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The "DRM Infrastructure" is trivial for authors and publishers, I'd not dare to call it "Infrastructure" at all. Also, costs are usually insignificant: you usually protect an entire work, not individual copies.

Yes, the costs are so trivial that Wal-mart, Microsoft, and Yahoo all tried to shut down their DRM servers and only caved to the backlash, with no promises that they would remain on forever. If the costs are so trivial, then why bother with shuttering the services?

well, you'd be surprised then. Its when MS forces *some* programs to run as Metro apps, such as the web browser, so that you're in your nice multi-monitor setup, and you go to surf the web, and suddenly you have a full-screen (on monitor 1, not the other ones) metro-styled browser.

Ars has done a more in-depth, after-weeks-of-use article about it and even their pro-Microsoft writer thinks its a bit pants now. He's scathing about its multi-monitor support: it works great in desktop mode, but is useless in metro mode and that includes all the metro stuff you're forced to have when called from the desktop.

Microsoft have already said that the Win32 API is now legacy and will only be updating their WinRT API going forward. what's interesting is they've also said their .NET APIs are also legacy now.

I think Win8 is going to be another Vista, wait for Win9.

Took me a total of 5 seconds to google Anonpaste + ArsTechnica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2012/04/anonymous-builds-its-own-pastebin-like-site.ars Seriously, would it have been that hard to search for?

What about the Path app. It would steal your address book and private photos. It's recent and very high profile. That's not malware?

I find it very suspicous that their "empirical analysis" didn't uncover a single bit of "malware" on iOS. Mod article Troll.

First, the point is that this email isn't a "smoking gun". Not by a long stretch.

The patent claims have narrowed significantly, with only 2 of the original 7 patents remaining, and one of those is on shaky ground. Most of the remaining claims are about copyright, not patent. So while there are still patents involved, it's largely about copyright at this point.

See Groklaw if you need to familiarize yourself with other facts of the case.

The article is here.

I think many people who assume they are invulnerable and have older macs probably have no clue they are even infected. I am curious what the percentage of older MacOSX installations are? Not everyone can afford or want to buy an expensive iMac/Powerbook every 3 years.

To add (thanks for the edit button, slashdot!)

Source of the numbers

That's in development

Like others mentioned, subversion and git aren't bad tools either, though I guess they wouldn't be worth the effort unless the project is of textbook proportions.

MUNICIPALITIES in most cases can just string up their neighborhood, and complaints will be limited.

Tell that to the people in Wilson, NC.

Oh, and the people of Monticello, MN., too.

The "limited complaints" you're talking about involved millions of dollars in legal fees and even the involvement of members of congress and other federal agencies.

Not to mention the fact that these companies were given their local monopolies as incentive in order to speed the spread of high-speed internet in the communities (not to mention prevent the nightmare that would be multiple brand-specific network infrastructures), but now that most everyone outside of rural areas are wired, they're abusing their market position by keeping prices artificially high and speeds somewhat lower than most first-world countries, and all this while bringing in record profits year after year and signing up more and more customers than ever before.

This is why, in my opinion, they need to open up the network like the did telephones and have mandated line-sharing regulations in place to ensure that the last-mile is covered. Then we'd have real competition and, I'm betting, end user prices would plummet. The metered internet idea scares a lot of people because they're used to paying an arm and a leg for internet, but if you could sign up with any provider in the U.S., I'm positive the prices would plummet and be more reflective of the actual costs of maintaining the networks themselves. We've seen this before with long distance telephone service, when over the course of a few short years the per minute costs went from over 25cents/minute to 10cents/minute to less than 5cents/minute (when I last had terrestrial telephone I think I was paying 3cents a minute after the free 120 minutes a month they gave me).

I'm ready to join that angry mass of citizens, believe me, but unfortunately 50% of the people in this country still think the internet is a luxury good for people solely to play video games, consume pornography, or worship Satan with, so it's probably going to be a while before that comes to pass. I'm being facetious, but I honestly speak to a surprising number of people that have a real disdain for the internet as a whole.

Yeah should have gone this route... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/going-commando-on-the-tsa-redux-a-kilt-wearer-speaks.ars

Honestly, I'd fully support metered billing for internet connectivity, provided internet was once and for all declared a public utility subject to regulation in much the same way as the terrestrial telephone companies are, or at least, they open up the lines like they did with telephone service in the 90's so that consumers can shop around for their carrier and not be locked into the local monopolies we deal with today concerning our ISPs here in the States. For instance, our local power company can't just arbitrarily raise rates like our ISPs do year after year, they have to ask permission from our local Public Utility Commission and have public hearings anytime they need to raise rates.

It would be interesting to see how "expensive" all this bandwidth truly is for the ISPs if they had to compete in the same markets for customers. It's the same story as with long-distance telephone service; when everyone was locked into their local phone service; long-distance charges were a fucking fortune, but once they opened up the lines, all the 10-10 numbers started cropping up, and rates plummeted. It would be interesting to see how much differently things would be if Comcast, Charter, Time-Warner, Cox, etc, all had to compete with each other in every market. I have a feeling that these "problems" with bandwidth would be solved pretty quickly.

Besides, it's funny how quickly these major ISPs fall all over themselves to prevent any competition in the first place, even to the point of rolling out their own fiber to prevent a small town from spinning up it's own ISP after repeatedly telling those same people that they just couldn't afford to upgrade. Funny how the threat of competition makes things like that suddenly "affordable".

In the US at least, wireless services are also exempt from the neutrality requirements that the telcos negotiated with content providers.

So, switching to wireless-only for your home internet may, depending on your provider, mean opening yourself up to all that non-neutral stuff -- deep-packet inspections, throttled torrenting, blocked or throttled access to non-ISP-provided streaming video, and so forth. As far as I know, none of the LTE carriers are doing any of this now, but Verizon fought pretty hard for the exemption, they must have had a reason.

If you search for "net neutrality wireless exemption", you'll get lots of good hits, like this one.

Is my data stored in the US?

Does the US government claim to have jurisdiction over my data? (I think I know the answer to this one).

As long as it is a US company providing the service (e.g., Google), the US claims jurisdiction over data stored anywhere in the world by that company:

Link

This is that Ars article.

- Commodore PET (same CPU as Apple II)
- TRS-80 with Zilog-80 processor (best selling computer of 1978, 79, and 80).

Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/3

http://arstechnica.com/staff/forcequit/2012/04/sandwich-makers-finally-described-as-female-under-facebooks-leet-speak-option.ars

I guess you missed this one

If facts count at all in this disagreement, then the Aussies are correct.

Anytime you have a long network hop to your data, it is at greater risk for downtime and inaccessibility. This is a fact, not a political thought.

I live in the USA and work in IT. I would not host my data in Australia unless I wanted to have times when it was inaccessible and was willing to put up with clogged networking.

Heck, I'd like to host my data outside the USA too .... just to prevent the US government from feeling they deserve access to it, which they do not.

More and more countries need to only store data in the USA for end customers who are actually located inside the USA. I'd try to keep my infrastructure outside the US too based on FBI server-grabs. The FBI has grabbed entire racks of servers because they were too lazy to figure out which specific server was believed to hold the "offending" data. The other 3000 websites were gone and I read that after a year, the servers were still not returned. Too bad if your company data is "close" to some supposed "bad guys" - they take and figure out the issue later.
* http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/22/0217200/fbi-seizes-servers-in-virginia
* http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387447,00.asp
* http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6830514157
* http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10220786-240.html
and the recent megaupload seizures
* http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds-smashed-megaupload.ars

A Canadian service provider was caught up in a raid like th
is and immediately contacted the US-FBI special agent to be told they were too busy to work with them.

The US government is arrogant based on these actions and others.

If I were in Australia, there's no way that I'd host data in the USA for non-USA-based users.

I work for an American cloud service provider, and even we do not want to store our(customers') data in the U.S. The patriot act is a huge obstacle when selling to foreign customers. Hence why we have a major data center in Canada, and are looking at putting one in the U.K.

(see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/patriot-act-and-privacy-laws-take-a-bite-out-of-us-cloud-business.ars)

If someone still wants to buy an old version that has only limited support then why should Microsoft knock them back? You know they didn't stop selling Windows 3.11 until 2008!

But it begs the question if anyone has ever been jailed for copyright infringement.

Yep: Kino.to Admin Gets 2,5 Years Prison Sentence.

That's not in the U.S., which I assume the GP was asking about. That said, it's yes here, too, under 17 U.S.C. 506:

(a) Criminal Infringement. —
(1) In general. — Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed —
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
(C) by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.

And for a recent case, see NinjaVideo.net.

Mostly because people are idiots, and partly because OS manufacturers haven't figured out how to deal with high density displays.

1) It's easy to see that one CPU is faster than another, or one laptop has more RAM or a bigger HDD than another, or that one screen is larger (in inches) than another, but most people's eyes will glaze over when trying to compare two pairs of numbers in the thousands. (Fun fact: a 20" 4:3 LCD at 1600x1200 has about 10% more pixels than a 20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050.)

2) Even thought it was obvious that high-res displays would (should) eventually be the norm, MS and Apple both really dragged their feet on resolution independence. We had these gorgeous things (22.2", 200dpi widescreen at 3840x2400) eight years ago but if all of (or most of, or even some of) your UI elements were half the size you needed them to be, life got pretty bad, pretty quick. Ars was hopeful that it would happen SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO with OS X 10.4 and then again in 10.5 but... sadly, no.

Even the iPad was launched in 2010 with the same 10", 1024x768 resolution we had on the 10" Compaq TC1100 in 2003. I was really hoping the first iPad would be at least 1400x1050 or, better yet, 1600x1200. The latter would have been 200dpi and would have been awesome. (Not that I'm unhappy we wound up at 2048x1536, but 16x12 would have been very good for quite a while.) I'm not a fan of the original iPad's screen at all.

Mostly because people are idiots, and partly because OS manufacturers haven't figured out how to deal with high density displays.

1) It's easy to see that one CPU is faster than another, or one laptop has more RAM or a bigger HDD than another, or that one screen is larger (in inches) than another, but most people's eyes will glaze over when trying to compare two pairs of numbers in the thousands. (Fun fact: a 20" 4:3 LCD at 1600x1200 has about 10% more pixels than a 20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050.)

2) Even thought it was obvious that high-res displays would (should) eventually be the norm, MS and Apple both really dragged their feet on resolution independence. We had these gorgeous things (22.2", 200dpi widescreen at 3840x2400) eight years ago but if all of (or most of, or even some of) your UI elements were half the size you needed them to be, life got pretty bad, pretty quick. Ars was hopeful that it would happen SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO with OS X 10.4 and then again in 10.5 but... sadly, no.

Even the iPad was launched in 2010 with the same 10", 1024x768 resolution we had on the 10" Compaq TC1100 in 2003. I was really hoping the first iPad would be at least 1400x1050 or, better yet, 1600x1200. The latter would have been 200dpi and would have been awesome. (Not that I'm unhappy we wound up at 2048x1536, but 16x12 would have been very good for quite a while.) I'm not a fan of the original iPad's screen at all.

There is never any justification for this activity. Ever.

I tell people: 95% of the time, I can appeal to someone's God-given instinct to want to do the right thing at all times. 5% of the time, this doesn't work. So I resort to putting wild-eyed fear into that person in terms of what's going to happen when (not if) they get caught.

Your employer might have heard of Reverb Communications?

I'm reading some phenomenally bad advice here that takes the form of "Why don't you just try the software and vote it up if you like it?" Fact is, the Federal Trade Commission won't see it that way. You're a paid advocate. End of story.

You can encourage friends to try it out, disclosing to them that your employer is involved.

As far as trying to MAKE Citrix handle badly coded apps (vs. doing it RIGHT, in the code itself (assuming you have source that is?) -> http://apache.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2764191&cid=39573491 )

I did a post on Arstechnica about it, circa 2000/2001 iirc, here -> http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1011866&start=40

SPECIFICS ON HOW TO "HACK" CITRIX TO HANDLE 'BADBOY APPS':

---

1.Run Regedt32.exe or regedit.exe and locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\TerminalServer\Compatibility\Applications

NOTE: The above registry key is one path; it has been wrapped for readability.

2.Double-click the Applications subkey to reveal several pre-defined settings. Select SETUP under the Applications subkey. The following values are displayed on the right side of the Registry Editor window:

FirstCountMsgQPeeksSleepBadApp:REG_DWORD:0xf

Flags:REG_DWORD:0x8

MsgQBadAppSleepTimeInMillisec:REG_DWORD:0

NthCountMsgQPeeksSleepBadApp:REG_DWORD:0x5

---

This was VERY KEY to my research in it... & you MAY wish to refer to CITRIX documentations in current models (or for Terminal Server, which is largely based off CITRIX licensed code).

Except I kept the attack in code where it SHOULD be done, saving this fix for issues in programs where the source is not available...

The OS was not at fault, but the middleware, client load, citrix session, and Grids we used, WERE!

Again - For me, the "proof was in the pudding" of that project, & success of it going from 100% cpu use & freezeups, to 2% & client loads of 500-1000 folks on it at once on a WAN with Citrix Session galore to the warehouses in remote campus locations.

HOWEVER - On the registry hack?

No guarantee this is the RIGHT thing to do, this OS level Reg hack, taxing an already taxed out server either! Probably would work, but only as a last resort in my book at least, here's why:

Correct the code first if you can! Not the OS... it's NOT at fault usually!

Hacking the registry for this fix, is Bad Business, Bad Logic unless YOU HAVE NO CHOICE (like where you do NOT have sourcecode for the badboy app in question)!

You correct the app according to MS/Citrix constraints on TS/WinFrame/MetaFrame design considerations & save this "BadApp" list for apps you CANNOT correct!

* There you go, hope that helps...

APK

P.S.=> I like to be COMPLETE in information I post (plus, it's just good review too), so there ya are folks - "onwards & UPWARDS!!!"... apk

... effectively giving the model away until it is fixed.

According to Ars Technica, all new phones sold, even with the $100 credit, have the fix already installed.

Customers not wanting to wait can have their phones swapped for updated versions in AT&T stores.

Since when do we use the Toronto Sun as a reputable source for technical stuff?

Yeah, and how hard is that? Is this about malware that magically attaches itself to existing executables, or does it just drop itself into a system directory and run itself?

"As with previous variants of the malware, the latest variant of the Flashback malware, called OSX/Flashback.I, works by modifying code within Web browsers that causes it to launch when the browsers are opened and result in modified Web pages being displayed."
Removal instructions

Both are pretty bloody old problems and easily mitigated. How is it that OSX can be owned by a driveby exploit trojan that adds it to a botnet? I thought its underlying guts were Unix. How is it that Windows can't notice that something new has been installed and executed without the user's instigation?

What have Apple and Microsoft OS developers been spending their time on for the last decade? Surfing pr0n? Posting "you guys suck" on web forums? Making Clicky spin more gracefully?

Meanwhile, their users are unwittingly added to botnets and their machines run keyloggers that phone home to crackers. And they get to pay for these "privileges"?!? Gee, what a great deal.

$DEITY help them if their shareholders ever wise up.

Actually the problems ARE all solved in the latest versions of OSX. The attack vector is a Java applet displayed in the browser, Lion no longer includes Java by default, malware detection was added in Snow Leopard and starting in Lion processes are sandboxed. From what I've read the malware seems to target older computers and versions of OSX. As always the best protection is remaining up to date.

I appreciate your awe, however disingenuous it may be. My methodologies may be controversial here, but they are based on some interesting notions:
* conservatives don't trust science any more.
* belief trumps facts

If you are looking for scientific rigor, perhaps you should check your own posts. I can't seem to find anything remotely informative there, Mr. Peanut Gallery.

Responses and clarifications on the CSIRO patent lawsuits:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/op-ed.ars

They didn't "came back more than 10 years after", they were trying to claim royalties for more than 10 years and only succeeded recently (in this one case).

Here's a nice timeline.

What's news (at least to me and I'm guessing many others) is that this exploit does not require any other interaction than an http request. That is, no password required.

The Flashback.K variant requires no password to install itself.

I recommend ArsTechnica, it seems a lot of /. posts are coming from them anyway, so you might as well go direct.

Their comments section needs threading though, but if you're after articles rather than discussion, it's way better then here.

The ITC rejected B&N's antitrust complainst against Microsoft.

In order to protect you over their in the Homeland, us out here in the gap [anywhere else] have voluntarily given up any pretense to democracy. Ubiquitous warrantless surveillance being the norm and the right to silence dispenced with. So you won't be safe anywhere, even in Canada.

Charms in Win8: (from an ArsTechnical article)

The charms bar is an always-accessible set of five icons that appear down the right hand edge of the screen. From top to bottom, these icons are Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Start is the easiest to handle as it simply takes you to the Start screen. Search is used to initiate searches, both of built-in things (files, programs, settings) and applications that register themselves as being searchable. Share allows the content of the current application to be shared in some way with other applications (for example, a Flickr browser might allow URLs to be "shared" with other programs, and a mail client might opt to receive such shared content).

>I have yet to see anyone who does not have a vested interest in Metro like it.

That implies there is no one without a vested interest in Metro who like it right? And this is for a OS that has a billion users.

>Having both GUIs on the same machine violates everything both Microsoft and Apple have said about consistency of UI.

Any references to them saying so? Even if so, why do they have to follow what they (allegedly) said?

>The only solution is to get rid of one or the other.
>That means that the Desktop needs to go. Microsoft is /not/ backing down from Metro.

Talk about leap of logic. This is a company that bends over for backwards compatibility. The desktop is going nowhere my friend, if you think that Microsoft will break millions of Win32 apps on Windows 8, you're frankly retarded. Whether Windows 8 will crash and burn due to the schizo UI is a different topic which I am willing to entertain, but they will not break compatibility that is their lifeblood, especially in enterprise. Period. And you arguing for it over and over again makes you sound stupid, to be frank.

>As if I care. There are actual jokes of the tech world, and they are...

Slashdot is indeed the joke of the tech world. Slashdot wrote stories like this about Windows 7(not to mention organized fud campaigns by Computerworld fake benchmarks):

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revealed-in-windows-7

Go on, read the comments there.

Choice comment from that discussion:

Re:A DRM ban clause should be added as a constitut (Score:4, Insightful)
by hairyfeet (841228) Alter Relationship on Tuesday February 17 2009, @12:54AM (#26882807) Journal

I been saying it and saying it that the DRM in Win7 hadn't been turned on and that is why they are getting good performance out of it now. Vista Beta 1 ran great for me too, but that was the pre DRM version. All of this DRM crap has to monitor you to keep "criminals" like the owner of the PC from doing as they like 24/7/365. All of that monitoring takes up CPU and RAM that could have been used for your stuff.

Mark my words, what we are seeing here is the tiniest tip of the turd iceberg that is Win7, AKA Vista the second edition. It will go down in flames as folks find out it is a big pile of stink just like Vista. That is why just yesterday I had a customer literally throw money at me saying "make this %^&^&$ POS Vista go away! I don't want to see this thing again until XP is on it!". So mark my words, Linux guys. Be getting your A games ready. Be doing everything you can to fix the little irritants like Winprinters because when Vista7 goes down in flames you are going to have a LOT of POed folks looking for a new direction. And Apple is just too damned expensive for John Q. Average. So this is your shot, make it count. I doubt seriously after Win7 goes down in flames that Ballmer will have a job and the next guy they bring in will probably be one of the MS Office guys and he will go back to dull and boring business OSes(Oh,Lord,please let it be so!) so you guys probably won't get a third at bat.

I for one would like some healthy competition to make the marketplace more fair so don't miss your shot,make it count. Because a moron as stupid as Ballmer only comes around once in a lifetime and you don't want to miss it.

And the tech world noticed that Slashdot turned into a joke --> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/oh-the-humanity-windows-7s-draconian-drm.ars

>Windows 7 actually doesn't suck. It's what Vista should have been. Its throughput for nontrivial amounts of files /does/ suck, but as a run-of-the-mill OS, it's not 'orrible, guvnuh.

Ah lovely, now you love Window

They can introduce all the warrantless tapping statutes they like but there's no obligation or wish on my part to hand over my decryption keys

Incorrect. The UK has the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which lets them demand encryption keys/passwords. If you do not comply, you can face jail time

Just because you let Google handle the login doesn't mean Gawker gets anything more from you than an email address which you were already obligated to provide in the past.

The only situation where that is true is where you previously provided them an email that was already associated with a social networking account (like GMail is). You could avoid providing Gawker with information about your social networking account by using an unrelated email account. No you know longer have that option. You must authenticate using some method which tells Gawker the account you use for social networking. And this is useful information to them. Gawker advertizes on Facebook, this indirectly gives them access to demographics information about the accounts they are advertizing to, which they can now link with Gawker accounts.

All this does is allow Gawker to off-load all user account stuff to some other entity, making them less of a hacking target,

Except research is showing that outsourcing this task is more difficult than people think. Sites that do so are more likely to make a mistake that results in a data breech than those who use their own in-house authentication. Any sort of cross-site integration is tricky from a security point of view, and this is no exception. They haven't made things more secure, they have just introduced another point of failure.

it wasn't the standards body that "called them out", but the retailers who asked "shouldn't it have...."

The Pi devs thought it didn't need the CE mark because it is an unfinished product, not a consumer device (eg it doesn't come with a case). they thought this because the Beagleboard is a similarly 'unfinished' product and it too doesn't have the CE mark.

The Pi people are going through the CE motions to make sure they're covered, and finding out if they really have to go through the compliance checks on the side.

ArsTechnica does a much better job describing the issue.

Reality has a well known liberal bias. Of course conservatives are going to distrust science.

Now remind me if it is liberals or conservatives that distrust science when it comes to the following beliefs.

Cell Phones cause cancer.
That all GMO crops are bad.
We can't replace coal power plants and aging nuclear power plaints with newer safer designs.

That's what I would like to know! It was unfortunately upheld in Germany, citing that it takes effort to come up with technical software solutions (i.e. having ideas is hard), that's why there should be software patents. Perhaps I remember incorrectly.

First off, it doesn't cost the big manufacturers $200 to license Windows. It's more like $50 or possibly even less.

Bundled software with budget laptops, outside of the OS, is shovelware, and is often used to reduce the price.

For the hardware, the display is the most expensive component, and it's no wonder that cheap tablets tried to save money on the display. I'll grant you that tables save some money with lower RAM and small flash drives, but it's not hundreds of dollars. Chipsets for standard ports like ethernet are cheap, and only cost a few dollars. I don't know how much they saved on stuff like GPU, but again, it's not hundreds of dollars, especially when you're talking budget laptops in the price range of $400.

I have one, the charge times are quite slow. To be honest, too slow.

Try to use a charger or a powered USB port that is rated for "fast" iPad charging -- These chargers/ports supply 1.5-2.0A rather than the USB minimum which is typically 500mA for a powered port but can be as low as 100mA per port on an unpowered hub. That said, simple math will tell you the new iPad takes a long time to charge. The device has a 42Wh battery and charges at 5V which requires 8.4Ah @ 5V to fully recharge. On a 500mA connection, that takes 16.8 hours and on a 100mA connection it takes a whopping 84 hours.

However, on a 2A connection (iPad rated), it takes only 4.2 hours. It's also worth noting that the iPad continues to charge for up to 1hr after it says it's 100% charged so real charging time is actually a little longer than what you might think.

The weight isn't really any different, the reason it's so uncomfortable to hold for long periods is the same as any other iPad, there's simply no good way to hold it without blocking or touching the screen.

FWIW, the iPad is much easier to hold than the smaller Kindle Fire. I have both and the Kindle Fire has such a thin boundary that thumb touches always accidentally register when trying to hold the device.

"Apple screening process" is mostly about following design and content rules.

It doesn't even catch copyright infringements and even non-working apps - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/02/fake-pokemon-yellow-rises-to-no-3-position-on-itunes-app-charts.ars

To some extent, every large telecomms provider is an arm of its national government... e.g. AT&T was part of the U.S. government's warrantless wiretapping program. and in return for cosying up to the government, AT&T gets billions a year in tax breaks.

The real question is whether or not Huawei equipment has backdoors that allow spying, and also whether equipment from other vendors has such backdoors. A vendor should not be disqualified based on vague speculation about what might be possible. There were allegations years ago that the U.S. had used backdoored Cisco equipment to spy on the European Union parliament internal network - should the E.U. have banned Cisco from competitive tenders based on these allegations alone? Should we trust, say, Ericsson switches, even though we know that they come preloaded with "lawful intercept" capability that has been abused in the past?

Ahem, emulators of IBM z systems?

Probably the same for IBM i. IBM has a monopoly on these systems and make a fortune selling vastly overpriced hardware for those of their customers trapped with legacy systems. Oh, so your CPU is too slow? Either pay $$$$$ to unlock it from 100 MHz to 1.9 GHz (because we crippled it when we sold it for $$$$$) or pay $$$$$ for a new system that would cost less than 10% as (high-quality) off-the-shelf PC hardware.

It's a scandal, really. I hope they eventually lose all their customers and go to hell.

This has actually happened multiple times. Neighbor looks at CP using your open wifi, FBI raids YOUR house and ousts YOUR family from your home.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/fbi-child-porn-raid-a-strong-argument-for-locking-down-wifi-networks.ars

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/28039374/detail.html

I'm not looking to replace my entire library of DVD with Blu Ray, since I have literally hundreds of DVDs. But some movies which I really like I've re-invested in them because seeing them in full HD is worth it if I can find the disk on sale.

Doesn't matter, lowering the price is a stop-gap to what's inevitable. The consumers will get what they want whether the movie industry likes it or not.

Music industry fought mp3, suing everyone, until Apple came in and cleaned their clock. Now instead of $15 CDs we buy songs for $1 and the music industry does whatever Apple says because Apple sells more music than Walmart. Had the music industry stopped suing their customers and start selling to their customers they would be the ones with $100 billion instead of Apple.

Fast forward, and the movie industry is on the exact same path of destruction as the music industry. Doesn't anyone learn? Look, you can try and sell blu-ray discs for $20+ a pop, but that's just going to drive more people to streaming. Give us $5 BD and start a universal streaming service and make money again or someone else will and they'll take your money. It's your choice, but in the end we will have a streaming movie service and we won't be paying $20+ for discs just like no one buys $15 CDs anymore.

Resistance is futile. We are your consumers.

How about this article, which lists multiple users making the claim you say doesn't exist by name: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/megaupload-wasnt-just-for-pirates-angry-users-out-of-luck-for-now.ars

Your claim is fucking ridiculous. There are 25 PB of data. It's nearly impossible for there not to be significant amounts of legitimate data on there.