"Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition."
I'm curious what all of these posters saying "we don't know what his intent was" think the legitimate business model might have been.
So I've made and am going to sell a new STB. Someone's going to buy it. If I'm not helping that person break the law, then he or she is apparently a subscriber to Dish service.
Of course, if they're a subscriber to Dish service, they have exactly as many STB's already in their posession as their subscription allows them to use. Dish supplies the hardware as part of the contracted arrangement. From the end-user perspective, a 3rd party can't compete on price (because the price of the Dish-supplied STB is already built in to the subscription).
It soudns like you think they would sell through Dish. Well, if they're cooperating with Dish then they don't really need to break the encryption.
The only thing that seems to leave is, maybe they want to compete with the standard STB on features. Well, I'll just say that if I were on the jury it would take some substantial evidence to move that off the "fantasy scenrio that doesn't rise to the level of reasonable doubt" list.
As TFS itself points out, much of the navigate-by-smartphone market is people who wouldn't have bought a GPS anyway. Either they didn't like the idea, or for some it would never even have occured to them... but put it in their hands as an add-on to something they do want, and voila!
The GPS market, meanwhile, has a lot of people who either need and/or are conditioned to believe they need a specialized device rather than an add-on feature to a generic electronic gadget.
"give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area"
Ok... that doesn't seem like a terribly practical idea to me.
Suppose the "one area" that's damaged is the processing unit, or the interface that relays threat information to the wearer.
Let's suppose we solve that problem. Maybe we can distribute the processing across the fabric - some sort of nanoprocessor for every square inch of fabric. Maybe we can leverage the soldier's tactile sense to take input everywhere so we don't need in-tact signal paths outside of his body. (And maybe the jokes that go along with that idea aren't worth repeating...)
Now, your soldier is going to have to take some sort of sensory input representing information from all around him in a way that the mind doesn't normally process. This will require considerable training to handle and respond to. It would be pretty much manditory to have some sort of fiiltering on this information, or the soldier will quickly tune himself/herself to ignore it and/or be overwhelmed. How much is "enough" pre-processing? I guess we'll only know if someone decides to try.
Further developing the sensors is only one dimension of the problem if you want to realize this application. Apart from being a new way to conceal a camera (assuming the fabric isn't conspicuuos), I don't see this as good for much, at least for a long while to come.
I have to suspect GP was being sarcastic; and if so he/she has a point.
The question in this case wasn't whether an association of an IP to an activity could stand as evidence that a particular person was involved in that activity - TFS's attempt to draw that connection notwithstanding.
The question in this case was whether an IP address constitutes personal information per MicroSoft's privacy policy. The judge ruled no because the IP identifies the computer, and so doesn't directly identify the person.
As GP notes, a street address doesn't directly identify a person either. At best it identifies the place a person lives. But maybe it identifies a place where a family lives. Or maybe it identifies a business. And on and on.
HOWEVER, an address can, in many cases, be treated by the law as personal information subject to protection. HIPAA's privacy regulations, for example, are often interpreted to apply to any information from which identity could be inferred - even imperfectly, even "some of the time". So at least according to some companies' legal departments, a small-town ZIP code is sometimes considered sensitive from a privacy standpoint. (Note that there is no wealth of HIPAA lawsuits from which to draw "official" interpretation of these regulations, so companies tend to fend for themselves in figuring out what their obligations are.)
So I would argue that the judge's logic doesn't generalize. The real forward-looking solution is a clarification in companies' privacy policies.
The stated intent of the promise (and you can be as cynical as you like about whether this is really what they're doing) is to facilitate interoperability. They're not interested in you making other things that use their patents. They're really not interested you you writing a "C# implementation" using their patents, but really it toasts bagels instead of compiling C# code, and claim they can't sue you.
They also leave themselves some interesting outs, so the question I can't answer (as I haven't studied the relevant material) is one of intent. The real test of whether they're trying to be interoperable would come with an analysis of the spec in question. Are the "interesting" parts of the spec over which they hold patents mandatory parts of the core spec? If they're optional, then MS can sue you if you use their patents to implement them. If a key feature is implemented using a spec that is referenced by the covered spec, that doesn't fall under the promise either.
At worst it might be somewhere between a nice start and a PR stunt; at best it might be a legitimate move toward a patent truce.
The 1st Ammendment protects expression, not action. Even the protection on a written piece is diminished if it is functional. With program code, your "audience" is a machine; it cannot appreciate any ideas you might exprses, but can only function according to your instructions.
I expect it would be a rare day that software functionality would be protected by the 1st Ammendment.
How glib. (In spite of the fact that 3 or 4 moderators apparently don't think so.)
The law governs all manner of simple actions that can be described with harmless-sounding generalisms, under certain circumstances. It's the context and effect of doing those general things that either is, or is not, legal.
Is it legal to twitch my finger? But what if my finger is wrapped around the trigger of a gun, which I'm pointing at a clerk at a convenience store? Do I need a court precedent for deciding if moving my own finger is legal?
Solar -> Thermal -> Mechanical -> Electrical is "probably more efficient" than Solar -> Electrical?
I guess I'd like to see numbers to back that up.
I also doubt it will be cheaper, once you account for maintenance of the mechanical components.
Yes, I suppose you could use molten salt as a battery for thermal energy. On the other hand, you could use a battery as a battery for electrical energy, and you won't spend the entire day fighting against thermodynamics to keep your reserve from leaking away.
A steam-based system may be conceptually simpler, but I'd need a citation or two to believe it has long-term advantages. (It may have short-term advantages in that it's possible to implement with components that exist and are well udnerstood today; but that's why there's R&D.)
Ok... I question the assumptions in GP's article, but I also question your solution. It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Now to be fair, like I said, I doubt the burden would be shared equally. And in fact I'll bet the richer you are, the more carbon credits you end up paying for indirectly. (You heat, cool, and light a bigger house. You take more trips. You buy more manufactured goods.) Probably not enough to make the tax progressive, but enough that the raw dollars of impact would correlate somewhat with income.
So now:
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
2) How will you fund the "prebate"? The government is already in debt, and 300 million times anything is a lot of money to loan out while you wait for carbon taxes to roll in.
The current tax is on the sale of gas. It doesn't matter where or why I burn the gas. I'm assuming you think it does because they claim to fund road projects with that money (if you for some reason believe that earmarking tax money means anything)... but so what? I'm not using my city's public schools at this time, yet I pay taxes that go to that. And why is this ok? Because the taxes I pay aren't use taxes on the schools.
What's being proposed is a use tax on public roads, but oh by the way we're going to measure that by car mileage. If you want to tax use of the road, find a way to do it accurately.
Are you aware that, were you audited, you would in fact be required to provide documentation for those donations? That the charity is willing to be complcit in tax fraud by handing you a blank receipt is really beside the point.
It doesn't matter if "most people" won't rack up enough off-road mileage to matter. Some people will. Those people will need a way to prove it in order to "claim back" that portion of their taxes. And there is no justification for addign even more paperwork burden to taxpayers just so they can avoid paying money they don't owe.
What really bugs me about most of the comments I'm seeing, is this "well it wouldn't affect most people" -- which pretty much means "well it wouldn't affect me". For the record, I don't drive a car, so this tax would have 0 impact on me. But some of us think of people other than ourselves when discussing the ways in which our government ought to forcefully demand resources from its citizens.
No reason you couldn't claim it back? That makes me wonder if you do your own taxes...
If you try to tell the taxing authroity that some amount of the thing you're taxed on is non-taxable, you have to have documentation to prove it. If the taxing authority didn't require this, people would (shocking though you might find this) lie to avoid paying taxes.
"would you prefer the government track your every whereabouts instead?"
The fact that you can't conceive of a solution that doesn't have other problems, does not make it ok to tax people for usage that didn't occur.
So much is wrong with that attitude when we're talking about taxation.
"Hey, sorry you have hobbies that aren't like 99% of the population; that makes you not a voting block, so we don't really care about your rights. So you can just suck it up and pay money out of proportion with the justification for the tax... or maybe we'll be so kind as to let you do extra paperwork to see if we'll be so knid as to grant you an exemption so that you don't have to pay money you don't owe."
Actually, what he seems to be saying is: If you sell someone a thing, your rseponsibility for how they use that thing after the sale is less than your responsibility for how someone uses a service you are actively providing. Given the nature of secondary infringement, it certainly seems like a plausible distinction. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good cynical punchline.
(Now, whether I agree with his conclusion I couldn't say without digging quite a bit deeper into the issues.)
Apparently you don't know what a strawman argument is. Unless of course you can point out where exactly I misrepresented an opponant's position so that I could attack a weaker argument than the one he or she was posing.
"lots of reasons. One of which is the inability of anyone knowledgeable to review the code quality or to patch security holes."
I wonder if you've actually interacted with any of Microsoft's technical staff. From your attitude, I'm going to guess not. (It may save you some trouble to know that "technical staff" does not mean "first line tech support".) I have on a number of occasions (mostly a few years back), and your characterization that they ahve nobody knowledgeable is laughable.
As for the rest of your comments... Citation Needed.
As you yourself point out, user desktops are a different environment from appliances and servesr. Show me a apples-to-apples comparison with each type of software being used in the same environment, or STFU.
"But if that's the case, it will be *then*, not *now*."
Exactly. LIke I said, myopic.
"For me, having about 200 Linux systems, both servers and PCs my "background noise" says "malware-related costs to-date: zero". "
Either you think the future will be exactly like the past, in which case computing may not be the field for you, or you didn't understand the point I raised.
"but, hey, let's inflate this number "
NIce straw man. What I said is, this metric is not valid for comparison because we don't have valid measurements for both sides of the equation. Accusing me of trying to "inflate the numbers" when I said no such thing shows considerable bias.
That may be many things, but hypocracy it is not. The US is not saying the technology shouldn't exist; it is saying it shouldn't be in Iran's hands. Again, that's what an embargo is.
Sure, you can advise your boss that his TCO will be lower on account of malware if he goes with Linux. I'm not even saying it's a bad idea.
Of course, so can everyone else who picks up on this meme.
And as that argument sways more users toward FOSS, the cost/benefit for malware writers will change. Maybe we hit an equilibrium point that's less prone overall than today's monoculture, but there are reasons I doubt it. (I think the concerns of monoculture are overstated when the opponant is intelligent rather than random; and I think business will always push toward a monoculture anyway.)
Based on the information available today, predicting the future-looking TCO associated with exploit of software bugs on one platform vs. another is futile. With MS we have a track record from which to say "not good"; for FOSS we have no reasonable track record. So to me, that's background noise. I'd love to see an experiment to collect good data on the malware cost of FOSS.
This would work itself out if we had real competition on security among software vendors - which is why I don't say it's a bad idea to advise switching toward a 2nd vendor be that a FOSS solution or anything else. But it's hard to make that scale in the business world without interoperability, and the players in the market don't want to risk becoming commodities. Good luck.
Even better - imagine a world where the customer doesn't bear the cost of the vendor's mistakes. I know, crazy...
If Jimmy Wales had wanted to use his platform to publish this information, but been constrained from doing so (e.g. by legal force), then I would understand seeking "justification".
As it is, the owners of several conduits of information made a decision that those conduits would not be used to spread certain facts. They don't need "justification" to do that. "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean "obligation for others to provide you the means to reach an audience". Wikipedia has always had controls over what information it carries, even if they are so much broader than "normal" that people like to forget they exist.
The word "censorship" has become emotionally loaded. It's become a common rhetorical tactic to start by using the word literally (by the textbook definition, Wikipedia did censor itself) and then get people to react as though we were talking on the same level as state-enforced suppression of information. Talk to me about "justification" when private blogs start disappearing, or people start facing consequences for being overheard on the street.
Meanwhile, you probably already know Wales's rationale. You can agree or disagree with it; you can choose to let it influence your usage of Wikipedia; you can even think less of him as a person and state as much publically if that's what floats your boat.
But before demanding "justification" for his rationale, maybe you should provide some justificaiton for your sense of entitlement to the use of his forum to share information he doesn't want to convey.
Treated differently depending on whether or not they do follow? Yes, that's pretty much the definition of "embargo".
If the US were threatening to prosecute the company or its principals for daring to break the embargo, then you might have a point. That's a very different thing from saying "ok, if you won't honor our refusal to do business with Iran, then we also won't do business with you".
You're basically saying that the US is somehow obligated to provide postiive support (in the form of business) to any given foreign-based company, even if that company does thigns against stated US interests. I don't think it's the US outlook that is broken in this instance.
TFA doesn't seem clear on this point, but what the name of the technique implies is that you can perform the operation, but neither the inputs nor the outputs are ever decrypted. So if you can't see the question, and you can't see the answer, then why would you perform the operation other than at the request of someone who can (i.e. the client)?
That said, I'd like to know a lot more about this before I'd want to trust it. For this to work, I'd think a lot of the data's structure must be preserved. Maybe you can't detect that structure from the encrypted data, but you can probably infer a lot about it by analyzing the algorithms your clients ask you to apply (especially if they're your algorithms - i.e. software-as-a-service type stuff). I'm impressed if this doesn't create vulnerabilities.
Also I suspect this is fundamentally divorced from public key techniques. If I'm able to encrypt values of my choosing and perform operations of my choosing on encrypted values, I'm pretty sure I can work backward to extract the cleartext from the encrypted data the client provides...
Slashdot Mirror
"Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition."
I'm curious what all of these posters saying "we don't know what his intent was" think the legitimate business model might have been.
So I've made and am going to sell a new STB. Someone's going to buy it. If I'm not helping that person break the law, then he or she is apparently a subscriber to Dish service.
Of course, if they're a subscriber to Dish service, they have exactly as many STB's already in their posession as their subscription allows them to use. Dish supplies the hardware as part of the contracted arrangement. From the end-user perspective, a 3rd party can't compete on price (because the price of the Dish-supplied STB is already built in to the subscription).
It soudns like you think they would sell through Dish. Well, if they're cooperating with Dish then they don't really need to break the encryption.
The only thing that seems to leave is, maybe they want to compete with the standard STB on features. Well, I'll just say that if I were on the jury it would take some substantial evidence to move that off the "fantasy scenrio that doesn't rise to the level of reasonable doubt" list.
As TFS itself points out, much of the navigate-by-smartphone market is people who wouldn't have bought a GPS anyway. Either they didn't like the idea, or for some it would never even have occured to them... but put it in their hands as an add-on to something they do want, and voila!
The GPS market, meanwhile, has a lot of people who either need and/or are conditioned to believe they need a specialized device rather than an add-on feature to a generic electronic gadget.
So why would stand-alone GPS sales be down? Hmm, I just can't seem to think of any other factor that might be in play
"give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area"
Ok... that doesn't seem like a terribly practical idea to me.
Suppose the "one area" that's damaged is the processing unit, or the interface that relays threat information to the wearer.
Let's suppose we solve that problem. Maybe we can distribute the processing across the fabric - some sort of nanoprocessor for every square inch of fabric. Maybe we can leverage the soldier's tactile sense to take input everywhere so we don't need in-tact signal paths outside of his body. (And maybe the jokes that go along with that idea aren't worth repeating...)
Now, your soldier is going to have to take some sort of sensory input representing information from all around him in a way that the mind doesn't normally process. This will require considerable training to handle and respond to. It would be pretty much manditory to have some sort of fiiltering on this information, or the soldier will quickly tune himself/herself to ignore it and/or be overwhelmed. How much is "enough" pre-processing? I guess we'll only know if someone decides to try.
Further developing the sensors is only one dimension of the problem if you want to realize this application. Apart from being a new way to conceal a camera (assuming the fabric isn't conspicuuos), I don't see this as good for much, at least for a long while to come.
I have to suspect GP was being sarcastic; and if so he/she has a point.
The question in this case wasn't whether an association of an IP to an activity could stand as evidence that a particular person was involved in that activity - TFS's attempt to draw that connection notwithstanding.
The question in this case was whether an IP address constitutes personal information per MicroSoft's privacy policy. The judge ruled no because the IP identifies the computer, and so doesn't directly identify the person.
As GP notes, a street address doesn't directly identify a person either. At best it identifies the place a person lives. But maybe it identifies a place where a family lives. Or maybe it identifies a business. And on and on.
HOWEVER, an address can, in many cases, be treated by the law as personal information subject to protection. HIPAA's privacy regulations, for example, are often interpreted to apply to any information from which identity could be inferred - even imperfectly, even "some of the time". So at least according to some companies' legal departments, a small-town ZIP code is sometimes considered sensitive from a privacy standpoint. (Note that there is no wealth of HIPAA lawsuits from which to draw "official" interpretation of these regulations, so companies tend to fend for themselves in figuring out what their obligations are.)
So I would argue that the judge's logic doesn't generalize. The real forward-looking solution is a clarification in companies' privacy policies.
there is nothing particularly difficult about installing/operating an electrical grid
Yeah, I always assume that everything I don't know how to do is easy, too.
It's not just avoiding "embrace and extend".
The stated intent of the promise (and you can be as cynical as you like about whether this is really what they're doing) is to facilitate interoperability. They're not interested in you making other things that use their patents. They're really not interested you you writing a "C# implementation" using their patents, but really it toasts bagels instead of compiling C# code, and claim they can't sue you.
They also leave themselves some interesting outs, so the question I can't answer (as I haven't studied the relevant material) is one of intent. The real test of whether they're trying to be interoperable would come with an analysis of the spec in question. Are the "interesting" parts of the spec over which they hold patents mandatory parts of the core spec? If they're optional, then MS can sue you if you use their patents to implement them. If a key feature is implemented using a spec that is referenced by the covered spec, that doesn't fall under the promise either.
At worst it might be somewhere between a nice start and a PR stunt; at best it might be a legitimate move toward a patent truce.
The 1st Ammendment protects expression, not action. Even the protection on a written piece is diminished if it is functional. With program code, your "audience" is a machine; it cannot appreciate any ideas you might exprses, but can only function according to your instructions.
I expect it would be a rare day that software functionality would be protected by the 1st Ammendment.
How glib. (In spite of the fact that 3 or 4 moderators apparently don't think so.)
The law governs all manner of simple actions that can be described with harmless-sounding generalisms, under certain circumstances. It's the context and effect of doing those general things that either is, or is not, legal.
Is it legal to twitch my finger? But what if my finger is wrapped around the trigger of a gun, which I'm pointing at a clerk at a convenience store? Do I need a court precedent for deciding if moving my own finger is legal?
Solar -> Thermal -> Mechanical -> Electrical is "probably more efficient" than Solar -> Electrical?
I guess I'd like to see numbers to back that up.
I also doubt it will be cheaper, once you account for maintenance of the mechanical components.
Yes, I suppose you could use molten salt as a battery for thermal energy. On the other hand, you could use a battery as a battery for electrical energy, and you won't spend the entire day fighting against thermodynamics to keep your reserve from leaking away.
A steam-based system may be conceptually simpler, but I'd need a citation or two to believe it has long-term advantages. (It may have short-term advantages in that it's possible to implement with components that exist and are well udnerstood today; but that's why there's R&D.)
Ok... I question the assumptions in GP's article, but I also question your solution. It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Now to be fair, like I said, I doubt the burden would be shared equally. And in fact I'll bet the richer you are, the more carbon credits you end up paying for indirectly. (You heat, cool, and light a bigger house. You take more trips. You buy more manufactured goods.) Probably not enough to make the tax progressive, but enough that the raw dollars of impact would correlate somewhat with income.
So now:
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
2) How will you fund the "prebate"? The government is already in debt, and 300 million times anything is a lot of money to loan out while you wait for carbon taxes to roll in.
What does that have to do with anything?
The current tax is on the sale of gas. It doesn't matter where or why I burn the gas. I'm assuming you think it does because they claim to fund road projects with that money (if you for some reason believe that earmarking tax money means anything)... but so what? I'm not using my city's public schools at this time, yet I pay taxes that go to that. And why is this ok? Because the taxes I pay aren't use taxes on the schools.
What's being proposed is a use tax on public roads, but oh by the way we're going to measure that by car mileage. If you want to tax use of the road, find a way to do it accurately.
Are you aware that, were you audited, you would in fact be required to provide documentation for those donations? That the charity is willing to be complcit in tax fraud by handing you a blank receipt is really beside the point.
It doesn't matter if "most people" won't rack up enough off-road mileage to matter. Some people will. Those people will need a way to prove it in order to "claim back" that portion of their taxes. And there is no justification for addign even more paperwork burden to taxpayers just so they can avoid paying money they don't owe.
What really bugs me about most of the comments I'm seeing, is this "well it wouldn't affect most people" -- which pretty much means "well it wouldn't affect me". For the record, I don't drive a car, so this tax would have 0 impact on me. But some of us think of people other than ourselves when discussing the ways in which our government ought to forcefully demand resources from its citizens.
I guess the question is, why are you willing to accept those as the only two possible outcomes?
No reason you couldn't claim it back? That makes me wonder if you do your own taxes...
If you try to tell the taxing authroity that some amount of the thing you're taxed on is non-taxable, you have to have documentation to prove it. If the taxing authority didn't require this, people would (shocking though you might find this) lie to avoid paying taxes.
"would you prefer the government track your every whereabouts instead?"
The fact that you can't conceive of a solution that doesn't have other problems, does not make it ok to tax people for usage that didn't occur.
So much is wrong with that attitude when we're talking about taxation.
"Hey, sorry you have hobbies that aren't like 99% of the population; that makes you not a voting block, so we don't really care about your rights. So you can just suck it up and pay money out of proportion with the justification for the tax... or maybe we'll be so kind as to let you do extra paperwork to see if we'll be so knid as to grant you an exemption so that you don't have to pay money you don't owe."
Your odometer can report how much of your mileage was on public roads? Cool!
Actually, what he seems to be saying is: If you sell someone a thing, your rseponsibility for how they use that thing after the sale is less than your responsibility for how someone uses a service you are actively providing. Given the nature of secondary infringement, it certainly seems like a plausible distinction. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good cynical punchline.
(Now, whether I agree with his conclusion I couldn't say without digging quite a bit deeper into the issues.)
"Not this strawman argument again."
Apparently you don't know what a strawman argument is. Unless of course you can point out where exactly I misrepresented an opponant's position so that I could attack a weaker argument than the one he or she was posing.
"lots of reasons. One of which is the inability of anyone knowledgeable to review the code quality or to patch security holes."
I wonder if you've actually interacted with any of Microsoft's technical staff. From your attitude, I'm going to guess not. (It may save you some trouble to know that "technical staff" does not mean "first line tech support".) I have on a number of occasions (mostly a few years back), and your characterization that they ahve nobody knowledgeable is laughable.
As for the rest of your comments... Citation Needed.
As you yourself point out, user desktops are a different environment from appliances and servesr. Show me a apples-to-apples comparison with each type of software being used in the same environment, or STFU.
"But if that's the case, it will be *then*, not *now*."
Exactly. LIke I said, myopic.
"For me, having about 200 Linux systems, both servers and PCs my "background noise" says "malware-related costs to-date: zero". "
Either you think the future will be exactly like the past, in which case computing may not be the field for you, or you didn't understand the point I raised.
"but, hey, let's inflate this number "
NIce straw man. What I said is, this metric is not valid for comparison because we don't have valid measurements for both sides of the equation. Accusing me of trying to "inflate the numbers" when I said no such thing shows considerable bias.
"Actually, I am being cynical, not myopic"
Oh, really?
"in 30 or forty years it may become a problem, but by that time I will have retired"
That's the definition of myopic.
"In addition, many of the "costs" Microsoft calculates are in fact dependent on Linux being less poopular "
I never said MS's TCO estimates were valid. What I'm saying is, it's wrong to answer a lie with a lie.
That may be many things, but hypocracy it is not. The US is not saying the technology shouldn't exist; it is saying it shouldn't be in Iran's hands. Again, that's what an embargo is.
That's a bit myopic.
Sure, you can advise your boss that his TCO will be lower on account of malware if he goes with Linux. I'm not even saying it's a bad idea.
Of course, so can everyone else who picks up on this meme.
And as that argument sways more users toward FOSS, the cost/benefit for malware writers will change. Maybe we hit an equilibrium point that's less prone overall than today's monoculture, but there are reasons I doubt it. (I think the concerns of monoculture are overstated when the opponant is intelligent rather than random; and I think business will always push toward a monoculture anyway.)
Based on the information available today, predicting the future-looking TCO associated with exploit of software bugs on one platform vs. another is futile. With MS we have a track record from which to say "not good"; for FOSS we have no reasonable track record. So to me, that's background noise. I'd love to see an experiment to collect good data on the malware cost of FOSS.
This would work itself out if we had real competition on security among software vendors - which is why I don't say it's a bad idea to advise switching toward a 2nd vendor be that a FOSS solution or anything else. But it's hard to make that scale in the business world without interoperability, and the players in the market don't want to risk becoming commodities. Good luck.
Even better - imagine a world where the customer doesn't bear the cost of the vendor's mistakes. I know, crazy...
If Jimmy Wales had wanted to use his platform to publish this information, but been constrained from doing so (e.g. by legal force), then I would understand seeking "justification".
As it is, the owners of several conduits of information made a decision that those conduits would not be used to spread certain facts. They don't need "justification" to do that. "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean "obligation for others to provide you the means to reach an audience". Wikipedia has always had controls over what information it carries, even if they are so much broader than "normal" that people like to forget they exist.
The word "censorship" has become emotionally loaded. It's become a common rhetorical tactic to start by using the word literally (by the textbook definition, Wikipedia did censor itself) and then get people to react as though we were talking on the same level as state-enforced suppression of information. Talk to me about "justification" when private blogs start disappearing, or people start facing consequences for being overheard on the street.
Meanwhile, you probably already know Wales's rationale. You can agree or disagree with it; you can choose to let it influence your usage of Wikipedia; you can even think less of him as a person and state as much publically if that's what floats your boat.
But before demanding "justification" for his rationale, maybe you should provide some justificaiton for your sense of entitlement to the use of his forum to share information he doesn't want to convey.
Expected to follow? No...
Treated differently depending on whether or not they do follow? Yes, that's pretty much the definition of "embargo".
If the US were threatening to prosecute the company or its principals for daring to break the embargo, then you might have a point. That's a very different thing from saying "ok, if you won't honor our refusal to do business with Iran, then we also won't do business with you".
You're basically saying that the US is somehow obligated to provide postiive support (in the form of business) to any given foreign-based company, even if that company does thigns against stated US interests. I don't think it's the US outlook that is broken in this instance.
TFA doesn't seem clear on this point, but what the name of the technique implies is that you can perform the operation, but neither the inputs nor the outputs are ever decrypted. So if you can't see the question, and you can't see the answer, then why would you perform the operation other than at the request of someone who can (i.e. the client)?
That said, I'd like to know a lot more about this before I'd want to trust it. For this to work, I'd think a lot of the data's structure must be preserved. Maybe you can't detect that structure from the encrypted data, but you can probably infer a lot about it by analyzing the algorithms your clients ask you to apply (especially if they're your algorithms - i.e. software-as-a-service type stuff). I'm impressed if this doesn't create vulnerabilities.
Also I suspect this is fundamentally divorced from public key techniques. If I'm able to encrypt values of my choosing and perform operations of my choosing on encrypted values, I'm pretty sure I can work backward to extract the cleartext from the encrypted data the client provides...