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The arstechnica article is bull. AOSP is alive and well, and in no way is Google trying to extinguish it. The complaints in the arstechnica article mostly boil down to the fact that Google provides components that interact with its cloud services which aren't open source because they aren't useful except as an interface to those services. They're useful, but not essential to the operating system.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

And yet Windows 10 on release day will have more users than Linux has gotten in 22 fricking years LOL.

BTW you are simply trading one master for another, as Google is in the process of pulling a EEE on Android, they have also cut off the funding they were giving to AOSP and if you bother to look online their OEM contracts make MSFT contracts of the 90s look like the GPL. And funny that so many talk about how "open" Google is yet I can take any bog standard Windows laptop right off the shelf at Walmart and be dual booting anything from BSD to Haiku in under 10 minutesyet on the exact same hardware thanks to Google DRM a ChromeOS "laptop" can ONLY boot a handful of Linux distros that have been specially modified to run on ChromeOS hardware (even though its made from standard laptop parts) and even then ONLY if you put in a page and a half of CLI bullshit AND completely wipe ChromeOS, no dual booting allowed...yet MSFT is supposed to be the "DRM happy" company and Google "open"...DaFuq?

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Google should give the guy that wrote "don't be evil" a fucking BMWer as so many otherwise logical geeks have bought that bullshit hook, line, and sinker, that it makes Apple's hipster marketing look as amateur as New Coke. "Think Different" ain't got shit on them, no siree bob!

The Apple Watch shipped with just the very limited WatchKit SDK available to developers. The coming WatchOS 2 update will provide developers with a native sdk that allows apps to actually run on the watch rather than just display an interface to an iPhone app.

Perhaps this new sdk will attract more apps.

Was just reading about a 25 GPU cluster for brute forcing passwords. You can use them for supercomputing too. You could probably homebrew one with used equipment and save some cash. Anyway, here is some inspiration: http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Stronger for everyone except them, perhaps.

They did something similar, put a couple of specific constants, into the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. It was later shown that they amounted to a skeleton key - if you knew the numbers used to derive the constants, you could predict the future output of a given RNG instance with only a small amount of sample data. So any encryption based on Dual_EC_DRBG could be considered to be broken by the NSA (somewhat conveniently, in a way that only the NSA could actually prove).

Despite the poor performance of this algorithm which lead most implementers to ignore it, it managed to end up as the default in the product of one of the most trusted vendors, RSA. There was speculation that the NSA bribed them to make this design choice. [1]

Unsurprisingly, it was withdrawn from the standard in 2014.

[1] The only comment on that story makes the same point - that the NSA, in the past, had reinforced weaknesses in DES. In the light of the later evidence about Dual_EC_DRBG, that may bear further examination - if the change was the tweaking of constants, it's entirely possible that this reinforced the standard for everyone but the NSA.

I thought we weren't supposed to use flash any more. CVE's & mozilla & facebook

I don't want to have unprotected vids.

lol ethics! I take it you never read the infamous IRC logs then.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Out of information, which school of ethics so you think they belong to?

Don't be so sure that they won't redesign their software, and don't think that bans are the only tools which governments have at their disposal. Skype was originally secure but has since been modified to add backdoors and, possibly, spyware. Apple was forced to forego direct client-to-client communications in FaceTime and begin relaying calls through severs (where they could be intercepted) because of a patent suit from VirnetX,, a company that specializes in military patents and has also sued Skype.

Yes, companies have and will redesign their software to degrade security at the behest of governments, or they'll get sued by patent trolls operated as front companies for those governments.

Judge Hellerstein is on a roll.

How east Texas became the epicenter for 'patent troll' lawsuits

Company with no product wins $533M verdict vs. Apple, says it’s no “patent troll”

East Texas Federal Judge Sets Rules for Post-'Alice' World

http://arstechnica.com/ is pretty good from a tech news coverage perspective. http://theregister.co.uk/ has the nice snarky British humor angle as well.
http://fark.com/ tends to have pretty great and balanced political discussion and humor.

For more irreverent/technical discussion threads, though, I'd guess there might be some corner of reddit that could match what we had here on Slashdot... but I haven't redditted much, so someone else will have to guide us.

Are you insinuating that the captured IRC etc. traffic on display there is faked?

No, I'm pointing out that it exposes the GGers. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there is a good summary here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

The full log is here: http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6...

You can search it easily for keywords. I'm still kind of amazed that with all the planning and effort they put into GG they made the obvious mistake of using a public IRC room to organize it all, speaking quite openly about their real motives and how they were astroturfing the hell out of social media with sock puppet accounts.

That's all that needs to be said when talking about Lenovo.

Superfish

Wankers

Someone got confused by Snapchat (he's not the only one) and sent a video to his entire contact list instead of just his girlfriend. Those should not have been easy to confuse.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Dude, per the original article:

The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).

I think the National Academy of Science is a pretty good source for an appeal to authority, don't you?

No one needs Blizzard's permission to have a SC tourney

Technically they do, at least if they're streaming the tourney to the public. The graphics of StarCraft and StarCraft II are copyrighted.

so... again... what is the restriction?

It's considered performing the video game publicly. Video games are considered audiovisual works in U.S. copyright law, and the owner of copyright in an audiovisual work has the exclusive right to perform that work publicly. Doing so without express permission is copyright infringement, as if you were offering to stream . Please see the article "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland and this appellate brief from a moot court.

But again, the scene speaks for itself in that it has:

...copyright strikes from a game's publisher against a league for broadcasting the league's matches.

That's the one big difference between physical sports and electronic sports: electronic sports are almost always non-free. See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland.

What happened to the Apollo engine? Couldn't that be re-built and used by the U.S.A.?

They are:

http://arstechnica.com/science...

An F1 powered rocket with modern improvements would be tremendous, iit was a monster then, an updated one would be doubleplusgood.

Amazing they let it languish for solid boosters.

...that Microsoft is even offering free upgrades to Windows 10 for pirated Windows 7 versions. http://arstechnica.com/informa... Although, this makes one wonder if this is an attempt to find pirates and prosecute them....

Like the removal of legacy bios on most ALL tablets and budget laptops; It is coming... Just slowly so people won't put up a big stink:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Nice to see that American politicians are not the only crooks with too much power. Now what do we do about it?

When US politicians try to ban online gambling, it's not to drive business to government gambling sites, but rather to drive business to Sheldon Adelson. I guess they figure if you're going to be corrupt, you might as well be corrupt for someone who pays better than the government.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

I didn't just cite one source, half wit.

I cited a lot of things. And mostly recently I cited a peer reviewed paper.

Choke on it.

Did you say check on it? OK! Here's a complete list (as of this writing) of your citations in this thread in chronological order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.populartechnology.n... (Site is a one man operation that doesn't identify the operator or his alleged "staff". Attempts to debunk Cook paper by cherry-picking results from a nebulous survey.)
http://www.nature.com/news/pub... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://articles.mercola.com/si... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://arstechnica.com/science... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.the-scientist.com/?... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... (opinion piece written by a lawyer (who doesn't appear to have ever practiced law) who claims to be a "trained scientist". The article relies exclusively on research done by unnamed "investigative journalists" at populartechnology.com - a blog that by all appearances is operated by a single unidentified individual.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... (first mention of a legitimate source rebutting the Cook paper)
http://link.springer.com/artic... (legitimate source debunking Cook)

So what have we got here...looks like a bunch of citations that have nothing to do with the Cook paper, one citation from a clearly bogus website, One citation written by a hack lawyer relying exclusively on the aforementioned bogus website, one citation from a pop-sci website alluding to an authoritative source, and (finally) a citation pointing to a legitimate source. And guess what? I've recognized your final source's potential legitimacy multiple times. You should probably take that as a win and call it a day.

In any event, don't you think you could've saved yourself a lot of time, effort, aggravation and ridicule if you'd have just kept your mouth shut until you actually come across a legitimate source? Instead, your process (if you can call it that) of supporting your arguments is to link to sources that you haven't subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever. It's a textbook example of a lack of critical thinking skills.

As to your claim that there is only one peer reviewed paper refuting your peer reviewed paper...

You're making things up again. I made no such claim. And for the last time, Cook's paper isn't MY paper. The only time I addressed it's validity I expressed skepticism of it's conclusions. Since you're having trouble remembering, here, let me help you:

"To be honest, I

And yet it happened:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Also this notion that peer review catches all frauds is laughable:
http://www.nature.com/news/pub...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

http://arstechnica.com/science...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...

As to your point about reading the abstracts. That's not enough. You need to actually have the study itself vetted. And peer review does not do that.

These studies are getting busted all the time for making things up or using really sloppy methodology that could be "interpreted" to mean anything... often transparently the author had a conclusion they wanted before even starting the study.

That isn't real science. That's what creationists do. You have to do your study with an open mind and accept whatever the study might say. No forming your theory before the data comes in and no shaping the data to fit your theory. It is FINE to have a hypothesis before you start the study. But it can't go beyond that until you've actually got the data in... and then you base the theory on the data... you do not shape the data to equal your hypothesis.

And that is frequently what is going on.

I'll go with one of the co-architects of ZFS, Matthew Ahrens,
http://arstechnica.com/civis/v...

There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.

In other words, there is a non-zero chance that you will get silent data corruptions on disk if you don't use ECC RAM. It is the same risk with ZFS as with any other filesystem. And yet, personal computers have been running without ECC RAM for decades and it hasn't been a travesty. So yeah, if you are running in the type of situation where you absolutely must ensure the highest level of data integrity, then you must use ECC RAM. If you are running your own personal home media NAS, it is probably not an unmitigable risk to buy cheaper hardware. The storage gurus will argue, "Why use ZFS if you don't care about it's data integrity features?" My response is that ZFS has a ton of other very useful features that make it a great filesystem.

BTW, bad vs. good RAM is not the same thing as non-ECC vs. ECC RAM. While ECC RAM will protect you from bit flips, a bad stick of RAM is still a bad stick with or without the extra parity bit. Aaron Toponce has a good (non-sensational) discussion on the topic,
https://pthree.org/2013/12/10/...

This is a *security* focused appliance that made this goof from one of the more well regarded vendors in the market.

"Goof?" I'm not convinced. It's just as likely that this was engineered into the products intentionally.

News broke last year that NSA was intercepting Cisco equipment enroute to customers and making a few tweaks. Cisco made a big production a few months ago about how they were suddenly willing to ship to random addresses to avoid NSA interdiction. Perhaps that's because whatever NSA needs is already built in, and always has been, and the whole story about NSA physically yanking packages from carriers was misdirection. Put that story out there and people who are able to control the delivery chain will have a strong, but very false, sense of security.

And now we know that transgenic processes occur in nature too.
http://arstechnica.com/science...

For future reference, this is what a ban looks like:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

ban
verb
1.
officially or legally prohibit.
"he was banned from driving for a year"
synonyms: prohibit, forbid, veto, proscribe, disallow, outlaw, make illegal, embargo, bar, debar, block, stop, suppress, interdict; More
noun
1.
an official or legal prohibition.
"a proposed ban on cigarette advertising"
synonyms: prohibition, veto, proscription, embargo, bar, suppression, stoppage, interdict, interdiction, moratorium, injunction
"a ban on soliciting"

I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles
How does this happen?

You are thinking like a PC gamer and thinking about ONLY the CPU and GPU when you compare the PC to the current gen consoles. Machines aren't just CPU's and GPU's, they have internal busses, I/O, RAM. Those matter.

And when it comes to those things, consoles are still specialized beasts.

Lets take the PS2. There were PC gamers claiming their GeForce 3 was better, their CPU faster, etc etc. That may have been true, but the PS2 wasn't an ordinary PC, it had specialized RAM and specialized internal busses. It could do things that a PC of that era simply could not do.

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

Watch the vector unit demos. They're running entirely on the vector unit in 16K of RAM, no CPU involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

IIRC, somebody came up with a Zlib implementation that ran entirely on a PS2 vector unit.

The PS3 is similar, fast Rambus RAM, SPU's, and fast internal busses. IIRC somebody smarter than me referred to it as "taking the multiprocessin ideas introduced with the PS2, further"

The PS4 is more "normal", but still has specialized RAM and internal busses. You simply can't buy a PC with GDDR5 main ram. Imagine if you had a PC with ALL of it's RAM as fast as the RAM on the video card. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But that can't happen, the PC is limited by PCIe.

The PS4 isn't.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

It can move data around in ways a PC simply can not do. It also doesn't have to deal with the problem that is Windows. Windows is a general purpose OS, even when it runs games.

The PS4 runs BSD, while it is also a general purpose OS, there's no need on the PS4 to keep "desktop computer services" running. The PS4 doesn't have to keep a print spool up, have a java updater constantly running, . It doesn't have to worry about the "needs" of an Office suite, or SMB shares, or Norton/Kaspersky/AVG, or any of the other things a PC does. It runs games. It can do other things as well but it's design focus is on games more than anything else.

I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles
How does this happen?

You are thinking like a PC gamer and thinking about ONLY the CPU and GPU when you compare the PC to the current gen consoles. Machines aren't just CPU's and GPU's, they have internal busses, I/O, RAM. Those matter.

And when it comes to those things, consoles are still specialized beasts.

Lets take the PS2. There were PC gamers claiming their GeForce 3 was better, their CPU faster, etc etc. That may have been true, but the PS2 wasn't an ordinary PC, it had specialized RAM and specialized internal busses. It could do things that a PC of that era simply could not do.

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

Watch the vector unit demos. They're running entirely on the vector unit in 16K of RAM, no CPU involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

IIRC, somebody came up with a Zlib implementation that ran entirely on a PS2 vector unit.

The PS3 is similar, fast Rambus RAM, SPU's, and fast internal busses. IIRC somebody smarter than me referred to it as "taking the multiprocessin ideas introduced with the PS2, further"

The PS4 is more "normal", but still has specialized RAM and internal busses. You simply can't buy a PC with GDDR5 main ram. Imagine if you had a PC with ALL of it's RAM as fast as the RAM on the video card. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But that can't happen, the PC is limited by PCIe.

The PS4 isn't.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

It can move data around in ways a PC simply can not do. It also doesn't have to deal with the problem that is Windows. Windows is a general purpose OS, even when it runs games.

The PS4 runs BSD, while it is also a general purpose OS, there's no need on the PS4 to keep "desktop computer services" running. The PS4 doesn't have to keep a print spool up, have a java updater constantly running, . It doesn't have to worry about the "needs" of an Office suite, or SMB shares, or Norton/Kaspersky/AVG, or any of the other things a PC does. It runs games. It can do other things as well but it's design focus is on games more than anything else.

While it's certainly fine for them to remove items featuring the confederate flag in non-historical contexts, as least in the sense that they have that right, they have not done any of this on a case-by-case basis. An Ars article has detailed some of the historical uses of the flag in civil war games that were pulled from the Apple store.

Well there's certainly a prominent example of a company taking explicit aim to *break* knock-off devices in a driver update:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Its not quite that simple.

Glass - really easy to recycle, we have even been doing this for decades in the UK. Only thing is, you have to sort it by colour first or it cannot be recycled, except as glass that is used in non-consumer areas.

Metal: easy to recycle, ferrous material is even easier as a big magnet can sort it. The rest is basically aluminium from drinks cans.

Paper: can be easy, but not if its contaminated with plastic (eg windowed envelopes) or plastic (coated to make it shiny). Even then, there's a limited recycling cycle for it, but it can still be burned in the end.

Plastic: now we get a problem. There are so many different types, (you can see them on your products by looking for the number inside the recycle triangle). Then there's problems with the colours - put black plastic in with the rest and it can only be turned into more black plastic. The prices for most plastic is so low that its often cheaper to just chuck it in the garbage.

Ultimately sorting at source is the only option to make recycling cost effective (and even then, if one neighbour decides to stuff his rubbish in the recycling bin, none of the lorry load that collected it gets used).

Round here, we do plastic in bags; metal, paper and glass in bins. I used to live in a place where you could put the latter 3 in a single bin as sorting that was relatively easy, but they didn't take plastic at all.

There are ways to encourage recycling like we used to do: community groups could collect things like paper, you'd store them until a church or scout group would turn up to collect bundles of one type of material (say, papers) where they would take them to be recycled and possibly even get paid for them as the bundles would be properly sorted and thus worth a lot more, or you could just put a penny deposit on glass or metal that could be refunded on return.

BTW, Ars had an interesting tour of a recycling centre:

http://arstechnica.com/science...

I was under the impression that a fail-over server that does not occasionally handle traffic in periodic tests could not be trusted to handle traffic in a true failure situation. Netflix routinely conducts tests of its failover infrastructure, shutting down large blocks of its leased Amazon capacity to make sure the rest of its capacity can keep up.

Plate tectonics might not be present on Venus because of "self repair."

That was until someone on their side let it slip that TH knew that the poor hardware performance was because intel allowed specific optimizations to benchmark codes. Thus their real world performance was flawed.

The problem with this argument is that all the benchmarks are flawed for this reason. I never trust a synthetic benchmark to tell me how hardware is going to behave in the real world.

for anyone who was looking for more to read on this matter, Ars Technica looked into this with PCMark2005. I'm not sure why but I don't care if that was a 10 year old benchmark, 10 years is not a long time IMO. I suppose AMD could be blamed a little though for not supporting writable registers like Via on their chips...

NVidia does sorta-similar with their Game/HairWorks features in Witcher 3, or pushing retardedly stupid anti-aliasing modes because their architecture runs them better than AMD's.

Though what they're going to watch the content on is beyond me.

This cheap video player is popular in North Korea.

As it seems IMAX came to their senses and apologized for that ridiculous demand :) Here is the link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Is there a good reddit area for slashdot refugees to have tech discussions?

The only other alternatives I see are http://arstechnica.com/ (though the discussion engine is pretty limited and somewhat heavily moderated), http://theregister.co.uk/ (doesn't seem to spawn many useful conversations somehow), and maybe http://fark.com/ (good discussions, but but pretty light on tech coverage in a pretty basic discussion engine)

> Not shocked Slashdot is only posting the story now and not even mentioning the retraction.

The retraction was added to the summary less than a half-hour after the ars story mentioning it.

They did.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

IMAX published an apology and admitted they overreacted. IMHO this is exactly the right thing to have done.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

And they really did apologize, not use the typical "We're sorry that you were offended by our perfectly reasonable actions" fake apology that are so common in these situations:

This is an IMAX-sized mea culpa to you, your team at Ars Technica, and your readers.

We are very passionate about our brand and sometimes we can be overzealous in trying to protect it. Unfortunately in this situation we acted too quickly without truly understanding the reference to our brand.

Again—we apologize for how this was handled and we will try to be better at taking compliments moving forward!

It'd be nice if Slashdot could mention their apology in the summary.

It looks like IMAX has issued and "IMAX sized" apology to ARS for this issue.

IMAX published an apology and admitted they overreacted. IMHO this is exactly the right thing to have done.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

My server doors have fancy locks on them, thanks.

I take it these locks are not impenetrable. Nor are the walls. Someone might penetrate these and hack fromt he inside, similar to the way Tom Cruise did in your example. Security: not perfect.

One thing I'm noticing from around here is that people don't have a lot of experience with high security. Buildings that you can't get into the lobby without being buzzed in... where you can't go the right floor without a key card.

That is the sort of security you'd go through to get the headquarters of Dennys... that isn't even high security. That's just standard corporate security theater.

I've walked in to many corporate buildings without any credentials whatsoever. I've even accessed regional police HQ switch room without anybody asking anything the moment I entered the building. I had reason to access that room, but I had never visited the premises nor did I had any work credentials on me.

This is the way the world actually works outside absurd theoretical security models. Just because you may have your security tightened up, if you are doing any kind of business you are still dependant of third parties, who are dependant on other parties etc. Unless the whole chain is flawless, your security is as good as the weakes tlink in that chain. And even if it is "flawless", it really isn't because nobody knows all the possible bugs and exploits that may exist.

As to people plugging stuff into our network. There are a lot of ways to make it so people can't do that. Again, mostly from the server room. Most cisco routers can stop it if you configure them properly.

Cisco? Lol.

From outside attack? They're not getting in.

Yeah. Sure.

You just don't seem to get it.

From Arstechica's article:

"Although the company no longer offers unlimited plans to new customers, it allows current unlimited customers to renew their plans and has sold millions of existing unlimited customers new... contracts for data plans that continue to be labeled as 'unlimited,'" the FCC said. "In 2011, AT&T implemented a 'Maximum Bit Rate' policy and capped the maximum data speeds for unlimited customers after they used a set amount of data within a billing cycle. The capped speeds were much slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised and significantly impaired the ability of AT&T customers to access the Internet or use data applications for the remainder of the billing cycle."

So as a rough order of magnitude estimate "millions of customers" equates to $100's of millions of revenue a month, over nearly 5 years, so they made roughly billions to 10's of billions of dollars on these accounts over the time period. And that is excluding customers that moved to a different plan as a result of the throttling.

The FCC said it believes millions of customers have been affected by AT&T's throttling, with speed reductions that "imped[ed] their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video." On average, customers' speeds were slowed for 12 days per monthly billing cycle, the FCC said.

These customers were impacted for about a 1/3 of the time, and if you value the throttled service at half the value of the promised service, that comes to 100s of millions to billions of dollars that they were overcharging. So the fine is on the low end of reasonable.

Note, that the FTC is also investigating this and may require AT&T to refund money to their customers in addition to paying the FCC fine.

I have always admired Monster's business model. Take something as dirt cheap as a cable, tack on a price at least 3000% above cost and not only make it a success but have customers who advocate the superiority of your product on faith alone. Because they spent so goddamn much.

Monster cable is bargain basement compared to the bill of goods that many "audiophiles" are buying nowadays... To the audiophile, this $10,000 Ethernet cable apparently makes sense. At least Ars had the sense to add this sub-headline: "In reality, one-way silver cable does nothing but make "audiophools" poorer.".

Apple certainly makes sure that your private life remains private and don't collaborate with government spies...

If I understand correctly:
- "In the future Skype for Web will utilize WebRTC so that you don’t need to install any plugins to get it working — meaning you only need to allow the site permission to use your webcam and microphone and you’re good to go, but for now a plugin is required to make calls."
- what we do know about Skype:
any calls you make with Skype go through servers, it's not a peer2peer solution anymore:
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
My guess is one of the positive reasons is: they want to analyze the audio to increase their understanding of language and translation.

WebRTC protocols supports end-to-end peer 2 peer encryption, but it doesn't mean an application has to use it.

Microsoft has already announced an Objective-C toolchain for Windows that certain select groups have already been using.

With Project Islandwood, iOS developers will be able to take their iOS apps and build them for Windows. Microsoft has developed an Objective C toolchain and middleware layer that provide the operating system APIs that iOS apps expect. A select group of third parties have been using the Islandwood tools already, with King's Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone being one of the first apps built this way. King's developers had to change only a "few percent" of the code in order to fully port it to Windows Phone.