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Another article on this, I agree with Dan's assessment - http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Well the following may well have been the NSAs work, and they got away with it for 9 years.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Just sit tight until these are perfected, and then buy a couple of dozen-

Next-gen “Archival Disc” will squeeze 1TB of data onto optical discs
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Either that, or install a duplicate RAID to back up the first one....

You DO know its possible, even easy, to pull a "EEE" on a project despite it being open source, yes? That being open source isn't a magical "get out of jail free" card, yes? If you haven't read it you might want to start here and please note that despite the fact there is a FOSS fork (ASOP) its quickly reaching the point where the FOSS part will be about as useful as the FOSS on a TiVo since none of the applications will actually run without major rewrites, which of course nobody is gonna do.

In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.

Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.

But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.

The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.

It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.

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

Apple is not the problem. The patent system is.

Can't we agree that both are?

If you leave your car with the keys in the ignition, then it is partially your fault when someone climbs in and drives away. However, the person who stole the car is also to blame. It's not a valid defense to say "He left his keys in the car so it wasn't stealing."

If all Apple wanted was to make sure nobody else got patents on all this UI stuff, they simply could have fully published the details of how their phone worked, and nobody filing after that would be able to claim to have invented it. And I'm not a lawyer but I think Steve Jobs's public "one more thing" demos would have sufficed to make all those UI features unpatentable by anyone else.

But that wasn't enough for Apple. "Patented!" crowed Steve Jobs. Apple patented everything they thought they could get away with, including totally obvious stuff like squishing your fingers together to make things get smaller on the screen, and spreading your fingers wide to make things get bigger on the screen. Come on, that is totally obvious and there even was prior art on it. So we return to where we started: the USPTO is a problem because it let Apple patent obvious stuff, but Apple is part of the problem for trying to patent obvious stuff. (Fortunately the "pinch-to-zoom" patent was in fact invalidated, due to Samsung winning in court against Apple!)

Samsung is going to go scorched earth on this new lawsuit. Millions for defense and not one cent for tribute. And Samsung has the millions. I hope Samsung wins big and invalidates all of Apple's patents.

(And then, as long as I'm dreaming, Samsung can go invalidate Microsoft's mobile patents next.)

It's quite easy to work around that small problem, if you implement the scheme with a small amount of intelligence. Some one trying to dos you will becoming from a different IP than the legit user, so you only time out if coming from the same domain.
And yes, cloudcracker was used to crack passwords: http://arstechnica.com/securit...

As was pointed out by someone on Ars, even if the secret key used by this device isn't stolen it can be bruteforced by having a single known account on the system. This is not a trivial problem, because it seems that they are using SHA1 (on the basis that the key can never be stolen, so the hashes don't need to be so strong). As such, there is a mountain of good gear out there for running lots and lots of hashes fast.

Basically:
1. Create account/password with online retailer
2. Steal user database for online retailer
3. Find you own account, for which you know the username and password (and salt, because it is in the database) and associated hash
4. Bruteforce the HMAC key required to get the stored hash using your username, password and salt
5. Use that same universal HMAC key for attacking all the other accounts
6. profit?

This assumes that there is a single key used for the HMAC and stored on the dongle, but it seems that is actually the case.
It does make getting all the passwords a bit harder, but it isn't a miracle cure.

Frankly after the terms that Google put out with Android AND the story on how Google is taking more and more of Android proprietary by taking critical APIs behind the "GoogleWall" I honestly do not see how any sane person can't see that Google IS Microsoft of the 90s.

Seriously folks, how can anyone argue that they aren't the same company? Blocking competition? See TFA and about a dozen other articles on Google pulling products with threats of being kicked out of having access to the OHA and Google Apps. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Hell Android is practically a textbook case of that, while Android 1 and 2 and ASOP were practically identical now there is a good chunk of the android games and apps that will not run on ASOP without being recompiled and in many cases rewritten. Trying to lock in? For God's sake they take bog standard X86 laptops and when they are done with them they are more fucking locked down than a cellphone! Hell even the latest windows allows you to fricking dual boot but not ChromeOS!

I'm sorry but while Google USED to be this great "throw shit at the wall and see what cool shit we get" kind of company as with sadly too many companies greed and the desire to keep the stock price high has turned them nasty. Maybe its a universal law of business or something, you get to be #1 and you turn nasty and greedy as you fight to stay top dog.

For those who missed this, here's a great article:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all, I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."

Bingo and there are liabilities here.

Freedom of speech only goes so far. We all know that shouting fire
when there is none can get you in a raft of trouble. Should someone
die in the crush to exit murder becomes one of the long list of charges.

Newsweek has responsibility and owns much of the consequences
for their actions. Should there be inconveniences I can see a tort.
Should there be damages I can see civil and criminal actions.
Should there be bodily harm... jail time for all in the decision process
and serious financial penalty for Newsweek the company.

Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all, I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."

Maybe something more like Gigabtyte's Brix Pro, or AsRock's Vision X. Going small comes with a cost, and often requires an external power brick (Mac Mini has power supply built-in), but there are lots of tiny PC's out there.

I knew there were people to come to complain that Linux/Android was insecure

It is insecure and there is a huge list of vulnerabilities.
Drive-by malware
EZ2Use exploit of another drive-by vulnerability
Here is a list of 30 other serious vulnerabilities many of which do not require authentication and provide remote access.

And that is before you even take a look at all the trojan malware out there that breaks from the application sandbox to take control of the system.

So instead of just pretending it is secure and sticking your head ignorantly in the sand why don't you wake up and actually take notice. Stop being a denier just because you love the platform, it's just a computing platform you don't have to defend it like it's a person.

Thanks god we have OpenSSL to the rescue. Oh wait 1, 2.

According to this article, the coverage for these will be an 18-mile radius.

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

While an air-to-air component could extend that with multiple drones, the whole system is still likely to link to a ground station within a small geographical area. That's why I don't think you'd get out of the "state owned" area, if these were ever employed in such a place.

A major point of these would be to eliminate the satellite link, so a further uplink to a satellite just seems ridiculous.

Bitcoin is an open source concept and codebase.

I thought you were wanting to defend it?

Digression: Remember the Apple SSL security bug last week? How it was relished by open source types with talk of open source having "many eyes making all bugs shallow". Well it turns out that Linux and every other OS relying on GnuTLS has had a similar security bug since 2005.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay as they are merely more efficient tools.

They are bound to fail, as they have no regulator, nor compensation scheme.

So we get great changes to how packets move and their origins while moving. This would have made any city, state, federal or intergovernmental efforts for tracking not so easy in past years.
The reason we seem to be getting all the good crypto news and 'fixes' might be that the vast illegal domestic spying programs have move on and are now ready for any such changes to the internet.
The next step seems to be "NSA head floats idea: What if we only gathered terrorist communications?" Mar 1 2014
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
i.e. a new “collect-it-all” option for domestic and international use offering deep pack inspection at a level (exchange, digital loop carrier) to keep the first 'hop'.
You can then move all the packets globally, encrypt all you want, at some point if your work, First Amendment-related activities or tracked daily movements become interesting your digital interactions can all be recreated.
Other efforts to gain your passwords can then be attempted.

And yet, despite the clear conflict of interest, an NSA employee remains in a position of trust in a cryptography standard. No accusation against the guy since don't know him. However, if you or I got caught trying to damage the standard we were working in, we'd get sued. If he got caught he'd just be told to be more careful next time. It is totally inappropriate and the IETF should act.

... and in the interest of "balance," (again, as I have little firsthand knowledge, it is difficult for me to ascertain how balanced this actually is) here's a rebuttal from an employee at Google:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423

(via Reddit)

I would agree that it *was* open-source, but these days it's open in name only. Google has been chipping away at its openness for years, making it almost useless/impossible to fork.

I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of this topic is almost completely second-hand, so if I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me. However this article sums up fairly well my understanding of the current situation:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/

The article is largely about Microsoft's relationship to Android (or lack thereof), but talks quite a bit about the current state of Android's "openness."

"The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued"

NASA management choose to ignore reports of a foam strike, as they ignored previous problems with the O-Rings ..

'NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha .. said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space agency to make the requests. There were two similar efforts by other engineers. All were turned aside. Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a manager told him that he refused to be a "Chicken Little." The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue"`

You (RMS) have said on numerous occasions that you don't use a cell phone because of privacy issues - that it can be used as a tracking device and underhandedly, for spying on its user.

What do you think of the "security-oriented" Blackphone? Secure enough for RMS?

Windows, any version, is architecturally insecure.

Actually every operating system is and anything widely in use will be targeted, as has been demonstrated quite clearly in the past couple of weeks, we have had:
The Windows EMET vulnerability
The Android E-Z-2-Use drive-by vulnerability
The OSX & iOS SSL vulnerability

Ars has an article about scraping the A10 to keep the F35, the slow, fat, but stealthy, Jack-of-all-trades that'll apparently get shot down in a conflict. Of course there's a lot more pork with the F35 than the A10.

Even without any counterfeiting, it sure would be a bummer if your 'verified +++ Secure!' chip fell victim to some subtle modification. Possibly even one that could be implemented by modifying the die after fabrication. Wouldn't be trivial; but if you only need to change a few hundred transistors and possess sufficient hardware and motivation...

No, not at all, and I'm fairly sure Comcast has not been.

Unfortunately your theory doesn't match the facts.

Here's the progression:

1. Netflix is slow on Comcast
2. Neflix pay$$$$$$ Comcast to speed up their traffic
3. Netflix is faster on Comcast

Now this could be an elaborate post hoc ergo propter hoc, except that Comcast accepted payment specifically to speed up traffic.

Therefore, proof.

They probably because they don't want to pay Google.

Agreed, and there are quite a few cities and small towns that have plans either in the works or completed to provide their own locally-owned fiber internet. Unfortunately, there have also been several instances of monopoly/duopoly ISPs suing the cities or otherwise using questionable methods in an attempt to either block the fiber installation entirely, or force the city to halt work on their installation just so the ISP can then come in and install their own service to steal the cities' thunder. (Monticello, MN comes to mind - http://arstechnica.com/uncateg...). Unfortunately, the fact that the monopoly/duopoly ISPs can and often will do whatever they can to sabotage municipal fiber in turn makes some cities hesitant to even pursue it.

The major ISPs are crooked, plain and simple.

The facial recognition systems track your face, your passengers face, another camera for you license plate number and then details get shared with a few gov and possibly private sector databases.
The main issue will be that your "home and work and shopping" driving options might be past a protest without a protest permit or parade permit and outside a free speech zone.
You would then be of interest. Is your state getting federal funds for national crime issues? Expect more tracking equipment.
ACLU: 2/3 of US population lives in “Constitution-free” zone
http://arstechnica.com/securit...
Expect more random Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... too :)

I thought GMS was introduced to address this issue (among other reasons) so that any bugs in new features could be fixed by sending out a GMS update, of course that doesn't solve the issue of not being able to push fixes for AOSP bugs directly to handsets.

That's the marketing pitch, but the reality is really much more sinister. The true goal is to replace AOSP with proprietary Google components.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Now, if they want access to Google Play Store they will probably have to go through the same process as any other Android phone vendor and sign and agreement and go through testing and certification. Virgin developers or not, if you want to access Play Store you need an agreement.

Not so easy.
http://www.theverge.com/2011/0...

It comes with a lot of restrictions, including shipping all Google apps like maps as default apps,say goodbye to Bing at the very least, not to mention it may not be "free" since Google is known to charge for GMS. So what's the point of forking again?
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

So there's the company that already forked android and made it not free FireOS (amazon's fork of android).

Oh wait, then there's this open handset alliance that forbids its members using android forks, except when it conflicts with the mother ship's desires...

Is that an acceptable use of something "free"? (trick question)

Here is an in-deph article on why forking Android won't work...

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

For most companies other than Microsoft and possibly IBM or Oracle that's largely true. However, Microsoft has deliberately manouvered its self into a situation where it has direct substitutes for most Google services. Few of them are good enough to compete in an open market, however, since Android is not copyleft, Microsoft will not have to release the source code and will not allow alternative services onto their new devices. Amazon has already shown that they can do this.

It's important to understand that this is part of a multi-sided strategy; Microsoft is on one side planning to benefit from Android's source code themselves. On the other side, they want to deny Google the benefit of the Android community. Since Google is opposed to copyleft software which would allow them to get a return from Microsoft taking their code, they will be forced to put more and more into Android's proprietary bits such as Google Play. This will gradually eat away at the Android Open Source community. There will be fewer people contributing new code and recruiting for Android developers for Google's proprietary parts will become more and more expensive for Google.

Cancelling Windows Phone and replacing it with Android is a master stroke for Microsoft:

• Windows 8 has been a disaster; they need the Windows developers concentrating on the desktop again. Cancelling WP will allow that.
• Windows Phone has shown that Micrsoft's developers are trapped; They will develop software as Microsoft tells them even if it means taking a loss.
• Windows Phone is also heading to be an embarassment. Even with vast subsidies and much more expensive hardware, the phones are barely competitive with low end Android. Getting rid of the Windows Phone subsidies will put billions on the bottom line.

This is part of Microsft's basic Embrace Extend Exterminate strategy which they have done again and again.

• Replaced LanManager with Kerberos and taking that over as ActiveDirectory
• Attempting to take over Java (failed because SUN had better license lawyers than Google)
• Replacing NetBIOS with IP

The story is clear. Microsoft has been persuading the rest of the software industry to avoid the GPL for years precisely to allow this type of takeover of Android.

From the article

. However, Google’s verification is not needed for an individual consumer to download and install a Google-signed version of the Google Play app store and then download the full inventory of Google proprietary apps to an unverified Android version.

That's quite wrong. The Play app is copyrighted, proprietary and is tightly coupled to Google's cloud. They even sent a Cease and Desist to CyanogenMod a few years ago and stopped them from distributing it. They don't go after individual users, but those users are still infringing Google's copyright and are essentially pirating the software. So this advice is like suggesting that Ubuntu make VM software that makes it really easy to pirate Windows to run Windows apps since MS does not go after individual personal home users for pirating their software.

Not to mention that even if all this manages to happen, Google can just tweak their servers and store app to reject connections from Android forks(see iTunes).

If you want read a better article about why forking Android does not make any sense, this article is way better:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Even if MS wants to do something like that, it makes a bit more sense to make Windows Phone able to load Android Apps, which they were/are supposedly exploring.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2...

No it is open like MacOSX is open.

Google has things locked very tight on Android which will make compatibility difficult and a constantly changing targeting if MS were dumb enough to make an Android fork.

Windows Phone would turn into a mobile version of OS/2 which is used by few and developers say "Oh it runs Android. Lets just target that only and ignore MS we will get both platforms etc", but in reality Google changes AOSP apis and viola it breaks on Windows Phone.

Windows Phone is not a bad OS even if it is spouted here as the anti Christ from people who actually never ran it. If it were not made by Microsoft I think people would like it here seriously.

Seriously this is not flame bait and I am not trolling here.

Just speaking as a Windows Phone user who is happy who switched. Windows Phone does have some features. It is very light and responsive on lower end hardware and has neat features with battery and data saving, and the best cut and paste support on touch around compared to IOS and Android (speaking as an ex android user). The view on this site is that MS is years behind and it is all soo buggy, slow, and crappy compared to the coolness of Android from people of course who actually never even used it before?!

It is not perfect as it lacks a notification center and voice support is less than with other platforms. But it does not mean it is crap either.

I am a former Android user and use a Nokia. Really Windows Phone is not a bad OS and if it was not made by Microsoft it would not be soo bashed here.

Android has issues. It is partially opensourced where AOSP is the proprietary part that locks developers and Microsoft to Google similar to MacOSX being partially open.

I think Ms will destroy its brand name and turn it into another OS/2 as developers will just target Android and with AOSP it means compatibility problems will arise often for Windows Phone users.

Windows 9 will have a unified modern apps that run on the phone and desktop if rumors are true. This will put a dent into both.

The author of this fine article has obviously no clue what he's talking about.

Agreed.

Here is an in-deph article on why forking Android won't work...

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

I'm pretty sure networks are oversubscribed because ISPs have no motivation to improve them. The margins for large service providers are ridiculous. A lot more infrastructure can be built before providing internet access becomes unprofitable.

No, it actually wasn't. You fell for the industry shill research that didn't hold up to peer review.

Irony, my good man. Irony. (Would have though my re-quoting you made that obvious). And ironic too, in the other sense, that you should have taken everything else that was serious (and factual) in that post as "reversed from fact."

Really, suggesting question the data rather than the theory was too far over the top.

Now that was deadly serious. To quote British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington, to the same effect, "No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory."

Less provocatively, as science commentator Scott Johnson explained on Ars Technica, "Scientists know that every study is imperfect or incomplete in some way and are especially skeptical of results that contradict—rather than build upon—the existing science."

You gave yourself away before even getting to your suggestion that trepanation might have had valid science behind it.

I never suggested that trepanation might have valid science behind it. Stop making things up! Or is this misunderstanding a manifestation of your naive philosophy of science?

You gave yourself away when you used the phrase "the scientific method" by the way. Perhaps you should stop arguing and try instead to understand?

Right now the arctic ocean and Hudson Bay are 100% frozen due to this thing we call winter. Summer it is a different story.

Second the world is getting cooler or stagnate in warming in recent years due to solar lull and dining as evident in the lack of solar flares. Last time this happened we had the mini ice age from 1400 - 1850. There is no scientific basis of global warming causing the polar vortex.

<citation needed>

here

Who told you that?

This isn't Wikipedia where "citation required" is accepted use. Here, we expect people to be able to use Google. However, I have used Google on your behalf and come up with this article which discusses the costs:

A Utility Infrastructure Law commonly quoted by engineers says, "The closer you get to the home, the more investment is needed, averaged per home connected." This law applies to all parts of the physical network, like water pipes, sewage pipes, and electricity cables. ..... A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation based on expert estimates indicates a relative investment level of 1:3:10 for core:middle:access networks, proving the Utility Infrastructure Law.

Right. If you have enough copyright claims against you that are not disputed, youtube will simply remove your account.

This guy pissed off some folks who are making claims in bad faith, but if you're sure you're not violating the law you need to state so in a counter claim. At that point, it's no longer legal to file further DMCA takedown notices on the same material, and they have to take you to court to proceed. Multiple claims on the same clip are considered misrepresentation. This is why it's suspicious to me that he received multiple takedown requests from one source, but maybe it was for different episodes.

Youtube is threatening to remove his account due to multiple unresolved dmca claims. Resolve them, and it goes away. It has little to do with AIDS deniers, except that they're tertiarily involved.

It's not a Weapon of Mass Destruction. It's a weapon of Mass Disruption! As in, people who dream of perfect weather, all the time, are disrupted with reality.

The true irony here though, is that we're the ones causing the more recent dynamic climate changes. (See Arstechinca article here.)

I love that they use their current collusion as an argument for why the merger should be allowed. ''We're not in competition now [because we've divided the market between us], so competition won't be affected.''

Can't wait to see which corrupt asshole gets a cushy new industry job this time. Oh wait, they fixed that by flipping it around, haven't they?

There is no patent-unencumbered video codec worth using.

That might be technically true... Google owns the patents on VP8. But since they've offered an irrevocable perpetual royalty free license to the entire world, it's unencumbered for all reasonable, practical purposes.

When Google open-sourced their hopeless purchase, the extent of the scam became apparent.

VP3 was open-sourced over a decade ago, and no lawsuits ever came out of that. Are you suggesting On2 only RECENTLY started stealing MPEG patents? When exactly? And let's not forget that VP9 was not developed until years after Google acquired On2, and just recently released.

What did Google do? Simple- it used its insane cash reserves to strike behind-the-scenes deals with the patent owners, paying the for right to use those patents in non-disclosure agreements.

All of H.264's patents must be worth many billions of dollars over their lifetime. If Google had paid out anything like that, it would be obvious from stock prices, SEC filings, etc., etc. Instead, Google paid a piddly little amount to MPEG-LA, and it's they who wanted the NDA to save face. MPEG-LA argued for years that they owned patents that covered VP8, yet after years only came up with a very short-list, and still most of that was found laughably irrelevant. H.264 is covered by THOUSANDS of patents, by HUNDREDS of companies. The deal Google entered into only involved 11 of those hundreds of companies, yet that was enough to get MPEG-LA to declare full stop on any harassment of VP8.

The reality:
"This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8."

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archi...

In fact, the MPEG-LA's posturing was being investigated by the DoJ as anticompetitive behavior:

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

Google NEVER denied its video codec purchase was a rip-off (and a bad one at that) of H264.

Yes they did. They even did so in court, and they unequivocally WON:

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

1) Google's fake free codec uses insanely more amounts of energy to decode and display video.

This is straightforward to disprove.
An x264 developer said of the first version of libvpx decoding:

"the current implementation appears to be about 16% slower than ffmpeg's H.264 decoder"

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...

But since then, numerous performance improvements have been performed:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...

2) Google's fake free codec has the tiniest fraction of hardware support than is enjoyed by H264. Every modern device decodes H264 in efficient hardware

Actually, hardware acceleration isn't a big deal. The difference between VDPAU and software decoding of 1080 video on my PC is just a few percentage points. When my phone switches from hardware to software decoding (you can force this with "Mobo Player"), the performance and power difference is very small, and goes almost completely unnoticed. Hardware acceleration mattered a lot when mobile devices ran with 35MHz CPUs, but today, it makes a very tiny difference.

For the same quality, x264 video files are less than HALF the size of videos produced for Google's fake free codec.

Back in 2010 when comparing the just introduced an

" Internet Explorer never will, but their market share is dwindling"

Why, yes! Everyone should ignore 50% of their potential market through some half-assed ideological argument! IE may be "dwindling" but it's still half your potential market, fuckwit. If you want to run a company that only targets half the people it could then be my fucking guest but everyone else wants to actually hit their potential market, not their artificially limited one.

First, a good businessman recognizes that some clients are just more trouble to do business with than they are worth, even if they want to do business with you.
 
Secondly, unless you've got a mental illness, once you've met your needs and those of the people who rely on you, you recognize that money is not something to hoard, but more of a vote than anything else, the means by which you choose which of your peers to elevate and which to diminish.
 
If all you ever do is chase money, you're always another mans tool. You're not setting the agenda, and you have no real power.
 
"So, you're funding Microsoft, empowering them to continue with their vicious behavior, are you? Well, you don't GET any fucking pudding, asshole, and I don't CARE how much money you have. Piss off."
 
Being able to say things like that is the reward for being industrious beyond your needs. It is how you make your power felt.

" Internet Explorer never will, but their market share is dwindling"

Why, yes! Everyone should ignore 50% of their potential market through some half-assed ideological argument! IE may be "dwindling" but it's still half your potential market, fuckwit. If you want to run a company that only targets half the people it could then be my fucking guest but everyone else wants to actually hit their potential market, not their artificially limited one.

I would not call anything Ron Amadeo writes "great". His articles on Ars Technica are mostly just wild speculation about what Google is doing. Most of the arguments are rebutted in a comment but Diane Hackborn (from a different article), which is mentioned in the summary.

Google’s iron grip on Android

Great story how Google gets it grip on Android.