This is sad. There is no proof that this person was the one who stole the phone (Of course, there is no proof that he wasn't). I wont tell you what to do, but I would never do something like this unless I'm confident that I have the right person.
Scrubbing the phone isn't as common as some make it out to be, and the result is victims becoming victims twice.
And we need people like Richard Stallman to provide a contrast. That said, I think the guy provided a fair article on how things might turn out based on how they are currently progressing.
I've been working on a project like this that's nearing completion (it works, and the api is mostly complete). It differs from this in that it uses any normal browser to fulfill requests (via extensions).
The idea is to have a pythonic API to any browser that has reasonable support for extensions; i.e. a cross-browser scripting.
What does it offer over Selenium Webdriver? Yeah, the API is not terribly pythonic, but it's battle tested and stable, works across almost all browsers and there's always wrappers like Splinter (http://splinter.cobrateam.info/) if you prefer a more pythonic interface.
As a non-american, I think diversifying and spreading the production (and knowhow) of technology is a good thing, in pretty much the same way not having only one browser/os vendor is a good thing. It's even better when it's spread geographically, and across different cultures.
I understand the reasoning of wanting to keep every thing local, but, and please pardon my frankness, it seems selfish .
I absolutely agree with you that spreading the production is a good thing. But that's not really what's happening with Shenzhen.
It's the centralisation in Shenzhen that, while awesome in one way, is the most troubling to me. If "something", be it politics or natural disaster, or crazy madman, happens to the wrong part of Shenzhen, the global impact would be dramatic.
Remember a bit over a decade ago, when earthquakes on Taiwan sent RAM prices soaring? Or when flooding in South Asia sent harddisk prices through the roof not that long ago?
The centralisation in Shenzhen is rapidly becoming a far higher risk to the global economy than either of those two.
If I'm manipulated into buying something that I genuinely want, then I'd be happier for it.
It's not as if seeing an ad for a $100 256GB SSD would make me skip looking up the reviews for it and evaluating its performance before I buy it.
It's mystifying to me why people are bothered by targeted ads. If ads become relevant to me, that'd be a wonderful thing. I'm not saying I'm right -- I'm saying I wish someone would explain why targeted advertising is evil.
1. I get no say in what information they store and use. If somebody else used my computer, that information is associated with me.
2. The more information companies have about me, the easier it is for the government to gather information without due process.
3. What is gathered about me can be stolen by somebody else.
I agree that, in theory, well targeted ads are far superior to the dating ads I get on Facebook, but with zero control, transparency or accountability, I'm very uncomfortable with the amount if info they are trying to gather from me.
I'm not bothered by targeted ads. I'm bothered by the idea that someone who has amassed all the information about me to show me well targeted ads can do other things as well.
For instance, they could sell pseudo psychological profiles or provide scoring services to potential employers, banks, insurance companies, landlords, users of dating sites or governments.
They could be subpoenaed and hence make me vulnerable to extortion by everyone with a sufficiently large legal budget or a political interest. The data could also be stolen by organized criminals.
In other words, it would give great power over my life to anyone who gets hold of that data, and therefore I do not want this kind of data to exist.
> If I'm manipulated into buying something that I genuinely want, then I'd be happier for it.
But do you genuinely want it? or were you _influinced_ into wanting it? It's the same principle that makes fast food advertisements so profitable for the food industry. The ads are already targeted (most people like to eat tasty food).
Furthermore, if you're truly indifferent with being influenced like this, to what extent will the "influencing" remain acceptable to you? where would you draw the line?
The issues with eroding privacy and with the amount of data needed to create targeted advertising are well explored, thus to expand the discussion a bit, lets talk about the subjects outside the scope of privacy.
Advertising, be that targeted or not, are problematic. In return for redirecting how people spend money, they distract people and steals time.
A child growing up is in average spending 133 hours watching TV commercials[1]. Add that with commercials on the web, games, and other media and the time spent on commercial is maybe longer for a child then what they spend learning a subject like math in school. If you then include the time lost from the distracting effect while reading email, or accessing a news site, and the cost of advertising to the individual goes up. People who's main problem at work or school is the ability to focus should strongly consider using tools such as ad-block. It could be the difference between graduating or not.
In contrast, opt-in advertising like recommendation services do not have those issues, and are in my view the only form of targeted advertising that are morally on the OK side. They use primarily legal methods in their businesses model, and do not need to use exploits and legal trickery to work.
People aren't bothered by the targeted ads. They're bothered by what else can be done with that vast, accumulated store of information and the network that's designed for surveillance, tracking and predicting behavior. For a lot of people, facebook is their identity. It's the way others see them and communicate with them, and their account holds a great deal of personal information which could be used to impersonate, blackmail or profile them.
The whole point of manipulation is to make you go against your own interests and buy things you don't need, at some point down the road. Otherwise it would just be making you aware that something exists (which I agree is fine, targeted or not), not manipulation.
> unless companies get to protect real IP that they develop themselves, what's the point in developing anything.
To make money.
Companies (and people) have been developing new technology long before patents were introduced, and something tells me that they will continue to do so just fine even in the unlikely event of the patent system is abolished.
The millions spent give them the advantage of being the first to introduce this type of product in market. Nothing more.
on a personal note: I'd hate to think what would have happened if everyone throughout history thought of "IP" the same way people nowadays seem to think. We'd probably just started producing cars that need to be cranked to start.
> startssl.com offers free SSL certificates valid in almost every browser, good for one year
startssl certs aren't trusted by my browser (or maybe the os?), so ssl's identity authentication for startssl is void. It's still better than no cert since ISPs can't detect what certs my browser trusts, thus wont make stupid moves, probably.
If you can use more widely recognized certificates, please do.
I've debated purchasing a wildcard certificate from them but was afraid of having users whose browsers didn't trust the root CA. May I ask what combination of OS and browser you're using?
Voice recognition has always been patchy or non-existent for languages other than English, and it's a deal breaker for something that relies _primarily_ on voice for input. That's the point I believe he was making.
I don't think he was referring to the glasses in specific rather than the state of voice recognition as a whole.
We all know that prior art can be missed when issuing a patent -- I'd assume having it already in the patent system makes that less likely to happen, and easier to deal with when it does happen.
Scrubbing the phone isn't as common as some make it out to be, and the result is victims becoming victims twice.