Doesn't have to be totally unbreakable, just unbreakable enough, like the Xbox 360. If you really want to see some serious trusted computing initiatives, modify copyright law.
We're getting it anyway.
More seriously, your argument hinges on the investor recouping his costs. Let's assume this, even though one can argue that it is not true (F/OSS seems to be working).
As a pretty serious contributor to FOSS (it's all I've worked on in the last three weeks), I would argue that it only works in certain cases. It's great for library or framework code, or code that will mainly be used by programmers for programming related tasks (ide's, scripting languages), but falls flat most everywhere else. There still isn't a good FOSS image editor, groupware client/server, or office suite. I still can't get a linux desktop to detect my monitors, my mouse, my graphics card, and my network card, all in one go.
Okay, since we are arguing it, then: Linux isn't preinstalled generally speaking, vendors do not cooperate with making drivers, and it is a minority system. These three do not affect only F/OSS; see other commercial OSes that have or had these properties. For other software, some has been polished, some not. Firefox is a nice example. A lot of stuff can be produced without the sort of legal ownership that copyright provides. Others have pointed out various works from before copyright, etc. The patron and donation models have existed in the past and still continue to exist as common models. There is far more out there on why F/OSS can work. One reason it has a hard time is the large warchests fighting its adoption.
If copyright is just to recoup costs, given the 3-6 year cycle of theater -> DVD -> TV, where the majority of income is made, why do we need copyrights longer than a decade? But then you did not argue that. You argued that without any copyright (and DRM) the costs could not be recouped. So, I'll try again.
What about things that aren't movies. If an author writes a book when he's young, then writes another and becomes famous for the second one, but then everyone realizes his earlier work was the true masterpiece, are you OK with the megacorporation publishing companies exploiting him to reap massive profits for little work? The reason FOSS library and framework code works so well is that you can make the calculation that by contributing code, others can expand, improve and maintain your code. Your sacrificing the competitive advantage the proprietary code gives you, for the long term advantage of a library with more features than you could realistically create yourself.
Original copyright in the US was only 28 years (if claimed and renewed), and didn't cover anything from outside the US. That model worked. And if it were that model, then the megacorporations would not exactly be exploiting the author you talk about. There certainly wouldn't be massive profits on an out-of-copyright work. I mean, really. Copyright (according to the constitution) is supposed to encourage production of works, not protect or produce profits. As long as it accomplishes that in the most minimal way possible, the creator not getting greatly compensated is not all that important, since he doesn't in the current system anyhow.
Given that there are so few media producers and distributors, it seems that contractual agreements against copying (similar to how NDAs work) could possibly be a solution as well. Theaters not abiding to the contracts can get blacklisted and sued. Technology already exists to determine which theaters copy illegally.
More seriously, your argument hinges on the investor recouping his costs. Let's assume this, even though one can argue that it is not true (F/OSS seems to be working).
If copyright is just to recoup costs, given the 3-6 year cycle of theater -> DVD -> TV, where the majority of income is made, why do we need copyrights longer than a decade? But then you did not argue that. You argued that without any copyright (and DRM) the costs could not be recouped. So, I'll try again.
Given that there are so few media producers and distributors, it seems that contractual agreements against copying (similar to how NDAs work) could possibly be a solution as well. Theaters not abiding to the contracts can get blacklisted and sued. Technology already exists to determine which theaters copy illegally.
What about other methods? Imagine theaters band together and sponsor creations, which those theaters alone are able to show? Then, those theaters have an incentive to not leak the movie.
What about on your government tax return, you fill in movie producer numbers and the amount of money you want the government to fund that company for the following year? To get government funding, you need to register for a number, and all footage related to a given movie must be released to a public database the day that the movie goes live.
There are many inventive ways of causing movies to be made even without copyright. Free your imagination.
This is one reason I have less of an issue with the "moral rights" of European countries than I do with standard US copyright. As I understand them, moral rights allow the enforcement of certain things outside normal copyright, such as attribution and the right to the work's integrity. Thus, plagiarism would be illegal, but copying may or may not, being governed by something else.
How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it
Sure you can say "they don't need them", but so what. They've been purchased. You can't just take back their address space.
Actually, the addresses are not "owned" by the companies. They are just allocated. So, theoretically, ARIN could deallocate them. The problem is that people would object and file lawsuits; besides, ARIN has no way to enforce the deallocation of addresses, as ARIN could simply be ignored. If that happened, you now have more than one machine per address, which is bad. Besides, it would only postpone the inevitable, and not by that much.
So, the proposal won't work because it would be a lot of work, be destabilizing, and not actually have a worthwhile payoff.
And they can't use 10.0.0.0 because...? And can't use 9.0.0.0/9 because...? And HP needs two/8s because...? And these companies should get (not "do get") preferential treatment because...?
It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file.
I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
You are basically correct, but there is more to the picture.
First, properly encrypted data does pass randomness tests. However, arbitrary data generally does not. Basically nothing on your disk contains data that will test random. The thing that will come closest is compressed data, since perfect compression produces something that can not be compresses further (because there are no patterns exploitable to compress). However, no compression is perfect, and compressed data has metadata, so that is also detectable. Free space on disk also has this property, unless overwritten with random data after deletion.
Further, encrypted data generally has other properties. One common property of encrypted data is that it is often padded out to the nearest multiple of some particular size. Truecrypt, for example, apparently always produces volume files of some multiple of 512.
Last, note that the detection merely purports to detect an encrypted block of data, not reveal any information about the data itself.
To analogize, imagine a large graphic, say 10,000x10,000 (your hard disk), and somewhere on that graphic is a 100x100 block of perfectly 50% grey (encrypted data). That block will stick out like a sore thumb, unless the graphic contains a bunch of blocks of 50% grey throughout (other random or encrypted data).
Pi is a transcendental, infinitely non-recurring number: every finite sequence of numbers is present within it, including all "truly random sequences", of any length.
That does not follow. The Liouville constant is an example of "a transcendental, infinitely non-recurring number" where it is not true that "every finite sequence of numbers is present within it". This is trivially shown, as the Liouville constant consists of only zeros and ones.
This is identical to the situation where if it snows and you shovel your walkway anyone falling can sue you because you modified the snow. If you just left the snow there and someone falls it is an act of God and there is nobody to sue. So for a very long time in Chicago few businesses and almost no residences in many areas shoveled snow because it could get them sued.
Every owner, lessee, tenant, occupant or other person having charge of any building or lot of ground in the city abutting upon any public way or public place shall remove the snow and ice from the sidewalk in front of such building or lot of ground.
If the sidewalk is of greater width than five feet, it shall not be necessary for such person to remove snow and ice from the same for a space wider than five feet.
In case the snow and ice on the sidewalk shall be frozen so hard that it cannot be removed without injury to the pavement, the person having charge of any building or lot of ground as aforesaid shall, within the time specified, cause the sidewalk abutting on the said premises to be strewn with ashes, sand, sawdust, or some similar suitable material, and shall, as soon thereafter as the weather shall permit, thoroughly clean said sidewalk.
The snow which falls or accumulates during the day (excepting Sundays) before four p.m. shall be removed within three hours after the same has fallen or accumulated. The snow which falls or accumulates on Sunday or after four p.m. and during the night on other days shall be removed before ten a.m.
(Prior code  36-19)
10-8-190 Liability for civil damages.
Any person who removes snow or ice from the public sidewalk or street, shall not, as a result of his acts or omissions in such removal, be liable for civil damages. This section does not apply to acts or omissions amounting to wilful or wanton misconduct in such snow or ice removal.
One person noted that they believe that the legend came about after a high-profile case of a business being sued because it allegedly did not clear snow properly.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Their historical worth probably is no better than the worth of a public announcement about a tax reduction written in three languages.
*cough*Rosetta stone*cough*
It is generally quite difficult to know the historical value of something in advance. And just because something is not well known does not mean it does not have historical value, either.
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Supply and demand? Prices up, units sold down?
In the specific case of the tobacco companies, there's this little thing called nicotine addiction that tends to prevent the "units sold down" part of that. If you don't know what nicotine addiction is all about because you have never personally experienced it, I urge you to be grateful for that.
All I know is that every friend that I have had that smoked and discussed smoking with me bemoaned the price increases over the course of years and noted that those increases caused a drop in personal consumption, and in one case, caused him to quit. However, I acknowledge that this is a small sample size (4) and that the plural of anecdote is not data.
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
The message if you Read The Lengthy Article, is that if they don't have and open license to the server code, don't use them. He seems OK with the idea that you use a server based application if they are covered by the GNU Affero GPL.
No, actually.
"Software as a service" means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, "software as a service" is incompatible with your freedom.
We did not try to address this with the GNU Affero GPL because this cannot be solved by a software license. If all the software running on the server is released free software, that would enable you to set up a your own similar server if you wanted to; but you still have no control when you use the server that isn't yours.
The only solution to this problem is not to use someone else's server to do your own computing on your own data. Do it on your own computer, using your own copy of a free program.
Emphasis mine.
He says that the Affero GPL helps deal with software running on a server, but that it can not help SaaS, since the problem with SaaS is inherent in its model of operation.
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
Certain aspects of it do operate without trust. Any time you see 1000000.00 written on a check, you can (and should) forget about trusting anyone.
Think of it this way: Without trust, we would all be too busy farming, hunting, building our own homes, fabbing our own materials, and providing our own healthcare.[sic]
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
This has all to do with trust. Checks are based on trust between banks, trust in the watermarks etc. on the check, and more. Money is based on trust: trust in money being hard to counterfeit, trust that the Feds will not send inflation too high (which depends on trust in the economy in general, etc.), trust that banks don't cheat you, and more. In general, many financial decisions are based on trust that fraud is low.
Both checks and money are about the financial system in general, which we have seen take a substantial downturn due to trust in things that turned out to be false, such as VAR, or the belief that insurance will cover you when things go bad (see Lehman Brothers). Had the trust in AIG been violated, then things would have been worse (see, "too big to fail").
You do not have to fully trust a number of the things above, but only if you trust that the government in the form of police, courts, and legislators are not going to screw you over. And there is enough evidence to show that you can't even fully trust them. How corrupt is the government? How likely is it that money will turn the tide against someone who is in the right? However, the level of trust in stable countries is generally high. If the government is corrupt, then things do not function as well.
Interestingly, countries that are doing better in this financial crisis are those that are less developed, as they have put less trust into the financial systems of the world. If they are less invested in finance, they have less to lose when things do bad. My in-laws in Laos are not happy that their money has gained 20% against the dollar in the last couple years, since it means the money sent back is worth less to them. And why has it? Their economy is based on labor and raw materials. They are trusting in different things.
As you seem to specifically talking about trust in non-human entities, I will not discuss trust in people.
The difference is where the code runs. Web apps are downloaded to your machine and run there, which means that if the app is GPLed, then you have the source and can modify it, and run the modified copy. With software as a service, the code runs on the remote server, and so, even if it is GPLed, the code does not need to be distributed, so you can't get the version of the code that is running, though this can be mitigated with the GNU Affero GPL. Further, even if you could get the code, you still can't run a modified version, since the code is running on a machine you don't control.
In sum, the previous article says that web apps are programs that ought to be GPLed so you get your freedom, and the current article says software as a service inherently makes freedom impossible.
The list is on display in the cellar. Bring a flashlight; the lights have probably gone, and so have the stairs. It is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Tell me, which DRM was unbreakable?
Doesn't have to be totally unbreakable, just unbreakable enough, like the Xbox 360. If you really want to see some serious trusted computing initiatives, modify copyright law.
We're getting it anyway.
More seriously, your argument hinges on the investor recouping his costs. Let's assume this, even though one can argue that it is not true (F/OSS seems to be working).
As a pretty serious contributor to FOSS (it's all I've worked on in the last three weeks), I would argue that it only works in certain cases. It's great for library or framework code, or code that will mainly be used by programmers for programming related tasks (ide's, scripting languages), but falls flat most everywhere else. There still isn't a good FOSS image editor, groupware client/server, or office suite. I still can't get a linux desktop to detect my monitors, my mouse, my graphics card, and my network card, all in one go.
Okay, since we are arguing it, then: Linux isn't preinstalled generally speaking, vendors do not cooperate with making drivers, and it is a minority system. These three do not affect only F/OSS; see other commercial OSes that have or had these properties. For other software, some has been polished, some not. Firefox is a nice example. A lot of stuff can be produced without the sort of legal ownership that copyright provides. Others have pointed out various works from before copyright, etc. The patron and donation models have existed in the past and still continue to exist as common models. There is far more out there on why F/OSS can work. One reason it has a hard time is the large warchests fighting its adoption.
If copyright is just to recoup costs, given the 3-6 year cycle of theater -> DVD -> TV, where the majority of income is made, why do we need copyrights longer than a decade? But then you did not argue that. You argued that without any copyright (and DRM) the costs could not be recouped. So, I'll try again.
What about things that aren't movies. If an author writes a book when he's young, then writes another and becomes famous for the second one, but then everyone realizes his earlier work was the true masterpiece, are you OK with the megacorporation publishing companies exploiting him to reap massive profits for little work? The reason FOSS library and framework code works so well is that you can make the calculation that by contributing code, others can expand, improve and maintain your code. Your sacrificing the competitive advantage the proprietary code gives you, for the long term advantage of a library with more features than you could realistically create yourself.
Original copyright in the US was only 28 years (if claimed and renewed), and didn't cover anything from outside the US. That model worked. And if it were that model, then the megacorporations would not exactly be exploiting the author you talk about. There certainly wouldn't be massive profits on an out-of-copyright work. I mean, really. Copyright (according to the constitution) is supposed to encourage production of works, not protect or produce profits. As long as it accomplishes that in the most minimal way possible, the creator not getting greatly compensated is not all that important, since he doesn't in the current system anyhow.
Given that there are so few media producers and distributors, it seems that contractual agreements against copying (similar to how NDAs work) could possibly be a solution as well. Theaters not abiding to the contracts can get blacklisted and sued. Technology already exists to determine which theaters copy illegally.
Good luck with that.
Things like that have worked in the past.
What about other methods? Imagi
The image is copyrighted, not the article. If you were to retype the article in its entirety, you would be perfectly safe. Just don't copy the image.
unbreakable DRM
LOL. Tell me, which DRM was unbreakable?
More seriously, your argument hinges on the investor recouping his costs. Let's assume this, even though one can argue that it is not true (F/OSS seems to be working).
If copyright is just to recoup costs, given the 3-6 year cycle of theater -> DVD -> TV, where the majority of income is made, why do we need copyrights longer than a decade? But then you did not argue that. You argued that without any copyright (and DRM) the costs could not be recouped. So, I'll try again.
Given that there are so few media producers and distributors, it seems that contractual agreements against copying (similar to how NDAs work) could possibly be a solution as well. Theaters not abiding to the contracts can get blacklisted and sued. Technology already exists to determine which theaters copy illegally.
What about other methods? Imagine theaters band together and sponsor creations, which those theaters alone are able to show? Then, those theaters have an incentive to not leak the movie.
What about on your government tax return, you fill in movie producer numbers and the amount of money you want the government to fund that company for the following year? To get government funding, you need to register for a number, and all footage related to a given movie must be released to a public database the day that the movie goes live.
There are many inventive ways of causing movies to be made even without copyright. Free your imagination.
This is one reason I have less of an issue with the "moral rights" of European countries than I do with standard US copyright. As I understand them, moral rights allow the enforcement of certain things outside normal copyright, such as attribution and the right to the work's integrity. Thus, plagiarism would be illegal, but copying may or may not, being governed by something else.
How about they take back the Class A address space owned by companies who probably aren't even utilizing it
Sure you can say "they don't need them", but so what. They've been purchased. You can't just take back their address space.
Actually, the addresses are not "owned" by the companies. They are just allocated. So, theoretically, ARIN could deallocate them. The problem is that people would object and file lawsuits; besides, ARIN has no way to enforce the deallocation of addresses, as ARIN could simply be ignored. If that happened, you now have more than one machine per address, which is bad. Besides, it would only postpone the inevitable, and not by that much.
So, the proposal won't work because it would be a lot of work, be destabilizing, and not actually have a worthwhile payoff.
And they can't use 10.0.0.0 because ...? And can't use 9.0.0.0/9 because ...? And HP needs two /8s because ...? And these companies should get (not "do get") preferential treatment because ...?
I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
You are basically correct, but there is more to the picture.
First, properly encrypted data does pass randomness tests. However, arbitrary data generally does not. Basically nothing on your disk contains data that will test random. The thing that will come closest is compressed data, since perfect compression produces something that can not be compresses further (because there are no patterns exploitable to compress). However, no compression is perfect, and compressed data has metadata, so that is also detectable. Free space on disk also has this property, unless overwritten with random data after deletion.
Further, encrypted data generally has other properties. One common property of encrypted data is that it is often padded out to the nearest multiple of some particular size. Truecrypt, for example, apparently always produces volume files of some multiple of 512.
Last, note that the detection merely purports to detect an encrypted block of data, not reveal any information about the data itself.
To analogize, imagine a large graphic, say 10,000x10,000 (your hard disk), and somewhere on that graphic is a 100x100 block of perfectly 50% grey (encrypted data). That block will stick out like a sore thumb, unless the graphic contains a bunch of blocks of 50% grey throughout (other random or encrypted data).
Pi is a transcendental, infinitely non-recurring number: every finite sequence of numbers is present within it, including all "truly random sequences", of any length.
That does not follow. The Liouville constant is an example of "a transcendental, infinitely non-recurring number" where it is not true that "every finite sequence of numbers is present within it". This is trivially shown, as the Liouville constant consists of only zeros and ones.
I'll take AOL for $200, Alex.
This is identical to the situation where if it snows and you shovel your walkway anyone falling can sue you because you modified the snow. If you just left the snow there and someone falls it is an act of God and there is nobody to sue. So for a very long time in Chicago few businesses and almost no residences in many areas shoveled snow because it could get them sued.
Urban legend. I googled the four words "chicago shovel snow sue" and got three links in the top four that quoted the Chicago municipal code (10-8-180 "Snow and ice removal" and 10-8-190 "Liability for civil damages") which states as follows:
10-8-180 Snow and ice removal.
Every owner, lessee, tenant, occupant or other person having charge of any building or lot of ground in the city abutting upon any public way or public place shall remove the snow and ice from the sidewalk in front of such building or lot of ground.
If the sidewalk is of greater width than five feet, it shall not be necessary for such person to remove snow and ice from the same for a space wider than five feet.
In case the snow and ice on the sidewalk shall be frozen so hard that it cannot be removed without injury to the pavement, the person having charge of any building or lot of ground as aforesaid shall, within the time specified, cause the sidewalk abutting on the said premises to be strewn with ashes, sand, sawdust, or some similar suitable material, and shall, as soon thereafter as the weather shall permit, thoroughly clean said sidewalk.
The snow which falls or accumulates during the day (excepting Sundays) before four p.m. shall be removed within three hours after the same has fallen or accumulated. The snow which falls or accumulates on Sunday or after four p.m. and during the night on other days shall be removed before ten a.m.
(Prior code  36-19)
10-8-190 Liability for civil damages.
Any person who removes snow or ice from the public sidewalk or street, shall not, as a result of his acts or omissions in such removal, be liable for civil damages. This section does not apply to acts or omissions amounting to wilful or wanton misconduct in such snow or ice removal.
(Prior code  36-20)
Source: http://www.amlegal.com/library/il/chicago.shtml
One person noted that they believe that the legend came about after a high-profile case of a business being sued because it allegedly did not clear snow properly.
That page is riddled with [citation needed]. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Who's on first. What's on second.
God, at least spell "Score" correctly.
How wrong you are! Homeopathy works and is proven and cures everything from hypochondria to cancer!
Yeah, I know what you mean. Their historical worth probably is no better than the worth of a public announcement about a tax reduction written in three languages.
*cough*Rosetta stone*cough*
It is generally quite difficult to know the historical value of something in advance. And just because something is not well known does not mean it does not have historical value, either.
Echoes of RMS and SaaS reverberate....
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Supply and demand? Prices up, units sold down?
In the specific case of the tobacco companies, there's this little thing called nicotine addiction that tends to prevent the "units sold down" part of that. If you don't know what nicotine addiction is all about because you have never personally experienced it, I urge you to be grateful for that.
All I know is that every friend that I have had that smoked and discussed smoking with me bemoaned the price increases over the course of years and noted that those increases caused a drop in personal consumption, and in one case, caused him to quit. However, I acknowledge that this is a small sample size (4) and that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Of course, IANAL, and I don't know nothing.
Implying that a lawyer DOES know nothing?
Sorry. I had to.
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Supply and demand? Prices up, units sold down?
The message if you Read The Lengthy Article, is that if they don't have and open license to the server code, don't use them. He seems OK with the idea that you use a server based application if they are covered by the GNU Affero GPL.
No, actually.
"Software as a service" means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, "software as a service" is incompatible with your freedom.
We did not try to address this with the GNU Affero GPL because this cannot be solved by a software license. If all the software running on the server is released free software, that would enable you to set up a your own similar server if you wanted to; but you still have no control when you use the server that isn't yours.
The only solution to this problem is not to use someone else's server to do your own computing on your own data. Do it on your own computer, using your own copy of a free program.
Emphasis mine.
He says that the Affero GPL helps deal with software running on a server, but that it can not help SaaS, since the problem with SaaS is inherent in its model of operation.
Get a septic tank!
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
Certain aspects of it do operate without trust. Any time you see 1000000.00 written on a check, you can (and should) forget about trusting anyone.
Think of it this way: Without trust, we would all be too busy farming, hunting, building our own homes, fabbing our own materials, and providing our own healthcare.[sic]
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
This has all to do with trust. Checks are based on trust between banks, trust in the watermarks etc. on the check, and more. Money is based on trust: trust in money being hard to counterfeit, trust that the Feds will not send inflation too high (which depends on trust in the economy in general, etc.), trust that banks don't cheat you, and more. In general, many financial decisions are based on trust that fraud is low.
Both checks and money are about the financial system in general, which we have seen take a substantial downturn due to trust in things that turned out to be false, such as VAR, or the belief that insurance will cover you when things go bad (see Lehman Brothers). Had the trust in AIG been violated, then things would have been worse (see, "too big to fail").
You do not have to fully trust a number of the things above, but only if you trust that the government in the form of police, courts, and legislators are not going to screw you over. And there is enough evidence to show that you can't even fully trust them. How corrupt is the government? How likely is it that money will turn the tide against someone who is in the right? However, the level of trust in stable countries is generally high. If the government is corrupt, then things do not function as well.
Interestingly, countries that are doing better in this financial crisis are those that are less developed, as they have put less trust into the financial systems of the world. If they are less invested in finance, they have less to lose when things do bad. My in-laws in Laos are not happy that their money has gained 20% against the dollar in the last couple years, since it means the money sent back is worth less to them. And why has it? Their economy is based on labor and raw materials. They are trusting in different things.
As you seem to specifically talking about trust in non-human entities, I will not discuss trust in people.
The difference is where the code runs. Web apps are downloaded to your machine and run there, which means that if the app is GPLed, then you have the source and can modify it, and run the modified copy. With software as a service, the code runs on the remote server, and so, even if it is GPLed, the code does not need to be distributed, so you can't get the version of the code that is running, though this can be mitigated with the GNU Affero GPL. Further, even if you could get the code, you still can't run a modified version, since the code is running on a machine you don't control.
In sum, the previous article says that web apps are programs that ought to be GPLed so you get your freedom, and the current article says software as a service inherently makes freedom impossible.
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
The list is on display in the cellar. Bring a flashlight; the lights have probably gone, and so have the stairs. It is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.