Skynet is happening...

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/we-failed-badly-by-gathering-private-data-google-executive-admits/19686490?icid=main|aim|dl1|sec1_lnk3|179632

Skynet is happening? how does that apply to Google?

Skynet is double posting?

ZOMG, we had an errant piece of code that ACCIDENTALLY recorded your logins, passwords, medical records and anything else we could pull. Uh-huh. This is old news, though.

Skynet is Facebook. They both send human flesh back through time. I have proof.

Dr. Hess wrote: ZOMG, we had an errant piece of code that ACCIDENTALLY recorded your logins, passwords, medical records and anything else we could pull. Uh-huh. This is old news, though.

That was my thinking. I could see an accidental piece of code that does something like record the network name illegally or something like that, but usernames, passwords, and medical records? Seriously? Why would code to do that be anywhere near the streetview cars?

Told you so.

In reply to Tommy Suddard:

they 'claimed' that it was put in, but was supposed to be deactivated when the streetview cars went through... yarite

i just said that because it's been an ongoing conspiracy for the longest time lol. just type into google of course or any other search engine "google is skynet"

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/22/google-releases-skynet-prediction-api/

Tommy Suddard wrote:

Dr. Hess wrote: ZOMG, we had an errant piece of code that ACCIDENTALLY recorded your logins, passwords, medical records and anything else we could pull. Uh-huh. This is old news, though.

That was my thinking. I could see an accidental piece of code that does something like record the network name illegally or something like that, but usernames, passwords, and medical records? Seriously? Why would code to do that be anywhere near the streetview cars?

I can answer that. Yes this was an honest-to-goodness mistake. The testing code that was left in grabbed anything that was going by, regardless of what it was. Maybe you were downloading Windows Updates, or maybe you were transmitting medical records, usernames, passwords, or whatever in plaintext. Whatever it was, the code grabbed it.

The streetview cars were basically wardriving and geotagging APs - the idea was to use access points like cell towers to triangulate your position, based on a database Google would keep. Kinda strange and pointless idea...but in testing they had some code that would grab a little bit of the wireless traffic (probably to make sure it was really connected to the AP), and that got left in.

It's actually surprisingly easy to capture information that you really don't want to have in your database. Surprisingly easy to let that info back out into the wild inadvertently, too. FB, their 3rd-party developers and Myspace are all in trouble for this right now. Of course, I too have my doubts about how "inadvertent" it all really is.

But it really is pretty easy to capture information that makes you say "huh, I'm not sure I should have that"