it would be nice if the Android App store allowed you to filter programs to begin with
Actually that would be a powerful idea to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. If Google made categories for certain apps and then applied some default filters it would go a long way. So if I am looking at wall papers then the default filter will have no permissions and honest wallpaper app developers will make sure they don't specify any more permissions than they need.
Surely this would just make a primary role of the recharge station be to smooth out that load? eg. a few giant banks of capacitors or similar could keep enough charge to smooth out the peaks?
Re: lagginess you might feel somewhat better when you get Froyo / 2.2. For me it fixed many of the occasional lags that were annoying. Prior to 2.2 I used a task killer (a 1x1 widget that you can tap to kill all non-critical background tasks) and if I noticed any lag I hit it and bam, phone is fine again. I think they sorted this out in Froyo because I have barely hit it once in a month now.
Not sure what you mean by "farsighted". When I look at what MS has done over the last 10 years, it almost seems like they have tried to be too far ahead of the curve. For example, Windows CE and tablet computers. Both correctly picked as major strategic plays and both executed by Microsoft - and failed. Why did they fail? You can have various different takes on it, but my take is that they largely went too early. Eg, I played with various PDAs and the simple fact is that the hardware was too mediocre to be useful. Not enough capacity to fit music, not enough CPU to play video, not enough battery life to go all day. Stylus instead of touch screen. 240x320 resolution. It all just added up to a 'meh' experience.
Had MS held WinCE / WinMo back in development until, say, 2005 - perhaps they could have launched something spectacular and really taken the market with it. Similar with tablet pcs - I had an XP tablet and it was good - but just not quite good enough. Stylus sucks, too heavy, 3 hours battery life (optimistically). Once again, hardware not really ready.
Apple played both of these cards later but much better. I suspect the products have been in development inside Apple for a long time - but they knew to hold them back until it really made a good user experience.
the original xbox was supposed to be the gateway to Microsoft being the centerpiece and rent-seeker of your home media center
That is what I always thought but have always been mystified by why if that was their strategy they didn't stick a tv tuner in there? I think if they just added tv tuner + composite video input and let the damn thing record it would have been the complete system for the living room and competed in a different space to the other consoles. As it is, it's just "another console". I would have bought a box for my living room in a heartbeat if I could watch and record TV on it. In fact, I did - but it's not an xbox it is a small form factor Win7 pc running media center.
As good as these exemptions are it is still spitting in the face of Fair Use that they have to be defined as exemptions to the law to make them legal: fair use was supposed to be a blanket safety net that ensured certain uses would always be legal. Now we have the situation where a whole blanked class of uses are illegal except for specifically named exemptions - and the sad thing is that everyone is grateful for it.
The frustrating thing to me is that Linux has been "almost there" for so long. Just yesterday I dug an old computer out of the garage and fired it up. It was running KDE circa 2002. And you know what? It was beautiful - pleasing graphics, everything I want. Almost. I remember when I actually used this machine that life was a constant stream of small annoyances. Small missing features. Things that didn't quite work right. Things that crashed. Wireless network unreliable. Different look and feel among many programs. Fonts in some programs look horrible. Copy and paste unreliable / inconsistent between programs.
I keep trying live distros when they come out. They *are* making progress - hardware support for common things like Wifi cards is much better - but it is sad to me that in almost 10 years the actual progress seems incremental. Maybe the last 5% is 95% of the work. Perhaps one day they will get there. But at the moment it seems to me that the forward progress is slower than the rate of change of technology so we are nearly at an equilibrium and the Linux Desktop is as good as it is ever going to be. Almost - but not quite - as good.
Australians have a very different attitude to government than Americans, and perhaps to some extent many other countries.
By and large, they see the government as a service provider. It provides their health care, education (right through from elementary school through to university), postal service, once upon a time even the telephone network and power and water services. Basically, any exigent need that an Australian citizen feels is immediately reflected in their mind to the government as the first port of call as to who should fill it. The government is accutely attuned to this and doesn't hesitate to jump in and try to first exaggerate the need for and then propose some (usually token but sufficient to win votes) solution to the "problem". This, combined with the fact that Australia has been a peaceful democracy since inception (if you ignore Aborigines, but that is what Aussies do) has lead to an implicit trust of government that simply doesn't exist in the US.
Now, don't get me wrong - Aussies hate the government - they are full of cynicism and basically assume that every politician is corrupt and every bureaucrat is incompetent. But they don't think they are evil. They would never even imagine that their government might persecute them or become their enemy in a war, etc. Even if they did, the government is so institutionalized in normal people's lives that it is basically pointless to worry about it. The American viewpoint seems a little bit ludicrous to most Australians - really, you want to hold onto your guns and absolute rights to free speech just in case you want to overthrow your entire government one day - like that is actually going to happen? You, with your pop gun are going to take on your nuclear armed government?
So when the government says they want to censor or monitor the internet, most people see it no differently to if your ISP announced that as a new extra feature to protect them. You pay for virus checkers and filters on your home computer, now the government is going to do that for free - awesome! It sounds like a good idea (catch more criminals, protect children etc) and due to implicit trust they have they don't really pursue it to question whether evil things might be done as a result, and even if they do it seems like a very theoretical, abstract concept.
You have a strange definition of being on 'life support'. If it means being actively sold throughout most of the world and guaranteed with updates for the next year then I guess most phones in the world are on "life support".
I'm sorry, this is utterly ridiculous - you claim the N1 is not more "open" than the iPhone? When the entire kernel and 95% of userspace is open source (as in, Here Is The Source, Check it Out with Git), installing non-approved apps involves merely checking a box, rooting the device is barely more difficult than that, and even if you stick to approved apps Google exerts almost no restrictions on what you can develop (and yes, tethering apps are included, without root, in contradiction to your assertion). When there are developers out there like Cyanogen checking out the source themselves and recompiling it into ROMs you can flash onto the device with the full blessing and approval of Google? The N1 is not more open than an iPhone?
Please, make whatever arguments you like about the quality of Android and iPhone ecosystems, but if you care at all about what "open" means in the software world, do not pretend that there is no difference between Android and the iPhone on this point. It may not be very meaningful or useful to you in particular (though as a software developer developer it should be), but some of us care about it a lot.
I know this is a side point, but can we PLEASE stop with the rubbish about the Nexus One being "not in production"? Google simply stopped selling it from their store. The N1 is very much alive, and indeed is still being launched from new carriers around the world (eg: Vodafone in Australia just a month ago).
Ok, touche, but let's face it, if the NSA take a particular interest in my data then I am pretty well screwed even if I never put it onto the internet (hello keyloggers, spyware, or just plain old cops bashing down the door and taking my computer).
On the other hand if they are casting a wide net to search for interesting people then I think my encrypted data is pretty safe even from them - even they do not have computing resources to do this stuff in real time (or do you have a revelation to give us that the NSA have a back door into Gnu PGP?)
There's another factor that makes AdWords so effective - when they are linked to search they are shown to people who are *looking* for something. In other words, when you have an open mind, an unfilled desire, a need. On the other hand banner ads etc, are shown to people who are in a completely different frame of mind.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between AdWords on Google's search page and AdWords shown on 3rd party sites. I suspect the ones linked to search will be much more effective.
I've always thought that unless you literally have millions of users it is quite acceptable just to block password attempts from come too quickly from a given ip address. For most sites more than 60 failed password attempts in a minute would be good enough to ban an ip address for 5 minutes. Yes there might be some people behind a proxy who end up with a message saying "wait 5 minutes", but that seems acceptable. This would mean the attacker needs to be in control of a considerable number of ip addresses to make an effective attack. If they have a botnet they might be able to do it, but lets face it, an attacker in control of a botnet of thousands of machines can already do some pretty unthinkable things.
Doesn't access to your workstation == access to your password == logging on as you? Consider how trivial it would be for one of those contractors to slip in an unobtrusive hardware keylogger onto your computer and then harvest everything you type from the next room?
NB: this is one reason why I now do most of my passwords using KeePass - it effectively makes 1 factor authentication into 2 factor which at least stops incidental / opportunistic keylogging attacks.
it's the fact that no information that is online is secure
I really don't get where this pervasive meme is coming from. I just encrypted and posted a 200MB backup file of my personal documents to an online service for safekeeping. Only I have the PGP decryption key. Can you tell me how it is not secure?
You've made very eloquent arguments for what I consider to be exactly my point of view. You give me an argument:
"Just because a kind can sneak into a movie doesn't mean we should just let them in whenever they want"
And I give you the same argument:
"Just because kids can sneak into a movie doesn't mean we should ban everyone from seeing movies not suitable for kids"
This is the same argument: not all things are right for all people. But all it tells us is that offering people control and choice is important. This is exactly what Microsoft and Apple are *not* doing. They are making the choice for you - and coincidentally, creating mini-dictatorships for themselves.
Unfortunately Android is also not giving control and choice because they aren't giving people a way to control what their kids see on the market. However I have much more hope for Android because with a free and open ecosystem you can bet if there is demand it will be filled (and there is demand).
Concentrate more on Corporate features.. full Exchange and Office support, Sharepoint, etc. than iPhone/Android
This is where MS has shot themselves in the foot big time. Corporates and businesses absolutely hate the concept of 3rd party app stores and will not (can not, in most cases) deal with them. Apple made a compromise but only for companies with > 500 employees. There's a huge opportunity here for small businesses who need custom software on their devices (eg: roving sales person can submit orders on their mobile device, etc.). But MS just gave that market the huge middle finger by locking down their device. Android seems to be the only player with a welcoming platform for these folks.
but they cannot hope to understand how women actually feel about and have sex by watching porn. Parents and schools are the last places kids turn to when it comes to sex, and by the time they actually see a real nude person in their bedroom, they've probably seen thousands of digital ones there for years
Even assuming all you say is true, how on earth do you think restricting apps on a mobile device is going to change this? The browser will browse anything your horny children tell it to. Do you really think locking down one aspect of the phone is going to change that? I'm fine with discussing how pornography can have negative impacts, but when it is used as a pretext for instituting complete lockdown of technology such that people do not even control what runs on their own computers any more I think it is way out of control. Especially when it has absolutely zero impact because there are other avenues for getting porn on to the devices. This has been a problem for a long time and there are lot of solutions to it that don't happen to coincidentally involve handing complete monopolistic lockdown control of content to giant companies.
NB: I will agree that this is a problem in the Android store, by the way, since you can find porn apps there right among apps for grandma and your kids. I have no idea why Google doesn't simply have a rating system that lets a parent filter out adult apps. There has to be a happy medium, I really don't understand why we have to live on the extremes here.
Do you and everyone else bitching about IE6 / IE7 understand that this adds a bunch of features even to IE8 that web developers waste a huge amount of time implementing IE-only cruft for? (Eg: border-radius).
You can spend your years focusing on ideology and waging a war to rid the world of a browser you don't like if you want. I'll be back here in reality making beautiful web sites quickly and efficiently and accomplishing things in my life. For people like me, this kind of solution is a god send.
Would a reasonable person with an understanding of wireless technology think that 3rd party companies should be allowed to...
Well, it is not really about what reasonable people think *should* be the law. The only reason reasonable people come into this is to use their judgement: is it a reasonable expectation that a conversation will be private in a given situation?
In this particular situation there might as well be giant blinking illuminated signs telling the person that their conversation is not private - everything from the install manual of the access point to Windows is telling them that it is not private. They can think about what "should" be private all they like, but it doesn't matter. The question is what does a reasonable person expect *will* be private?
Indeed - the fact that she is not taking it to court says that she knows they don't have a case but also that Google knows that the damage from just being contrite about this is far less then trying to defend themselves here. They really don't want this data at all, there is no business win for them in establishing that it is ok to collect it, in fact, the reverse is true. If they did successfully defend this it would just bring on a new bout of privacy legislation that might actually cripple them.
So it is a face saving exercise for the government and damage control for Google and everyone is happy - except all the poor suckers who have now been fooled by the government into thinking that their open Wifi connections are private and will continue to suffer the risk of having their identities stolen or worse - and that is the real crime here.
Yes exactly, but many people, including you, seem to intrepret this incorrectly by substituting "ignorant of basic facts" for "reasonable". That is not what it is about. The "reasonable" is a test of the judgement of an ordinary person after they are informed of the facts, not a test of what facts an ordinary person knows.
So would an ordinary person, after having learned all about how Wifi works - how an open Wifi access point allows anybody to see traffic and broadcasts it up to a hundred feet outside the boundary of their house, how a 20 second configuration step can be implemented to make it private, after observing how the documentation and software that was supplied with the access point strongly recommends to set up such a password, after noticing that common operating systems such as Windows 7 show a giant warning about how connecting to such a network is not private and anybody can see the data and actually calls it "Public" after you set it up - would an ordinary person, using reasonable judgement about these facts, then decide that an open Wifi network is private? I don't think so.
that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way.
Adding extensions to CSS is totally acceptible, even encouraged. All the browser vendors do it. As long as they do it using the blessed means built into the W3C standard there is no problem with that. It is precisely through such means that the standards actually move forward.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be nice if the Android App store allowed you to filter programs to begin with
Actually that would be a powerful idea to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. If Google made categories for certain apps and then applied some default filters it would go a long way. So if I am looking at wall papers then the default filter will have no permissions and honest wallpaper app developers will make sure they don't specify any more permissions than they need.
Surely this would just make a primary role of the recharge station be to smooth out that load? eg. a few giant banks of capacitors or similar could keep enough charge to smooth out the peaks?
Re: lagginess you might feel somewhat better when you get Froyo / 2.2. For me it fixed many of the occasional lags that were annoying. Prior to 2.2 I used a task killer (a 1x1 widget that you can tap to kill all non-critical background tasks) and if I noticed any lag I hit it and bam, phone is fine again. I think they sorted this out in Froyo because I have barely hit it once in a month now.
Not sure what you mean by "farsighted". When I look at what MS has done over the last 10 years, it almost seems like they have tried to be too far ahead of the curve. For example, Windows CE and tablet computers. Both correctly picked as major strategic plays and both executed by Microsoft - and failed. Why did they fail? You can have various different takes on it, but my take is that they largely went too early. Eg, I played with various PDAs and the simple fact is that the hardware was too mediocre to be useful. Not enough capacity to fit music, not enough CPU to play video, not enough battery life to go all day. Stylus instead of touch screen. 240x320 resolution. It all just added up to a 'meh' experience.
Had MS held WinCE / WinMo back in development until, say, 2005 - perhaps they could have launched something spectacular and really taken the market with it. Similar with tablet pcs - I had an XP tablet and it was good - but just not quite good enough. Stylus sucks, too heavy, 3 hours battery life (optimistically). Once again, hardware not really ready.
Apple played both of these cards later but much better. I suspect the products have been in development inside Apple for a long time - but they knew to hold them back until it really made a good user experience.
the original xbox was supposed to be the gateway to Microsoft being the centerpiece and rent-seeker of your home media center
That is what I always thought but have always been mystified by why if that was their strategy they didn't stick a tv tuner in there? I think if they just added tv tuner + composite video input and let the damn thing record it would have been the complete system for the living room and competed in a different space to the other consoles. As it is, it's just "another console". I would have bought a box for my living room in a heartbeat if I could watch and record TV on it. In fact, I did - but it's not an xbox it is a small form factor Win7 pc running media center.
As good as these exemptions are it is still spitting in the face of Fair Use that they have to be defined as exemptions to the law to make them legal: fair use was supposed to be a blanket safety net that ensured certain uses would always be legal. Now we have the situation where a whole blanked class of uses are illegal except for specifically named exemptions - and the sad thing is that everyone is grateful for it.
The frustrating thing to me is that Linux has been "almost there" for so long. Just yesterday I dug an old computer out of the garage and fired it up. It was running KDE circa 2002. And you know what? It was beautiful - pleasing graphics, everything I want. Almost. I remember when I actually used this machine that life was a constant stream of small annoyances. Small missing features. Things that didn't quite work right. Things that crashed. Wireless network unreliable. Different look and feel among many programs. Fonts in some programs look horrible. Copy and paste unreliable / inconsistent between programs.
I keep trying live distros when they come out. They *are* making progress - hardware support for common things like Wifi cards is much better - but it is sad to me that in almost 10 years the actual progress seems incremental. Maybe the last 5% is 95% of the work. Perhaps one day they will get there. But at the moment it seems to me that the forward progress is slower than the rate of change of technology so we are nearly at an equilibrium and the Linux Desktop is as good as it is ever going to be. Almost - but not quite - as good.
Australians have a very different attitude to government than Americans, and perhaps to some extent many other countries.
By and large, they see the government as a service provider. It provides their health care, education (right through from elementary school through to university), postal service, once upon a time even the telephone network and power and water services. Basically, any exigent need that an Australian citizen feels is immediately reflected in their mind to the government as the first port of call as to who should fill it. The government is accutely attuned to this and doesn't hesitate to jump in and try to first exaggerate the need for and then propose some (usually token but sufficient to win votes) solution to the "problem". This, combined with the fact that Australia has been a peaceful democracy since inception (if you ignore Aborigines, but that is what Aussies do) has lead to an implicit trust of government that simply doesn't exist in the US.
Now, don't get me wrong - Aussies hate the government - they are full of cynicism and basically assume that every politician is corrupt and every bureaucrat is incompetent. But they don't think they are evil. They would never even imagine that their government might persecute them or become their enemy in a war, etc. Even if they did, the government is so institutionalized in normal people's lives that it is basically pointless to worry about it. The American viewpoint seems a little bit ludicrous to most Australians - really, you want to hold onto your guns and absolute rights to free speech just in case you want to overthrow your entire government one day - like that is actually going to happen? You, with your pop gun are going to take on your nuclear armed government?
So when the government says they want to censor or monitor the internet, most people see it no differently to if your ISP announced that as a new extra feature to protect them. You pay for virus checkers and filters on your home computer, now the government is going to do that for free - awesome! It sounds like a good idea (catch more criminals, protect children etc) and due to implicit trust they have they don't really pursue it to question whether evil things might be done as a result, and even if they do it seems like a very theoretical, abstract concept.
You have a strange definition of being on 'life support'. If it means being actively sold throughout most of the world and guaranteed with updates for the next year then I guess most phones in the world are on "life support".
I'm sorry, this is utterly ridiculous - you claim the N1 is not more "open" than the iPhone? When the entire kernel and 95% of userspace is open source (as in, Here Is The Source, Check it Out with Git), installing non-approved apps involves merely checking a box, rooting the device is barely more difficult than that, and even if you stick to approved apps Google exerts almost no restrictions on what you can develop (and yes, tethering apps are included, without root, in contradiction to your assertion). When there are developers out there like Cyanogen checking out the source themselves and recompiling it into ROMs you can flash onto the device with the full blessing and approval of Google? The N1 is not more open than an iPhone?
Please, make whatever arguments you like about the quality of Android and iPhone ecosystems, but if you care at all about what "open" means in the software world, do not pretend that there is no difference between Android and the iPhone on this point. It may not be very meaningful or useful to you in particular (though as a software developer developer it should be), but some of us care about it a lot.
Still sounds like a violation to me - if they end up in the same binary blob / running together in the same 'process' then GPL applies.
I know this is a side point, but can we PLEASE stop with the rubbish about the Nexus One being "not in production"? Google simply stopped selling it from their store. The N1 is very much alive, and indeed is still being launched from new carriers around the world (eg: Vodafone in Australia just a month ago).
Ok, touche, but let's face it, if the NSA take a particular interest in my data then I am pretty well screwed even if I never put it onto the internet (hello keyloggers, spyware, or just plain old cops bashing down the door and taking my computer).
On the other hand if they are casting a wide net to search for interesting people then I think my encrypted data is pretty safe even from them - even they do not have computing resources to do this stuff in real time (or do you have a revelation to give us that the NSA have a back door into Gnu PGP?)
There's another factor that makes AdWords so effective - when they are linked to search they are shown to people who are *looking* for something. In other words, when you have an open mind, an unfilled desire, a need. On the other hand banner ads etc, are shown to people who are in a completely different frame of mind.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between AdWords on Google's search page and AdWords shown on 3rd party sites. I suspect the ones linked to search will be much more effective.
I've always thought that unless you literally have millions of users it is quite acceptable just to block password attempts from come too quickly from a given ip address. For most sites more than 60 failed password attempts in a minute would be good enough to ban an ip address for 5 minutes. Yes there might be some people behind a proxy who end up with a message saying "wait 5 minutes", but that seems acceptable. This would mean the attacker needs to be in control of a considerable number of ip addresses to make an effective attack. If they have a botnet they might be able to do it, but lets face it, an attacker in control of a botnet of thousands of machines can already do some pretty unthinkable things.
Doesn't access to your workstation == access to your password == logging on as you? Consider how trivial it would be for one of those contractors to slip in an unobtrusive hardware keylogger onto your computer and then harvest everything you type from the next room?
NB: this is one reason why I now do most of my passwords using KeePass - it effectively makes 1 factor authentication into 2 factor which at least stops incidental / opportunistic keylogging attacks.
it's the fact that no information that is online is secure
I really don't get where this pervasive meme is coming from. I just encrypted and posted a 200MB backup file of my personal documents to an online service for safekeeping. Only I have the PGP decryption key. Can you tell me how it is not secure?
You've made very eloquent arguments for what I consider to be exactly my point of view. You give me an argument:
"Just because a kind can sneak into a movie doesn't mean we should just let them in whenever they want"
And I give you the same argument:
"Just because kids can sneak into a movie doesn't mean we should ban everyone from seeing movies not suitable for kids"
This is the same argument: not all things are right for all people. But all it tells us is that offering people control and choice is important. This is exactly what Microsoft and Apple are *not* doing. They are making the choice for you - and coincidentally, creating mini-dictatorships for themselves.
Unfortunately Android is also not giving control and choice because they aren't giving people a way to control what their kids see on the market. However I have much more hope for Android because with a free and open ecosystem you can bet if there is demand it will be filled (and there is demand).
Concentrate more on Corporate features.. full Exchange and Office support, Sharepoint, etc. than iPhone/Android
This is where MS has shot themselves in the foot big time. Corporates and businesses absolutely hate the concept of 3rd party app stores and will not (can not, in most cases) deal with them. Apple made a compromise but only for companies with > 500 employees. There's a huge opportunity here for small businesses who need custom software on their devices (eg: roving sales person can submit orders on their mobile device, etc.). But MS just gave that market the huge middle finger by locking down their device. Android seems to be the only player with a welcoming platform for these folks.
but they cannot hope to understand how women actually feel about and have sex by watching porn. Parents and schools are the last places kids turn to when it comes to sex, and by the time they actually see a real nude person in their bedroom, they've probably seen thousands of digital ones there for years
Even assuming all you say is true, how on earth do you think restricting apps on a mobile device is going to change this? The browser will browse anything your horny children tell it to. Do you really think locking down one aspect of the phone is going to change that? I'm fine with discussing how pornography can have negative impacts, but when it is used as a pretext for instituting complete lockdown of technology such that people do not even control what runs on their own computers any more I think it is way out of control. Especially when it has absolutely zero impact because there are other avenues for getting porn on to the devices. This has been a problem for a long time and there are lot of solutions to it that don't happen to coincidentally involve handing complete monopolistic lockdown control of content to giant companies.
NB: I will agree that this is a problem in the Android store, by the way, since you can find porn apps there right among apps for grandma and your kids. I have no idea why Google doesn't simply have a rating system that lets a parent filter out adult apps. There has to be a happy medium, I really don't understand why we have to live on the extremes here.
Do you and everyone else bitching about IE6 / IE7 understand that this adds a bunch of features even to IE8 that web developers waste a huge amount of time implementing IE-only cruft for? (Eg: border-radius).
You can spend your years focusing on ideology and waging a war to rid the world of a browser you don't like if you want. I'll be back here in reality making beautiful web sites quickly and efficiently and accomplishing things in my life. For people like me, this kind of solution is a god send.
Would a reasonable person with an understanding of wireless technology think that 3rd party companies should be allowed to ...
Well, it is not really about what reasonable people think *should* be the law. The only reason reasonable people come into this is to use their judgement: is it a reasonable expectation that a conversation will be private in a given situation?
In this particular situation there might as well be giant blinking illuminated signs telling the person that their conversation is not private - everything from the install manual of the access point to Windows is telling them that it is not private. They can think about what "should" be private all they like, but it doesn't matter. The question is what does a reasonable person expect *will* be private?
Indeed - the fact that she is not taking it to court says that she knows they don't have a case but also that Google knows that the damage from just being contrite about this is far less then trying to defend themselves here. They really don't want this data at all, there is no business win for them in establishing that it is ok to collect it, in fact, the reverse is true. If they did successfully defend this it would just bring on a new bout of privacy legislation that might actually cripple them.
So it is a face saving exercise for the government and damage control for Google and everyone is happy - except all the poor suckers who have now been fooled by the government into thinking that their open Wifi connections are private and will continue to suffer the risk of having their identities stolen or worse - and that is the real crime here.
It's about reasonable expectation of privacy
Yes exactly, but many people, including you, seem to intrepret this incorrectly by substituting "ignorant of basic facts" for "reasonable". That is not what it is about. The "reasonable" is a test of the judgement of an ordinary person after they are informed of the facts, not a test of what facts an ordinary person knows.
So would an ordinary person, after having learned all about how Wifi works - how an open Wifi access point allows anybody to see traffic and broadcasts it up to a hundred feet outside the boundary of their house, how a 20 second configuration step can be implemented to make it private, after observing how the documentation and software that was supplied with the access point strongly recommends to set up such a password, after noticing that common operating systems such as Windows 7 show a giant warning about how connecting to such a network is not private and anybody can see the data and actually calls it "Public" after you set it up - would an ordinary person, using reasonable judgement about these facts, then decide that an open Wifi network is private? I don't think so.
that doesn't mean they can't *add* their own little bit of kit to "extend" it in an incompatible or even *patented* way.
Adding extensions to CSS is totally acceptible, even encouraged. All the browser vendors do it. As long as they do it using the blessed means built into the W3C standard there is no problem with that. It is precisely through such means that the standards actually move forward.