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What database data leaked on the Internet caused Google to get my mothers maiden name? My Wireless is secure, how did Google get my data from my WPA2 wireless network(s)?
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Anyone else read this:
and wonder why, when the facts haven't changed, their conclusion has?
This is not a sign of an organisation that has the ability to make informed decisions. More a sign of one that just believes the latest thing it's told.
For some reason this reminds me of Jen from the IT Crowd who believed that, if you were to google the word "Google", the internet would be destroyed.
I also thought of the former World Chess Champion Wilhelm Steinitz who, when repeatedly given chess advice by an amateur, turned to him and asked "Sir, have you ever seen a monkey examine a watch?"
Steve
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I'm getting bored of the Google WiFi debate now, but let me just finish off with one last thought for you all.
Who would you rather have accessing your unsecured WiFi network? The Google Car that does one pass and probably only has very minute data...
... Or would you rather have a criminal sit outside your house for a few hours, grab your personal details, your identity, the dates you're away on holiday, your email conversations, etc....
I know who I'd rather have.
Who would you rather have accessing your unsecured WiFi network? The Google Car that does one pass and probably only has very minute data...
... Or would you rather have a criminal sit outside your house for a few hours, grab your personal details, your identity, the dates you're away on holiday, your email conversations, etc....
I know who I'd rather have.
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Jeff Knows
- Original Poster
- #208
Google know who wrote it. We know the software is called gslite (previously gstumbler) and we know the 8 lines or so of offending code. It was written to take the data collected by Kismet (Free open source software that you or I could use to sniff WiFi data) and discard useless information, write the rest into Google's filesystem.
Kismet doesn't discriminate data. It collects everything it hears, even encrypted data and when in drone mode (Like Google were using) pushes it all out to a listen server, Gslite (The software written years ago as Gstumbler by a Google employee, re-purposed and renamed Gslite then used in StreetCar) is meant to sift through all that incoming Kismet data, discard the useless bits like the encrypted data which would be jibberish, add the GPS location to the WiFi headers and write it to disk.
http://static.googleusercontent.com...pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf
Above is the independent source code review of Gslite. It's a good read if you are technical. On page 8 you'll see a figure of how it was setup. Then the following code on 11.
Code:
DEFINE_bool(discard_encrypted_body, true, "Discard bodies of encrypted 802.11 frames");
DEFINE_bool(discard_control_frame, false, "Discard 802.11 control frames");
DEFINE_bool(discard_data_frame, false, "Discard all 802.11 data frames");
DEFINE_bool(discard_management_frame, false, "Discard all 802.11 management frames");Now. Consider that the above code was not changed from when Gslite was Gstumbler and that as above those options could be superseded from a launching script or program, which is Google's Standard Programming Practice. Don't change the code, manipulate it with outside scripts.
So what happened here is that for some reason Gslite launched with default options, writing everything but encrypted to disk. One line of script could have stopped this from happening.
Now consider that Google segregated all the data, complied with deletion requests, created a new 'Privacy Advocate' job position, retrained staff and revised their code checking policy. All for one line of code, that might even exist it's just missing a semicolon or something and errors out.
It's a very, very costly mistake. But it's still a mistake. Perhaps they should have changed program defaults so it didn't happen, but Google point out that's not how they roll. Perhaps it should have been checked more thoroughly. Perhaps an engineer was running it that way to test it out and someone just stuck it into production. Perhaps the lead engineer hates his Job and deleted that bit of code. Who the hell knows.
The point is, Google never intended it to be that way. They have nothing to gain from that information but worldwide lawsuits and loss of money. There is no upside to having it and it's perfectly clear how it happened. That all points to accident in my book.
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seiretto
- Original Poster
- #210
I do not agree. I actually think that commercially there is.
LOCAL services/searches is going to be big business, having such data could help profile cites/areas/streets/houses and keep fat-old-G ahead of the rest so giving them an unfair advantage.
Its not right at all.
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Jeff Knows
- Original Poster
- #211
You are confusing the two data sets.
The information that is SSID tags, MAC address' and their corresponding GPS location is very useful. I completely agree. It lets them locate people by the WiFi networks around them, thus serving local searches.
However none of that is illegal to obtain nor is it what is being questioned. It's the data we are talking about, the web pages, email address', passwords they picked up and stored to disk while looking for the router ID info.
That stuff, is useless to Google. They have no need for your email address or password or what sites you happened to be visiting at that time. They get plenty of demographic and website statistic data through analytics and peoples own Google accounts. It's junk data, some of it just happens to be personal so people freak out about it and proclaim Google as some kind of identity thief masquerading as an Advertising/Search giant.
I still don't see a single reason why Google would require the 2 webpages I seen when they drove by my house and my Gmail password, or similar data. Analytics likely produces 600Gb's of market data a week, nevermind over 3 years. The phones tell them where you are, your email tells them who you like, your searches tell them what you want.. Anything they can possibly glean for market advantage from the WiFi data they already have in abundance.
It's weird on a personal level. At the scale of Google it's a waste of time and resources.
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Jeff Knows
- Original Poster
- #213
No?
I think risking your stellar reputation in pseudo-illegal activities to collect 600Gb's of random 'market research' when you have terabytes of fully legit and more complete data coming in weekly from many more sources a waste of time.
It's like running a shop that accepts multiple payment methods and despite knowing exactly what is coming and going and what payment method each transaction used you still decide to break in PayPal headquarters and have a look at their records.
I think risking your stellar reputation in pseudo-illegal activities to collect 600Gb's of random 'market research' when you have terabytes of fully legit and more complete data coming in weekly from many more sources a waste of time.
It's like running a shop that accepts multiple payment methods and despite knowing exactly what is coming and going and what payment method each transaction used you still decide to break in PayPal headquarters and have a look at their records.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #214
Do you think that Google still has a stellar reputation?
My view remains that for an organisation of Google's size to blame this on someone who was having a play with some software is not really believeable. It would have been incredibly stupid of Google to allow this to happen unintentionally.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/10/27/google-tries-explain-street-view-mistake/
.
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Jeff Knows
- Original Poster
- #215
Then you clearly don't understand how Google operates.
It may employ 20,000 people however it is still ran like a 3-man startup. Google employees are mostly computer engineers, the brightest geeks in the world and they have a massive amount of freedom within the company to produce what they wish.
Most of Google's revolutionary products were born from the '20% time'. Get lots of Geeks together, give them a few billion dollars, a nice office with food and a serverfarm you will see some amazing technology start appearing.
Google as a company think like a geek. PR, Aesthetics and (To their downfall) Privacy are sometimes at the bottom of the pile of important aspects. It's not malicious, they just get caught up in releasing something cool and don't really think about it.
We can't forget that the plan was to drive a car down every road on the planet. If you are a geek and part of the 10 man team that's going to make that happen, your mind is running wild with ideas. Whether or not some folks in Germany will take offense to you mapping their WiFi won't enter your head. It's just a cool feature to you.
Google's virtue and their issue is that they don't wait around to do things. They get 5 guys excited about it and let them do it. It brings us some of the most revolutionary products on the web and sometimes, they miss something.
It would be far, far incredibly stupider for Google to do this intentionally. I can see exactly how it happened. I've done it myself, too busy trying to get an awesome new feature working and going you completely forget to encrypt the database password for it and all hell breaks loose.. but luckily my mistakes don't get driven around the planet.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #216
I can assure you that I fully understand how Google operates. I know all about their 20% time. I am now in my tenth year in this business and I have not had my eyes shut for all of this time.
Well it sure as hell should! They are now one of the World's largest companies and they need to behave appropriately. I can just see a judge shaking his head as they tell him, "Sorry your honour, but we are geeks. It is not really our fault." (which is effectively what they have done).
I think in this case it may be you who does not understand how Google operates. They are not at all geeky in their taking over of the technologies developed by hundreds of small companies. Don't make the mistake of thinking that they invented all of these revolutionary products during their 20% time.
Remove some of these from their portfolio and they don't look quite so revolutionary.
.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #218
Compelling (and interesting) evidence that Google is manually pushing its own services to the top of the SERPs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/15/google_accused_of_hard_coding_own_results_into_search/
.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/15/google_accused_of_hard_coding_own_results_into_search/
.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #219
I suppose it could be worse. We could be in the USA ... but then does location matter?
The Register...
Significantly ...
The Register...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/17/google_facebook_wiretapping/
Significantly ...
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My statement was pretty clear. It was linking back to my original remarks that you are on a personal vendetta against Google, for whatever reason, and that you'll post any old tripe to try and "win" your case; even if that tripe has absolutely no basis or fact.
Again though, the previous thread on another business forum about copyright leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #226
Here's what I actually said in my original remarks...
"A lot of stories have surfaced during the last few months about Google and privacy issues. I thought it would be a good idea if we documented some of these here to see exactly where they are heading."
Actually while I agree that we should be wary of Google's objectives I don't agree with everything that is being said about them.
There is no "personal vendetta" and there is no case to win so calm down dear, it's only a wee record of what people (some of whom are much wiser than you or me) are saying about Google. You don't have to participate. In fact you would probably be better to just ignore this because it seems to be upsetting you.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #228
Sorry about that Seiretto.
I am also very disappointed in how this has turned out and I must admit that I have been taken aback by the bile and vitriol that it has generated. I have been involved in similar discussions in other more Internet dedicated forums. I have also read quite a lot about this situation and this is the only place where people have been dismissing Google's transgressions - quite unusual!
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Dawg
- Original Poster
- #229
Interesting that:
would you ascribe the singular reaction from this forum to:
Small business people (as represented here) having their heads in the sand regarding the behaviour shown by Google and flagged up by politicians, the media and regulators?
or;
Small business people thinking that it is a storm in a teacup generated by politicians, the media and regulators, with an added sprinkling of conspiracy nutjobs?
As with most things it is probably somewhere between the two, but the common denominator seems to be that small business people think differently from other people on other forums.
What are the other forums you mentioned? Are they business ones too, (which would negate the above)?
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Face facts - Google trangressions have amounted to less than any of ours this last year.
Only yesterday I flicked a fag end out of my car window. This is littering, it's illegal. I also spent an unlawful ectra hour in the local pub at the weekend, and I've sure as hell driven through 30mph zones at at least 32mph, not 30 every day of my working life.
We all do these tiny things, we all break laws everyday. Mostly we have no intent to do so for the sake of breaking a law, we have no intent to hurt anyone.
At worst, thats what Google did. It's clear why they wanted to do what they did (to collect legitimate information), there was a miniscule cock-up, they said sorry. If you drive, you haven't got a hope in hell of being 'less of a law breaker' than Google. So whats the point of this thread at all?
What they did is simply not enough to be relevant.
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Dawg
- Original Poster
- #232
How can you have an opinion as to who is in a minority? Surely it's a fairly simple counting exercise?
In my opinion those 5 cups of tea are very much a minority of the 7 cups of tea we are drinking....
But well done in linking to a press release and then a Guardian report of the press release.
Why does the phrase "the blind leading the blind" pop up? However I do so admire your tenacity: no argument brooked, no nuance countenanced: all in the cause of doing us a favour and alerting us to Google's quest for world domination.
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bdw
- Original Poster
- #236
Google sued for "reading" non Gmail users mail.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/23/gmail_privacy_lawsuit/
This is perhaps not as serious as some of the other stuff but is it right that they should base their ads on the content of a private email from another provider?
.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/23/gmail_privacy_lawsuit/
This is perhaps not as serious as some of the other stuff but is it right that they should base their ads on the content of a private email from another provider?
.
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Seriously? You think this is an article?
That's like me starting a law-suit because my e-mail to you was scanned for viruses by your ISP.
I'm pretty sure from a legal point of view, as soon as you send the e-mail message (that is as soon as it has been sent from your mail client towards tinternet), the message becomes the property of the recipient and not the sender.
This case will be thrown out in due course.
Another non story.
That's like me starting a law-suit because my e-mail to you was scanned for viruses by your ISP.
I'm pretty sure from a legal point of view, as soon as you send the e-mail message (that is as soon as it has been sent from your mail client towards tinternet), the message becomes the property of the recipient and not the sender.
This case will be thrown out in due course.
Another non story.
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Well, when I said pretty sure, I could only find a BBC article where the need to ascertain ownership came into play. Obviously there is a great difference between who owns the copyright to the content and who owns the actual message/envelope/letter. I have strong suspicions that it would be the person the letter is intended to go to who would be able to claim ownership of it should the need arise, such as in this instance.
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