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Except that the only way for anti-piracy to "win" is to take general purpose computers out of the public's hands and move everyone into walled garden ecosystems

Precisely. I see you've caught up with the industry's move to Tablet and Cloud.

We're busily swapping the Cluetrain for the Zittrain.

If you need address space randomization, you're already broken. It just makes the dumber stack overflow exploits crash more.

Defence in depth is a very good security practice. You accept that the first line of defence isn't going to be perfect, and build redundancy into the system.

As for the limitations of Apple's approach, then I'd suggest reading Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet - and how to stop it. He spends a lot of time discussing the attractiveness of "walled garden" systems and how similar benefits could be gained in open systems.

Responsible thing would've been to actually go through and read the damn documents and leak only the ones that are actually relevant to wikileaks' purported mission.

You're right. IN fact, they should have brought in outside experts, say, respected journalists who have a large body of knowledge about what is evidence of actual government malfeasance, had them look over the 250,000 documents, and then only published, say, the 960 documents or so that those journalists identify as being important.

Wait a minute! That's EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID.

Here's a FAQ for all of those who believe the lies currently being stated by Boehmer, Lieberman, and others regarding this leak: http://futureoftheinternet.org/wikileaks-cable-faq

Agreed - and it's the same in publishing.

The question of reputation is central in academic publishing. The same book will be at an advantage if it is published by Macmillan rather than brought out by an unknown press, or published online. The large and respected presses carry an automatic sense that their books are likely to be well-written and worth reading. Once an author has a good reputation, maybe they can start publishing under Creative Commons licences or the like. Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain have both done this - but only after spending a long time building up their reputations and writing a lot of other books under - presumably - the usual contracts. And their books come out with "big-name" publishers like Penguin and Yale alongside being freely available to download.

You just can't ignore the cachet of the publisher when it comes to books. It's one of the factors that academics use to evaluate whether a new book is worth their time or not, and that in itself often reflects the fact that the good publishers provide invaluable services in reviewing and editing.

I'm not defending Macmillan's move, btw - just pointing out that it's not quite as easy as it might seem to write the publishers out of the process.

The iPad isn't a general purpose computer

YES. That's precisely the problem. General purpose computers are in danger of being replaced by crippled 'appliances'.

This is a very very dangerous trend.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/

"Because the iPhone isn't intended to be an all-purpose pocket computer - its a phone and music player. "

That's pretty dumb, if that's all they think it is. Even dumber if users are happy with that state of affairs. Pretty sad for humanity in general, though. See Zitttrain.

"If Apple allowed apps that ran arbitrary code they'd have to check not just the C64 emu but every app with a macro or scripting facility to ensure that they were adequately sandboxed. That would be a lot of work. "

That... does not logically follow. At all.

An interpreter is not 'arbitrary code' by any stretch of the imagination. It's not running arbitrary *machine code*.

And yes, every app with a macro or scripting facility that runs on any computer, anywhere, MUST be adequately sandboxed. And not by humans, but by security policy. That's what a sandboxing model is FOR, so that you don't have to do "a lot of work" to make things secure.

How hard is it to write some secure http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1714205/Apple-Pulls-C64-Emulator-From-the-App-Store?art_pos=5#APIs for "allocate memory", "output to screen", "input from keyboard", and make sure THOSE don't have bugs - and then let a program do what the heck it wants with only those APIs?

Java managed to do this. What's so hard about the concept for Apple?

" "Well I want a pony!" you reply "But you'll just have to deal with a limited OS because we can't have nice things because they keep installing viruses on their machine!" "

Thank you, you've just made Jonathan Zittrain's point exactly.

Except he thinks this is a bad development and can still be changed.

anyone familiar with this?:
http://futureoftheinternet.org/

Or, if you don't like reading, you can watch his thoroughly engaging book talk here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/04/zittrain

Zittrain knows his stuff. He was friends with Postel. He's got an AI background from Yale in addition to his Harvard Law degree.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/