rest of the team to actually make use of this parallelism, and before doing any of this actually verifying that the thing you’re planning to implement is really what the customer needs? And of course, such work is usually done within an existing system that you have to navigate and modify in a way that remains maintainable (for example, writing the right types of tests, and creating the appropriate types of abstractions). I would be stunned if one’s ability along those axes plateaus within just a couple years of experience.
I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything seems to be very well-polished. At
both places, people generally are similar in their ability to write code that does a specific thing, but there’s a night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things, because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In other words, I feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my coworkers fresh out of college.
If the data collection is “anom-user-123456789 launched the built in email-client 20 times and sent 30 mails”, I suspect that’s not exactly HIPPA or ITAR-regulated data.
They don't need to sell hardware to achieve what they're doing. In the current form, they are mainly selling a service (SMTP relay on EC2) disguised as hardware (imx board inside a fancy box).
Why not charge the service for $100/year and allow anyone to use a Raspberry Pi and USB flash drive, which costs $35+$20? If they're using Linux on an imx, then there's likely little difficulty in porting to Raspberry Pi.
If I understand what you are asking correctly, then you are not wrong, and there's definitely an option to do this, but you are not the customer they are looking for.
If you have the chops to get a Rpi running, then you probably know how to run a mail server or you are definitely able to read an EXIM book and get it going on EC2 in a day... with all the consequences.
On the other hand, if you are a business professional, or a crypto holder, or a privacy concerned mom, you don't have the time and chops to go through the setup. What you want is an "iPhone for email", and this is what Helm will provide.
One device, simple setup, no hassle, all updates and management are taken care for you. It's beautiful, and $99/y isn't going to sway you. I pay $100/m for Comcast and get subpar internet in return, but I am not going to go and setup an ISP to save money.
That said, if you think this is a good idea but could be done at $100/y sub on a Pi, perhaps is a great time to start a competing service ;)
If a .iso is provided, I can't see why flashing a custom "Helm iso" is any different from flashing the default "Raspberry Pi iso", and there are a lot of people who can flash the raspbian -- there have been 5 - 10 million raspberry pi's sold so far. So, I think there are a lot of people who can use the Raspberry Pi.
From the perspective of Google it is obviously important to be present in the largest market on Earth both commercially and strategically, and not to let its competitors have it all for themselves.
From the perspective of the US (Google is an American company) it is obviously tactically and strategically important to have the best information possible on what is going on in China. This is much, much easier to achieve when American companies are present "on the ground".
For example, I am sure that this project gives the US a pretty good insight on what the Chinese government does. It would be much more difficult to ask Tencent how the Chinese system works, wouldn't it?
Google doesn’t really have world-wide competitors in the Chinese search market. Baidu is basically a large scale healthcare scam, while Bing is struggling
Foreign companies face different rules in China when compared to Chinese ones via selective enforcement of law. They will not be exposed to the same real Chinese system.
From a world wide perspective, google yielding the search market to China has yet to effect them since their competitors operating there are not at all competitive.
At this point, it is unlikely that Baidu will ever be competitive outside of China, especially with protectionism that prevents it from actually having to compete with google in any case. Bing has had its chance and hasn’t performed.
Likewise, search is increasingly less relevant as time goes on, so longer term vision likely drifts away from it anyways (which is more likely the real reason why google wants back into China).
Thought experiment: If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually fill the vacuum. Who?
Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
Not trying to justify any of this, but it's worth discussing.
> If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually fill the vacuum. Who?
Someone with less skills and expertise, who will hopefully make more mistakes implementing censorship? Or maybe someone with more skin in the game (e.g. locals) who might actually be more motivated to sabotage it?
But, conversely, Google implementing such a thing in China - and justifying it as moral there by these arguments - would also give them skills and expertise to do it US in the future, and a canned excuse as to why it's okay.
> Suppose that Chinese-born-and-bred search-engine-and-advertising-company, through virtue of having access to a massive economic resource, succeeds broadly and then enters the western markets. What then?
> If Google doesn't move in, someone else will eventually fill the vacuum. Who?
This is eerily reminiscent of arguments that people have used around Project Maven (cloud compute for drone footage). At this point I am starting to wonder if this style of argument has a fundamental weakness. E.g. if immoral act "X" is going to be done by someone, is it logical that the most moral actor "A" must do this? In the limit, this has the most moral actors doing the most evil. In fact, it has the most moral actors being the first to jump in to do evil, before anyone else even gets a chance to. That seems totally backwards.
There is no vacuum. Existing Chinese companies already provide all of the same services there that Google provides in the rest of the world. For example Baidu is the most heavily used search engine.
I think we need proper privacy measures, since the misuse of data is not necessarily an "antitrust issue". For instance, would breaking up Facebook really mean that the newly formed constituents respected privacy? And would antitrust enforcement against Google or Facebook reduce privacy exploitation by smaller entities?
I'd argue that it would not -- 1,000 small Facebooks could still violate privacy. Creating privacy legislation is the only real way to achieve proper privacy guarantees.
> Marcus also accuses Acton of “slow-playing” the implementation of a feature that would let businesses message WhatsApp users and ultimately help with monetization.
What does "monetization" mean? Charging more? Ads? Selling user data? If it means ads or selling user data, then that would directly violate the contract that Acton and Facebook agreed to, and thus Acton would have zero reason to implement it at all.
Brian advocated a particular business model for monetizing WhatsApp:
> For his part, Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.” [0]
David is saying that Brian, though advocating for this model and against the alternative of monetizing data, didn't put in any effort to demonstrate this model was workable:
> During this time, it became pretty clear that while advocating for business messaging, and being given the opportunity to build and deliver on that promise, Brian actively slow-played the execution, and never truly went for it. In my view, if you’re passionate about a certain path — in this case, letting businesses message people and charging for it — and if you have internal questions about it, then work hard to prove that your approach has legs and demonstrate the value. [1]
