Their real problem is either that they couldn't twist Verizon's arm enough, or that they were so profligate in their design that twisting wouldn't have done any good.
By all accounts, this "kin" pretty much curb-stomped anything in the dumbphone or "featurephone" category(unless you just had to have something that wouldn't blink at a month on standby in cold mud, or something). However, at the same time, it was stomped on by basically all the "smart" phones that Verizon had on offer, including the Pre Pluses that they were practically giving away.
Trouble was, Verizon wanted the same voice+data plan for a Kin that they did for any smartphone. Over a 2 year contract, it barely matters what the phone ostensibly sells for; but the monthly bills will add up fast. Essentially, a phone that couldn't even run third party applications, and had some notable holes in the first-party lineup, was being pitted against three actually competent smartphone flavors(blackberry, Pre, and the Android team), not to mention all the members of the target demographic who never even went inside the verizon store because they were already enslaved by AT&T.
Either Microsoft sucks at arm twisting, having gone soft dealing with PC OEMS, or they designed a phone that used too much data and Verizon told them that it just wasn't going to happen. If Kin had managed to hit Sidekick's market, basically "not as good as blackberry; but you can afford it upfront and monthly" they would likely have sold a bunch. As it is, though, they set the product up for slaughter-by-smartphone.
America Speaking Out is not, arguably, the best example.
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage. Worse; because of the, er... exceptional quality of political discourse in America, you ran into the "Poe's Law" problem.
If your mods are remotely on the ball, or your wiki editors are up to snuff, or whatever, it is pretty trivial to resist obvious and unsubtle attacks. Worthless posts get modded down, somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough. If, though, a fair part of your "crowd" is utterly batshit crazy, you run into a real problem: your most committed users will produce output almost exactly like your most vicious, cynical parodists(the same thing happened to Conservapedia. Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).
Similarly, with America Speaking Out, the problem isn't going to be with trivial vandalism, which is annoying but quick to clean up, the problem will be that it is impossible to distinguish between people ranting about how Barrack Hussein is a communist fascist muslim sleeper agent because they believe that, and the ones doing exactly the same thing because it amuses them to associate such views with the RNC. Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
Apple's entries into the business PC market are extremely limited(outside of a few specific fields), and would really require a serious culture shift on their part to go any further. (Oh, sure, like Steve is going to support old versions and functions he considers inaesthetic just because deprecating them would break your precious business-critical application... Oh, and you want a second source for hardware? Ha, ha, ha. Gentlemen).
However, this isn't a PC, this thing is being marketed as a Video-conferencing thin-client. That is something that Apple could manage with a few relatively trivial software modifications, and the economies of scale provided by their existing consumer hardware product.
They might well not bother; but Cisco's success with this device would be at their power and mere pleasure.
They've been trying to buy their way in to the consumer area, for some reason, first with the Linksys acquisition, more recently the guys who make those "flip" low-end camcorders, as well as the gotomyPC people.
I'm not sure if this is all part of a grand plan, or just the sign of a company that needs to invest in something; but hasn't done anything more creative than slap firmware locks and gigantic price tags on OEM hardware in years...
Unless Citrix has some real aces up their sleeve, this one is exactly as dead in the water as Apple feels like making it, outside of a few big corporations where just repeating "Cisco, cisco, cisco" in a soothing voice makes management's eye's glaze over and fills them with an irresistable urge to sign purchase orders.
The iPad is a relatively mass-market consumer product, based on a weedy little ARM core(very closely shared with another mass-market consumer product they produce). No way will Cisco be beating them on price, unless they are willing to get hammered on margins. Further, it is a general-purpose computer, crippled only as much as Apple wants it to be(for instance, this Cisco thing supports a mouse and keyboard for doing remote desktop/virtual terminal stuff. If Apple felt threatened, they could have deals inked with Citrix and VMware for their thin-client computing protocols, plus RDP and X11 and maybe NX, all rolled up into an app inside a month(App slogan: "Tenfootpole: for when you need to work on a PC; but can't bear to touch one...). I'm guessing that support for bluetooth mice could be added to the present support for bluetooth keyboards in even less time, and made available privately to that app, so as not to slum up the "touch experience". If they were really feeling motivated, they could kick out a full desktop dock accessory(the camera connect kit shows that there is USB host support in there, so it would take about ten minutes to design a dock with a power brick and USB hub, that holds it at the right angle and lets you plug in your mouse, keyboard, and flash drive full of boring work.
Now, there is no evidence that Apple is thus motivated. If they don't find the corporate market interesting or sufficiently profitable, they just won't bother. Even so, announcing that you plan to release a product when your competitor already has a product that is one software update away from being cheaper and better than that product, seems like a rather dubious move. I certainly wouldn't want to be in Cisco's shoes here.
But it would be unbelievably hilarious to imagine what would happen if Verizon announced that they would be carrying the iPhone and, once all the eager little pre-orderers had plunked down their US Treasury gift cards, revealed the horrible truth: that the ViPhone had had the same ghastly Verizon software makeover as most of the other phones Verizon sells, unbelievably unintuitive red interface, V-Cast music store, and all.
It would certainly calm fears at AT&T about subscriber loss...
I think that you are understating the power of environmental influences, and the effect of feedback loops.
People certainly differ in their willingness(and quite possibly capacity) to resist temptation; but this means that, on a population level, if you change the ease and availability of temptation, you change the number of people succumbing to it. It's like obesity. Yeah, everyone is, in theory, in control of what they eat, though metabolisms differ; but if the price of corn syrup drops by $1 a gallon, the number of fat people in a population will increase. Facebook is to infidelity what cheap HFCS is to obesity. It doesn't magically cram itself down your throat; but the population effects are clear and pronounced.
Second, of course, is feedback loops. Divorces occur over more than infidelity. If, for example, one or both parties have a predisposition to jealousy, a service that allows them to see all the old-people-from-highschool that their partner never bothered to defriend, and ruminate endlessly about whether they just didn't bother, or whether they are still exchanging steamy messages every day, is not going to help very much. Dealing with someone spiralling into crazy-jealous mode isn't going to be very pleasant. Things can easily spiral down from there, whether to actual infidelity, or just to "I can't fucking stand to be in the same house as this crazy bastard" territory.
The boundary between "system problems" and "user problems" is not a sharp one. There are certainly specific cases that you can, on snap judgement, put solidly into one camp or the other; but there exists more or less a continuum between them.
The problem with all this "social" crap is that it is generally in the interests of the provider to encourage you to expand your "network" as much as possible, and to reveal as much as possible, because it provides them with more valuable advertising data and attracts more users. Usually, if you do your homework, delve deep enough, and pay attention to detail, there exist a more or less functional set of privacy settings(either because the company fears being the target of the latest "State AG shooting for governorship Cracks Down on Cyber-Paedophiles" case, or in order to attract disclosure-shy users); but they are, all too frequently, a design afterthought at best, or deliberately obfuscated and semi-broken at worst; because they are not something that you are really encouraged to regard as a core feature.
Depending on whether a given service's privacy features are simply obscure and complex or literally broken, you can argue as to whether or not a specific incident represents "incompetence" rather than "system design problem"; but it is clearly and unequivocally the case that these systems give you a good hard shove in the direction of disclosure-by-default. This only sometimes means that they are literally impossible to secure; but the direction of the push is clear.
For shame, man! There is no way that your neighbor's router is licensed to run a copy of Genuine Microsoft Notepad.exe
Just use the first four megabytes that come out of/dev/random. Odds are that those 4 megabytes violate somebody's software patent; but at least the BSA won't be after you.
Lack of encryption is a pretty egregious offense; but a vulnerability that consists of making possibly-compromising disclosures specifically to people with which you have some sort of prior relationship, no matter where they are on the internet, is quite arguably more salient, for the vast majority of people, than a vulnerability that exposes their communications to technically savvy individuals within wireless range(if the wireless is unencrypted or weakly encrypted, or those individuals have the keys).
Plus, lack of encryption is something that you can, with minimal effort(and the cooperation of whoever you are talking to, which is the harder part), solve on your own. Pidgin+OTR. Done, instant encryption that even the provider can't do jack about for any protocol supported by libpurple. The provider telling everybody you know who you have been talking to lately, on the other hand, is an unsolvable problem from the client side(barring the old "uninstall that fucker like a bad habit that owes you money and never touch it again" solution).
And, ultimately, except in the case of financial matters, or malware that renders a computer unusable(where the damage is pretty much fungible, and it really doesn't much matter who inflicts it, it hurts the same), security vulnerabilities and privacy disclosure issues that specifically aim at people you know in real life hurt more than ones where random strangers can get the same data. Random malefactors on the internet can certainly steal your money, and a few hardcore sociopaths with nothing better to do might torment you just for giggles; but the people immediately around you are a large part of your life. Disclosures to the former are unfortunate. Disclosures to the latter are potentially devastating.
All the lack of privacy and cliquishness of the tiny little towns that people ran like hell to the big city to avoid; but with the systematic asymmetry of information that only modern technocratic corporatism can provide... Just lovely.
The most interesting part of the new "A4" is its concealed chamber of iBot(tm) nanites. These tiny robots feature a robust and elegant objective C API and GrandCentral support, for efficient parallel activity, whether it be reconfiguring antennas or synthesizing V-series nerve agents in the blood vessels of those who jailbreak their devices.
It should be noted that the MPEG-LA specifically does not "take on the responsibility and risk for future patent infringement lawsuits". Your MPEG-LA license covers only MPEG-LA patent pool patents, it does not constitute any sort of promise that these patents are the only ones required to implement the spec, nor does it offer indemnification in the event that you are sued over your implementation of the standard for which you purchased an MPEG-LA license.
Paying your protection money to them does ensure than none of the MPEG-LA members will sue you(at least over any patent that they have contributed to the MPEG-LA pool for the technology in question); but it confers no protection against any nonmember with a patent that they believe is being infringed upon(given that this group includes a little old mom 'n pop operation they call "AT&T" this isn't exactly a theoretical risk)...
Re:What does that tell you about the patent trolls
on
VP8 Codec Coming To FFmpeg
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think that it has been well understood, for some time, that VP8 is, by design, largely H.264-esque. Based on that "technical analysis of VP8 by an x264 developer" article that ran on slashdot shortly after Google's announcement, it would appear that the development strategy went more or less like this:
1. Examine H.264
2. Where the technique in question is not patent-encumbered, or patent encumbrances can be worked around, implement like H.264 did. Unless you have good reason to believe the contrary, your brilliant innovation probably isn't, and the guys who build decode silicon/write DSP firmware are not handing out prizes for novelty for its own sake.
3. Where the technique in question is patent-encumbered, and the encumbrance cannot be compatibly worked around, implement the least-worst alternative.
4. Get purchased by Google.
Obviously, from a standpoint of legal defense and market acceptance, a codec of breathtaking novelty and power, looking like an algorithmic refugee from the comp-sci genocides of the 32nd century, would be preferable. Unfortunately, such isn't available by any known means. H.264 more or less represents the present consensus on best available technique in the field; but is heavily patent encumbered. The only real reason to deviate from it is to avoid patents. Assuming that they did, in fact, perform steps 2 and 3 correctly, they will have achieved approximately the best available result at the lowest possible cost.
Based on their UI decisions, Chrome seems very clearly not aimed at the dialup set.
If you have multiple tabs open, and you center-click a link to open it in a new tab, Chrome opens the new tab immediately after the current tab(rather than opening it at the very end of the tab bar, as FF and Konqueror do). So, when you are finished with the tab you are on and close it, you are immediately plunked into the new tab you just opened. If your connection is slow, it probably hasn't loaded yet.
The new-tab-on-end browsers, on the other hand, tend to place the tabs that aren't loaded yet at the very bottom of your list as you work left-to-right. By the time you get there, things have probably sorted themselves out.
If you are dealing with image heavy pages, and clicking around reasonably quickly, this effect is noticable even on slower DSL connections. It is overwhelming on dialup. On mid-tier DSL or better, the difference pretty much fades away(unless the 3rd-party ad servers are particularly slow).
The trouble is network effects: The internet is useful because huge numbers of people have relatively cheap access to it. This makes it easy for interested parties to find each other for all sorts of purposes, and exchange information. It also has the advantage of being among the more "geography-independent" communication networks available. Transnational voice calls cost money. Transnational packets incur slight additional latency.
If you already have multiple parties who know one another, and wish to exchange information, and(ideally) are either in reasonably close proximity or have nontrivial means and technical know-how, building an independent network is not hard.
For short distance work, Wi-Fi meshes are pretty good, and are fairly cheap and easy to set up. Running hardlines is more reliable(assuming you have control over the necessary path); and reasonably practical for short distances.
Assuming it isn't being jammed, and you have ham skills and tools, packet radio is a lot slower; but better for long-range work.
Alternate DNS systems are doable enough; but are a useless toy unless the people doing the blocking are severely clueless. Cell data is similar. If anything, anything going over a cell network is likely to be even more tightly controlled than stuff going over landline.
The problem in all of these cases, though, is that the alternate systems lack the network effects of the internet. You either have a closed alternate system, which is reasonably secure; but only works with people you already know, and is largely useless for connecting you to new ones; or you have an open one, which is exquisitely vulnerable to infiltration by whatever sinister forces you are concerned about. Non-internet communication with people you already know is by no means useless; but it is not a substitute for internet communication. "Open-access" non-internet setups are more internet like; but also much more vulnerable to attack.
Completely impossible to win all the time; but a chat with an A/V vendor or botnet research outfit could probably get you a reasonably accurate rundown of "Percentage of systems compromised, by OS and version". From there, you could present the "zOMG Upgrade!" screen to users of any platform whose numbers fell above your acceptable risk threshold.
It would be an even more thankless task than bugging people about their browser version, which is why they aren't doing it; but you could probably cut down on risk considerably.
While, in theory, no OS is fully safe from user cluelessness, I'd wager that, for instance, XP users who aren't even on the current service pack are probably very bad bets (or heavily controlled appendages of some corporate IT department), while people who are at least fully up to wherever dutifully running their platform's auto-updater would put them are rather safer.
Slashdot Mirror
Their real problem is either that they couldn't twist Verizon's arm enough, or that they were so profligate in their design that twisting wouldn't have done any good.
By all accounts, this "kin" pretty much curb-stomped anything in the dumbphone or "featurephone" category(unless you just had to have something that wouldn't blink at a month on standby in cold mud, or something). However, at the same time, it was stomped on by basically all the "smart" phones that Verizon had on offer, including the Pre Pluses that they were practically giving away.
Trouble was, Verizon wanted the same voice+data plan for a Kin that they did for any smartphone. Over a 2 year contract, it barely matters what the phone ostensibly sells for; but the monthly bills will add up fast. Essentially, a phone that couldn't even run third party applications, and had some notable holes in the first-party lineup, was being pitted against three actually competent smartphone flavors(blackberry, Pre, and the Android team), not to mention all the members of the target demographic who never even went inside the verizon store because they were already enslaved by AT&T.
Either Microsoft sucks at arm twisting, having gone soft dealing with PC OEMS, or they designed a phone that used too much data and Verizon told them that it just wasn't going to happen. If Kin had managed to hit Sidekick's market, basically "not as good as blackberry; but you can afford it upfront and monthly" they would likely have sold a bunch. As it is, though, they set the product up for slaughter-by-smartphone.
America Speaking Out is not, arguably, the best example.
Only the nuttiest of cyber-utopians would suggest that the "wisdom of crowds" holds up particularly well when part of the crowd is engaged in deliberate sabotage. Worse; because of the, er... exceptional quality of political discourse in America, you ran into the "Poe's Law" problem.
If your mods are remotely on the ball, or your wiki editors are up to snuff, or whatever, it is pretty trivial to resist obvious and unsubtle attacks. Worthless posts get modded down, somebody spends 20 minutes sprinkling obscenities into a wiki article and somebody else spends 20 seconds reverting it, those sorts of attacks are survivable enough. If, though, a fair part of your "crowd" is utterly batshit crazy, you run into a real problem: your most committed users will produce output almost exactly like your most vicious, cynical parodists(the same thing happened to Conservapedia. Because the true believers and the mocking liberal cynics were indistinguishable, the site got bogged down in a series of purges based almost entirely on personality and loyalty to Dear Leader, rather than actual helpfulness to the "crowd"; because it simply wasn't possible to tell the "crowd" and any but its stupidest enemies apart).
Similarly, with America Speaking Out, the problem isn't going to be with trivial vandalism, which is annoying but quick to clean up, the problem will be that it is impossible to distinguish between people ranting about how Barrack Hussein is a communist fascist muslim sleeper agent because they believe that, and the ones doing exactly the same thing because it amuses them to associate such views with the RNC. Conversation is doomed when signal and noise can be distinguished only by intent.
Given that Knuth was actually replaced by a self-aware TeX macro some years ago, there is no reason to expect an future productivity decline...
One is a revenue center, the other is a cost center. I think we can guess which one is further on the ball?
Apple's entries into the business PC market are extremely limited(outside of a few specific fields), and would really require a serious culture shift on their part to go any further. (Oh, sure, like Steve is going to support old versions and functions he considers inaesthetic just because deprecating them would break your precious business-critical application... Oh, and you want a second source for hardware? Ha, ha, ha. Gentlemen).
However, this isn't a PC, this thing is being marketed as a Video-conferencing thin-client. That is something that Apple could manage with a few relatively trivial software modifications, and the economies of scale provided by their existing consumer hardware product.
They might well not bother; but Cisco's success with this device would be at their power and mere pleasure.
They've been trying to buy their way in to the consumer area, for some reason, first with the Linksys acquisition, more recently the guys who make those "flip" low-end camcorders, as well as the gotomyPC people.
I'm not sure if this is all part of a grand plan, or just the sign of a company that needs to invest in something; but hasn't done anything more creative than slap firmware locks and gigantic price tags on OEM hardware in years...
Unless Citrix has some real aces up their sleeve, this one is exactly as dead in the water as Apple feels like making it, outside of a few big corporations where just repeating "Cisco, cisco, cisco" in a soothing voice makes management's eye's glaze over and fills them with an irresistable urge to sign purchase orders.
The iPad is a relatively mass-market consumer product, based on a weedy little ARM core(very closely shared with another mass-market consumer product they produce). No way will Cisco be beating them on price, unless they are willing to get hammered on margins. Further, it is a general-purpose computer, crippled only as much as Apple wants it to be(for instance, this Cisco thing supports a mouse and keyboard for doing remote desktop/virtual terminal stuff. If Apple felt threatened, they could have deals inked with Citrix and VMware for their thin-client computing protocols, plus RDP and X11 and maybe NX, all rolled up into an app inside a month(App slogan: "Tenfootpole: for when you need to work on a PC; but can't bear to touch one...). I'm guessing that support for bluetooth mice could be added to the present support for bluetooth keyboards in even less time, and made available privately to that app, so as not to slum up the "touch experience". If they were really feeling motivated, they could kick out a full desktop dock accessory(the camera connect kit shows that there is USB host support in there, so it would take about ten minutes to design a dock with a power brick and USB hub, that holds it at the right angle and lets you plug in your mouse, keyboard, and flash drive full of boring work.
Now, there is no evidence that Apple is thus motivated. If they don't find the corporate market interesting or sufficiently profitable, they just won't bother. Even so, announcing that you plan to release a product when your competitor already has a product that is one software update away from being cheaper and better than that product, seems like a rather dubious move. I certainly wouldn't want to be in Cisco's shoes here.
But it would be unbelievably hilarious to imagine what would happen if Verizon announced that they would be carrying the iPhone and, once all the eager little pre-orderers had plunked down their US Treasury gift cards, revealed the horrible truth: that the ViPhone had had the same ghastly Verizon software makeover as most of the other phones Verizon sells, unbelievably unintuitive red interface, V-Cast music store, and all.
It would certainly calm fears at AT&T about subscriber loss...
Communism just isn't that sexy.
I think that I could be persuaded otherwise...
Well, I see that the ruskies remain low on the list of threats to due process of law...
I think that you are understating the power of environmental influences, and the effect of feedback loops.
People certainly differ in their willingness(and quite possibly capacity) to resist temptation; but this means that, on a population level, if you change the ease and availability of temptation, you change the number of people succumbing to it. It's like obesity. Yeah, everyone is, in theory, in control of what they eat, though metabolisms differ; but if the price of corn syrup drops by $1 a gallon, the number of fat people in a population will increase. Facebook is to infidelity what cheap HFCS is to obesity. It doesn't magically cram itself down your throat; but the population effects are clear and pronounced.
Second, of course, is feedback loops. Divorces occur over more than infidelity. If, for example, one or both parties have a predisposition to jealousy, a service that allows them to see all the old-people-from-highschool that their partner never bothered to defriend, and ruminate endlessly about whether they just didn't bother, or whether they are still exchanging steamy messages every day, is not going to help very much. Dealing with someone spiralling into crazy-jealous mode isn't going to be very pleasant. Things can easily spiral down from there, whether to actual infidelity, or just to "I can't fucking stand to be in the same house as this crazy bastard" territory.
Oh, and one more thing: Magically somehow force everybody you know to think before they share.
No big deal.
The boundary between "system problems" and "user problems" is not a sharp one. There are certainly specific cases that you can, on snap judgement, put solidly into one camp or the other; but there exists more or less a continuum between them.
The problem with all this "social" crap is that it is generally in the interests of the provider to encourage you to expand your "network" as much as possible, and to reveal as much as possible, because it provides them with more valuable advertising data and attracts more users. Usually, if you do your homework, delve deep enough, and pay attention to detail, there exist a more or less functional set of privacy settings(either because the company fears being the target of the latest "State AG shooting for governorship Cracks Down on Cyber-Paedophiles" case, or in order to attract disclosure-shy users); but they are, all too frequently, a design afterthought at best, or deliberately obfuscated and semi-broken at worst; because they are not something that you are really encouraged to regard as a core feature.
Depending on whether a given service's privacy features are simply obscure and complex or literally broken, you can argue as to whether or not a specific incident represents "incompetence" rather than "system design problem"; but it is clearly and unequivocally the case that these systems give you a good hard shove in the direction of disclosure-by-default. This only sometimes means that they are literally impossible to secure; but the direction of the push is clear.
For shame, man! There is no way that your neighbor's router is licensed to run a copy of Genuine Microsoft Notepad.exe
/dev/random. Odds are that those 4 megabytes violate somebody's software patent; but at least the BSA won't be after you.
Just use the first four megabytes that come out of
Lack of encryption is a pretty egregious offense; but a vulnerability that consists of making possibly-compromising disclosures specifically to people with which you have some sort of prior relationship, no matter where they are on the internet, is quite arguably more salient, for the vast majority of people, than a vulnerability that exposes their communications to technically savvy individuals within wireless range(if the wireless is unencrypted or weakly encrypted, or those individuals have the keys).
Plus, lack of encryption is something that you can, with minimal effort(and the cooperation of whoever you are talking to, which is the harder part), solve on your own. Pidgin+OTR. Done, instant encryption that even the provider can't do jack about for any protocol supported by libpurple. The provider telling everybody you know who you have been talking to lately, on the other hand, is an unsolvable problem from the client side(barring the old "uninstall that fucker like a bad habit that owes you money and never touch it again" solution).
And, ultimately, except in the case of financial matters, or malware that renders a computer unusable(where the damage is pretty much fungible, and it really doesn't much matter who inflicts it, it hurts the same), security vulnerabilities and privacy disclosure issues that specifically aim at people you know in real life hurt more than ones where random strangers can get the same data. Random malefactors on the internet can certainly steal your money, and a few hardcore sociopaths with nothing better to do might torment you just for giggles; but the people immediately around you are a large part of your life. Disclosures to the former are unfortunate. Disclosures to the latter are potentially devastating.
All the lack of privacy and cliquishness of the tiny little towns that people ran like hell to the big city to avoid; but with the systematic asymmetry of information that only modern technocratic corporatism can provide... Just lovely.
And that whole "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here" thing...
The most interesting part of the new "A4" is its concealed chamber of iBot(tm) nanites. These tiny robots feature a robust and elegant objective C API and GrandCentral support, for efficient parallel activity, whether it be reconfiguring antennas or synthesizing V-series nerve agents in the blood vessels of those who jailbreak their devices.
It should be noted that the MPEG-LA specifically does not "take on the responsibility and risk for future patent infringement lawsuits". Your MPEG-LA license covers only MPEG-LA patent pool patents, it does not constitute any sort of promise that these patents are the only ones required to implement the spec, nor does it offer indemnification in the event that you are sued over your implementation of the standard for which you purchased an MPEG-LA license.
Paying your protection money to them does ensure than none of the MPEG-LA members will sue you(at least over any patent that they have contributed to the MPEG-LA pool for the technology in question); but it confers no protection against any nonmember with a patent that they believe is being infringed upon(given that this group includes a little old mom 'n pop operation they call "AT&T" this isn't exactly a theoretical risk)...
I think that it has been well understood, for some time, that VP8 is, by design, largely H.264-esque. Based on that "technical analysis of VP8 by an x264 developer" article that ran on slashdot shortly after Google's announcement, it would appear that the development strategy went more or less like this:
1. Examine H.264
2. Where the technique in question is not patent-encumbered, or patent encumbrances can be worked around, implement like H.264 did. Unless you have good reason to believe the contrary, your brilliant innovation probably isn't, and the guys who build decode silicon/write DSP firmware are not handing out prizes for novelty for its own sake.
3. Where the technique in question is patent-encumbered, and the encumbrance cannot be compatibly worked around, implement the least-worst alternative.
4. Get purchased by Google.
Obviously, from a standpoint of legal defense and market acceptance, a codec of breathtaking novelty and power, looking like an algorithmic refugee from the comp-sci genocides of the 32nd century, would be preferable. Unfortunately, such isn't available by any known means. H.264 more or less represents the present consensus on best available technique in the field; but is heavily patent encumbered. The only real reason to deviate from it is to avoid patents. Assuming that they did, in fact, perform steps 2 and 3 correctly, they will have achieved approximately the best available result at the lowest possible cost.
Should I be preparing for Unforeseen Consequences?
Based on their UI decisions, Chrome seems very clearly not aimed at the dialup set.
If you have multiple tabs open, and you center-click a link to open it in a new tab, Chrome opens the new tab immediately after the current tab(rather than opening it at the very end of the tab bar, as FF and Konqueror do). So, when you are finished with the tab you are on and close it, you are immediately plunked into the new tab you just opened. If your connection is slow, it probably hasn't loaded yet.
The new-tab-on-end browsers, on the other hand, tend to place the tabs that aren't loaded yet at the very bottom of your list as you work left-to-right. By the time you get there, things have probably sorted themselves out.
If you are dealing with image heavy pages, and clicking around reasonably quickly, this effect is noticable even on slower DSL connections. It is overwhelming on dialup. On mid-tier DSL or better, the difference pretty much fades away(unless the 3rd-party ad servers are particularly slow).
The trouble is network effects: The internet is useful because huge numbers of people have relatively cheap access to it. This makes it easy for interested parties to find each other for all sorts of purposes, and exchange information. It also has the advantage of being among the more "geography-independent" communication networks available. Transnational voice calls cost money. Transnational packets incur slight additional latency.
If you already have multiple parties who know one another, and wish to exchange information, and(ideally) are either in reasonably close proximity or have nontrivial means and technical know-how, building an independent network is not hard.
For short distance work, Wi-Fi meshes are pretty good, and are fairly cheap and easy to set up. Running hardlines is more reliable(assuming you have control over the necessary path); and reasonably practical for short distances.
Assuming it isn't being jammed, and you have ham skills and tools, packet radio is a lot slower; but better for long-range work.
Alternate DNS systems are doable enough; but are a useless toy unless the people doing the blocking are severely clueless. Cell data is similar. If anything, anything going over a cell network is likely to be even more tightly controlled than stuff going over landline.
The problem in all of these cases, though, is that the alternate systems lack the network effects of the internet. You either have a closed alternate system, which is reasonably secure; but only works with people you already know, and is largely useless for connecting you to new ones; or you have an open one, which is exquisitely vulnerable to infiltration by whatever sinister forces you are concerned about. Non-internet communication with people you already know is by no means useless; but it is not a substitute for internet communication. "Open-access" non-internet setups are more internet like; but also much more vulnerable to attack.
Completely impossible to win all the time; but a chat with an A/V vendor or botnet research outfit could probably get you a reasonably accurate rundown of "Percentage of systems compromised, by OS and version". From there, you could present the "zOMG Upgrade!" screen to users of any platform whose numbers fell above your acceptable risk threshold.
It would be an even more thankless task than bugging people about their browser version, which is why they aren't doing it; but you could probably cut down on risk considerably.
While, in theory, no OS is fully safe from user cluelessness, I'd wager that, for instance, XP users who aren't even on the current service pack are probably very bad bets (or heavily controlled appendages of some corporate IT department), while people who are at least fully up to wherever dutifully running their platform's auto-updater would put them are rather safer.
There is one additional place: Security of the client OS. Keyloggers don't really care about SSL, or XSS countermeasures, or just about anything else.
I'm assuming that that is a battle that they simply have no wish to fight, though...