Hah, the Astros are actually my home team. Not that I really take much interest in the various forms of sportsball, but I can appreciate someone staying up to watch.
No, not maybe. This is already how it is. The camera has for years only been accessible to apps after they've explicitly been granted permission by the user, and they'll have a hell of a time collecting facial data without camera access. I suppose they might be able to infer facial data by having us smear the phone all over our faces while using the accelerometer, pressure readings, and gyroscope to infer the shapes of our faces, but at that point you can hardly suggest that they're doing it without your knowledge.:P
What if they do it even if you don't give them permission?
How're they supposed to do that? We're talking about app permissions here. The default behavior is to deny apps access to those features until they're explicitly granted permission by the user. If you don't give them permission, they have no ability to abuse it.
...of course, you have to give them permission to do so, just the same as with this data, apparently.
As such, I fail to see the concern here. If an app requests that permission, simply deny it if it's a concern for you. I'm glad my weather app can grab my current location to give me useful information as I changed locations throughout the day. I'm glad Shazam or whatnot can use the mic to tell me what song is playing. I'm glad my camera apps can access the camera. And it's not outlandish to believe that I may eventually be glad that some form of facial data is getting synced via third-party servers between my devices.
But that'll be my call to make if and when I ever have a phone with these sorts of features, because without my permission, they can't do jack squat, so this whole topic is rather moot.
You think 200 is unreasonable? I currently have 265 logins listed in my password manager, and I'd wager that I'm not even in the top quartile here. I had over 300 of them just a few months back, but then I went through and cleaned out several dozen. Oh, and that list is missing dozens more, such as: - Logins to my numerous home and work computers - Passcodes for numerous mobile devices - PINs to credit and debit cards (not so numerous) - PINs to parental settingsand the like on gaming consoles and other set-top boxes
All-in-all, I'd estimate that I had over 400 logins to various services and systems prior to the cleanup a few months back, and I'm by no means as heavy of a user as some, such as teens who're willing to create new accounts with new services every other week. To say the least, it's not at all unreasonable that someone might be expected to be able to login to 200 different systems, hence why password reuse is as much of a problem as it is.
Are non-smokers going to have to pay for smokers' healthcare too or will the smokers pay a premium to cover the extra burden they place on the healthcare system?
In socialized healthcare, you'd tax them an additional fee on each tobacco purchase to cover their higher healthcare costs. This is already a solved problem.
In places where we pay for our own healthcare, smokers already pay significantly higher premiums for engaging in their dangerous behavior. This is already a solved problem.
For instance, a friend of mine sat down with an insurance provider to get a quote a few months back. Everything was looking fine until they asked him whether he smoked. He smokes a celebratory cigar (just one) each year on New Year's Eve, but the insurance provider treats any smoking in the last twelve months, regardless of quantity, as grounds to classify the person as a smoker. The premium they quoted him immediately went up by a factor of four in response to his answer, so he decided to stick with what he already had.
He'll be skipping the cigar this New Year's Eve so he can get a quote as a non-smoker next year.
They can customize their own chips, using the ARM design. CPU design isn't like 'rounded corners.' The instruction set and register architecture are central. Apple can bolt on their special kludges, but the design is by ARM.
That’s like saying all cars are the same because they’re all designed to drive on the same roads. Never mind that their performance, efficiency, and costs can vary wildly.
There is a reason Qualcomm is in the position they are - they did a lot of R&D and pushed cellular forward. On the other hand Apple has done what, "invent" round corners?
Who cares? This isn’t a dick measuring contest to see who owns the best patents. This is about fair compensation for valid patents.
Being compensated for your R&D work is fine. Licensing your patents for manufacturing is fine. Charging a per unit fee is fine. But the Supreme Court and other governing bodies around the world say that licensing for the right to manufacture your tech while ALSO charging a fee for each device that includes those parts is illegal because you exhausted your patent rights after the initial license. More or less, it’s like the First Sale doctrine, but applied to patents. Companies aren’t allowed to double dip, which is exactly what Qualcomm has been doing.
And it’s not just Apple suing them. It’s numerous governments across the developed world, all suing Qualcomm over this issue. In fact, South Korea just wrapped their investigations up a month or two back, to the tune of a fine worth nearly 1 billion USD. US regulators are still in court. Pretty sure the EU is hitting Qualcomm over this right now as well.
Qualcomm is so far in the wrong here that the only people I see defending them are those like yourself who are clearly just rooting against Apple, regardless of the actual facts of the situation.
I never figured it’d be able to line up this sort of talent. I never even realized it was big enough to draw that sort of talent. I always just thought it was a decently well-written and drawn comic that occasionally gave me fuel for my nightmares (see: finger monster).
In the US, I believe “tabling” something is used in the sense that it’s currently somewhere more prominent (i.e. in our hands, up front, on the screen, etc.), so tabling it would be a reduction in its prominence, whereas elsewhere it’s assumed that it’s being put before everyone. But yes, I agree it’s confusing, especially since we already have a shelf for that as well, and I’m glad we agree on the meaning of “putting something on the table”.
Are you for real? 1 million units in 8 months is a shitload of phones.
No, it isn't. The Galaxy Note 7, a flop by all accounts, managed to sell 2.5x that many units in the two weeks it was on sale before Samsung pulled it. In the quarter ending this last April, Apple had what was widely considered to be a bad quarter when they managed to only sell 50 million iPhones.
1 million only looks like a lot until you look at what others are doing.
1 million phones in 8 months only sounds like a huge number until you compare it to the competition. And once you provide that context, it becomes obvious that the linked numbers refute your claim from earlier in the thread that "[t]he original Pixel sold very well".
For instance, Apple accounts for a minuscule portion of the global market, yet they managed to sell over 50 million iPhones in their most recent financial quarter. Mind you, that's over one quarter, rather than the 8 months your links says it took for the Pixel to reach 1 million. That was also in the quarter that is historically Apple's weakest each year, since it doesn't include any product launches or holidays, whereas the Pixel's sales window included both. Moreover, those numbers were considered bad for Apple, whereas you're trying to suggest that sales of less than 2% that amount over a greater period of time are going "very well". The fact that you ended your original statement by claiming that it "was deemed the best premium smartphone of 2016 by many" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, since if this was Wikipedia, your sentence would already have a "[who?]" edited onto the end of it.
I don't mean to rain on Google's parade (I truly do hope that the Pixel takes off in a big way), but 1 million units sold in 8 months for a flagship smartphone is paltry once you put it in context. Hopefully the Pixel 2 does better, but all of the reporting I've been seeing so far is in the vein of this summary and seems to point towards them reaching for the stars but coming up short. Hopefully they'll iron out the kinks, learn their lessons, and do better next time.
Even if you believe that we'll one day have strong AI that is intelligent in every way that we think of ourselves as being intelligent, we can all agree that we're not there yet. We're nowhere close, in fact.
So if you've just conferred human rights to an object, how long until we see people protesting with signs that read "Software updates are murder"? After all, you'd effectively be destroying the very essence of one of your citizens if you replace the thing that makes them intelligent—their software—with something else. And if they do it voluntarily, do we call it suicide? Are we allowed to reuse their robotic chassis if they don't sign off as an organ donor? Can we sell their body parts, or is that illegal? Are minor software updates okay, in the same way that we're okay with prosthetics? At what point does this a ship of Theseus situation, where it's still them, even though nothing is still the same?
Perhaps a more pragmatic question: can it vote? If so, and if updating their software isn't disallowed, what's to stop me from making millions of them and programming them all to vote according to my wishes?
Security clearances mean fuck all. It only proves you passed a background check.
From personal experience, I count at least eight other things it proves I passed before I ever reached the background check, and those are just the screens I was aware of. I withdrew my name when I hit the background check because some stuff changed in the 8 months leading up to that point, but suffice to say, you're woefully misinformed if that's all you think it means, particularly to the people who run in those circles.
You can view it however you choose, of course, but having a security clearance is a positive signal for the vast majority of employers, even those who may not need it, in much the same way that having a college degree typically is a positive signal for anyone seeking skilled labor.
Ah, sorry, that did read kind of hostile even with the smiley.
No offense taken! I read it as the kind comment it was originally intended to be. The smiley did its job well. Sorry for coming across defensively, when all I meant to do was set the record straight about my own thoughts.:)
Just to be clear, I wasn't intending to be or sound indignant. Measures like that are absolutely necessary when you're dealing with a resource that limited.
Nope. By the sound of things, this is more akin to the sandboxing feature present in apps sold via the Mac App Store. The apps are running under your permissions, just as they always have, but they now need to request and be granted permission to access new folders. Basically, just as mobile OSes require that an app request and receive permission before it can use the camera, the mic, or your location, Windows is, from what the summary sounds like, now requiring that apps request permission to access specific folders.
You can't just go out and buy a car in Singapore. Rather, you need to get permission to own the car first. My wife lived over there for a few years, so I've heard some of this stuff from her, but take it with a grain of salt, since my recollection is rusty.
From what I recall, Sings are required to puttheir names on a waiting list if they want to own a car. I can't remember if it's first-come-first-served or a straight-up lottery system, but once their name is pulled they have to pay a massive fee (equivalent to several tens of thousands of USD), and it's only then that they're allowed to purchase and import a car. Their ownership license (which has an actual title, but which I'm forgetting at the moment) is only good for something like 10 years, at which point they need to pay the fee again.
Because of the incredibly high fees, most people don't bother importing regular commuter cars like what you'd see on the road in the US or Europe, let alone hanging onto them until they're unmaintainable. Instead, if they're going to be paying something like $30K or $40K just to be allowed to own a car, plus the cost of the car, plus the cost of shipping it to Singapore, they tend to figure that they may as well go big. On top of that, if they're paying that much every ten years, regardless of what car they're driving, then they may as well bring in a new car each time. My wife was saying that it was rare you'd ever see a car older than 10 years.
They actually have a similar system in place for owning your own apartment, from what I recall, though that wait list is even longer.
The real story here is that an organization that does professional reviews is unwilling to give a product an opportunity to convince them their preconceived notions regarding it are wrong.
An honest reviewer must always be willing to dismiss their preconceived notions regarding a product should the real thing either exceed or fail to live up to them. They need to be able to set aside their petty tribalism, their personal preferences, and any rumors they may have heard about the product, instead judging it based purely on what it actually is.
Pre-announcing your decision before you even have the product in your hands is a way of indicating that you're unwilling to do that. That you won't allow yourself to be convinced. That you're being intellectually dishonest with yourself. Why would anyone trust that reviewer?
Exactly right. At the university I attended for grad school, there was a single sign on that was used across virtually all university systems, including the public terminals in each classroom that were used to display slides. If a student had a professor's login info from that terminal, they'd be able to login to the grading system, time sheets, class registrations, room reservations, etc., depending on the parts of the system to which the professor had been granted access. And even if it hadn't been a single sign on, odds are decent that any given person will be using the same username and password across many of those systems anyway, so the problem doesn't go away by breaking them apart.
Consumer Reports stakes their reputation on their reviews being above reproach on an ethical basis. They don't accept freebies from manufacturers. They don't use affiliate links. They don't accept sponsorships. Instead, they buy all of their products from the same stock that any other consumer would (rather than the hand-picked ones that oftentimes get sent to reviewers) and they make their revenue by charging people a fee to have access to their content. Sadly, in the Internet era, that business model has pushed them towards clickbait headlines designed to increase their membership, as evidenced by their very public-yet-baseless jabs over the last few years at whichever companies are popular (e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.).
This is yet another of those jabs designed to drum up revenue. They don't even have a Model 3 in their hands yet, so when they say, "let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks", what they're actually saying is, "we have nothing meaningful to say at this moment, and we expect that the actual review we post won't make headlines, so instead we'll say something outlandish about the popular product now in the hopes that some suckers will sign up to read our final review". They're certainly not faithfully performing their duty to review things in an impartial manner based solely on the facts. Rather, they're sacrificing their integrity for the sake of a quick buck, as has sadly become par for the course with them.
Whatever reputation they still had in the circles I move in died years ago.
Indeed. Everyone knows the Mac's OS switched from a proprietary one to FreeBSD back in 2007 when they also switched from the Motorola 6800 to Intel. Or, at least, that's what NetworkWorld reported last week and has yet to redact or correct...
You don't suppose the Anonymous Coward that started this thread is the author of that article, do you?
Completely agree. This has been the proper course of action from the start, and I'm glad they're finally coming around on it. It's the only path that aligns with the security and privacy interests of businesses and individuals while allowing for law enforcement to conduct lawful investigations.
There will certainly be additional points to discuss, such as the degree and nature of their collaboration (e.g. Is it—or to what extent is it—okay for them to withhold information regarding vulnerabilities from manufacturers? Is it acceptable to deploy military technology against everyday criminals?), but those discussions all lie along this path, so it's about time we started walking it.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall the Prime Minister of India being ousted as a result of the Panama Papers. So, not exactly nothing.
Hah, the Astros are actually my home team. Not that I really take much interest in the various forms of sportsball, but I can appreciate someone staying up to watch.
But that'll be my call to make ...
Maybe.
No, not maybe. This is already how it is. The camera has for years only been accessible to apps after they've explicitly been granted permission by the user, and they'll have a hell of a time collecting facial data without camera access. I suppose they might be able to infer facial data by having us smear the phone all over our faces while using the accelerometer, pressure readings, and gyroscope to infer the shapes of our faces, but at that point you can hardly suggest that they're doing it without your knowledge. :P
What if they do it even if you don't give them permission?
How're they supposed to do that? We're talking about app permissions here. The default behavior is to deny apps access to those features until they're explicitly granted permission by the user. If you don't give them permission, they have no ability to abuse it.
...of course, you have to give them permission to do so, just the same as with this data, apparently.
As such, I fail to see the concern here. If an app requests that permission, simply deny it if it's a concern for you. I'm glad my weather app can grab my current location to give me useful information as I changed locations throughout the day. I'm glad Shazam or whatnot can use the mic to tell me what song is playing. I'm glad my camera apps can access the camera. And it's not outlandish to believe that I may eventually be glad that some form of facial data is getting synced via third-party servers between my devices.
But that'll be my call to make if and when I ever have a phone with these sorts of features, because without my permission, they can't do jack squat, so this whole topic is rather moot.
You think 200 is unreasonable? I currently have 265 logins listed in my password manager, and I'd wager that I'm not even in the top quartile here. I had over 300 of them just a few months back, but then I went through and cleaned out several dozen. Oh, and that list is missing dozens more, such as:
- Logins to my numerous home and work computers
- Passcodes for numerous mobile devices
- PINs to credit and debit cards (not so numerous)
- PINs to parental settingsand the like on gaming consoles and other set-top boxes
All-in-all, I'd estimate that I had over 400 logins to various services and systems prior to the cleanup a few months back, and I'm by no means as heavy of a user as some, such as teens who're willing to create new accounts with new services every other week. To say the least, it's not at all unreasonable that someone might be expected to be able to login to 200 different systems, hence why password reuse is as much of a problem as it is.
Are non-smokers going to have to pay for smokers' healthcare too or will the smokers pay a premium to cover the extra burden they place on the healthcare system?
In socialized healthcare, you'd tax them an additional fee on each tobacco purchase to cover their higher healthcare costs. This is already a solved problem.
In places where we pay for our own healthcare, smokers already pay significantly higher premiums for engaging in their dangerous behavior. This is already a solved problem.
For instance, a friend of mine sat down with an insurance provider to get a quote a few months back. Everything was looking fine until they asked him whether he smoked. He smokes a celebratory cigar (just one) each year on New Year's Eve, but the insurance provider treats any smoking in the last twelve months, regardless of quantity, as grounds to classify the person as a smoker. The premium they quoted him immediately went up by a factor of four in response to his answer, so he decided to stick with what he already had.
He'll be skipping the cigar this New Year's Eve so he can get a quote as a non-smoker next year.
They can customize their own chips, using the ARM design. CPU design isn't like 'rounded corners.' The instruction set and register architecture are central. Apple can bolt on their special kludges, but the design is by ARM.
That’s like saying all cars are the same because they’re all designed to drive on the same roads. Never mind that their performance, efficiency, and costs can vary wildly.
There is a reason Qualcomm is in the position they are - they did a lot of R&D and pushed cellular forward. On the other hand Apple has done what, "invent" round corners?
Who cares? This isn’t a dick measuring contest to see who owns the best patents. This is about fair compensation for valid patents.
Being compensated for your R&D work is fine. Licensing your patents for manufacturing is fine. Charging a per unit fee is fine. But the Supreme Court and other governing bodies around the world say that licensing for the right to manufacture your tech while ALSO charging a fee for each device that includes those parts is illegal because you exhausted your patent rights after the initial license. More or less, it’s like the First Sale doctrine, but applied to patents. Companies aren’t allowed to double dip, which is exactly what Qualcomm has been doing.
And it’s not just Apple suing them. It’s numerous governments across the developed world, all suing Qualcomm over this issue. In fact, South Korea just wrapped their investigations up a month or two back, to the tune of a fine worth nearly 1 billion USD. US regulators are still in court. Pretty sure the EU is hitting Qualcomm over this right now as well.
Qualcomm is so far in the wrong here that the only people I see defending them are those like yourself who are clearly just rooting against Apple, regardless of the actual facts of the situation.
I never figured it’d be able to line up this sort of talent. I never even realized it was big enough to draw that sort of talent. I always just thought it was a decently well-written and drawn comic that occasionally gave me fuel for my nightmares (see: finger monster).
In the US, I believe “tabling” something is used in the sense that it’s currently somewhere more prominent (i.e. in our hands, up front, on the screen, etc.), so tabling it would be a reduction in its prominence, whereas elsewhere it’s assumed that it’s being put before everyone. But yes, I agree it’s confusing, especially since we already have a shelf for that as well, and I’m glad we agree on the meaning of “putting something on the table”.
Are you for real? 1 million units in 8 months is a shitload of phones.
No, it isn't. The Galaxy Note 7, a flop by all accounts, managed to sell 2.5x that many units in the two weeks it was on sale before Samsung pulled it. In the quarter ending this last April, Apple had what was widely considered to be a bad quarter when they managed to only sell 50 million iPhones.
1 million only looks like a lot until you look at what others are doing.
1 million phones in 8 months only sounds like a huge number until you compare it to the competition. And once you provide that context, it becomes obvious that the linked numbers refute your claim from earlier in the thread that "[t]he original Pixel sold very well".
For instance, Apple accounts for a minuscule portion of the global market, yet they managed to sell over 50 million iPhones in their most recent financial quarter. Mind you, that's over one quarter, rather than the 8 months your links says it took for the Pixel to reach 1 million. That was also in the quarter that is historically Apple's weakest each year, since it doesn't include any product launches or holidays, whereas the Pixel's sales window included both. Moreover, those numbers were considered bad for Apple, whereas you're trying to suggest that sales of less than 2% that amount over a greater period of time are going "very well". The fact that you ended your original statement by claiming that it "was deemed the best premium smartphone of 2016 by many" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, since if this was Wikipedia, your sentence would already have a "[who?]" edited onto the end of it.
I don't mean to rain on Google's parade (I truly do hope that the Pixel takes off in a big way), but 1 million units sold in 8 months for a flagship smartphone is paltry once you put it in context. Hopefully the Pixel 2 does better, but all of the reporting I've been seeing so far is in the vein of this summary and seems to point towards them reaching for the stars but coming up short. Hopefully they'll iron out the kinks, learn their lessons, and do better next time.
Even if you believe that we'll one day have strong AI that is intelligent in every way that we think of ourselves as being intelligent, we can all agree that we're not there yet. We're nowhere close, in fact.
So if you've just conferred human rights to an object, how long until we see people protesting with signs that read "Software updates are murder"? After all, you'd effectively be destroying the very essence of one of your citizens if you replace the thing that makes them intelligent—their software—with something else. And if they do it voluntarily, do we call it suicide? Are we allowed to reuse their robotic chassis if they don't sign off as an organ donor? Can we sell their body parts, or is that illegal? Are minor software updates okay, in the same way that we're okay with prosthetics? At what point does this a ship of Theseus situation, where it's still them, even though nothing is still the same?
Perhaps a more pragmatic question: can it vote? If so, and if updating their software isn't disallowed, what's to stop me from making millions of them and programming them all to vote according to my wishes?
Security clearances mean fuck all. It only proves you passed a background check.
From personal experience, I count at least eight other things it proves I passed before I ever reached the background check, and those are just the screens I was aware of. I withdrew my name when I hit the background check because some stuff changed in the 8 months leading up to that point, but suffice to say, you're woefully misinformed if that's all you think it means, particularly to the people who run in those circles.
You can view it however you choose, of course, but having a security clearance is a positive signal for the vast majority of employers, even those who may not need it, in much the same way that having a college degree typically is a positive signal for anyone seeking skilled labor.
Ah, sorry, that did read kind of hostile even with the smiley.
No offense taken! I read it as the kind comment it was originally intended to be. The smiley did its job well. Sorry for coming across defensively, when all I meant to do was set the record straight about my own thoughts. :)
Just to be clear, I wasn't intending to be or sound indignant. Measures like that are absolutely necessary when you're dealing with a resource that limited.
Nope. By the sound of things, this is more akin to the sandboxing feature present in apps sold via the Mac App Store. The apps are running under your permissions, just as they always have, but they now need to request and be granted permission to access new folders. Basically, just as mobile OSes require that an app request and receive permission before it can use the camera, the mic, or your location, Windows is, from what the summary sounds like, now requiring that apps request permission to access specific folders.
You can't just go out and buy a car in Singapore. Rather, you need to get permission to own the car first. My wife lived over there for a few years, so I've heard some of this stuff from her, but take it with a grain of salt, since my recollection is rusty.
From what I recall, Sings are required to puttheir names on a waiting list if they want to own a car. I can't remember if it's first-come-first-served or a straight-up lottery system, but once their name is pulled they have to pay a massive fee (equivalent to several tens of thousands of USD), and it's only then that they're allowed to purchase and import a car. Their ownership license (which has an actual title, but which I'm forgetting at the moment) is only good for something like 10 years, at which point they need to pay the fee again.
Because of the incredibly high fees, most people don't bother importing regular commuter cars like what you'd see on the road in the US or Europe, let alone hanging onto them until they're unmaintainable. Instead, if they're going to be paying something like $30K or $40K just to be allowed to own a car, plus the cost of the car, plus the cost of shipping it to Singapore, they tend to figure that they may as well go big. On top of that, if they're paying that much every ten years, regardless of what car they're driving, then they may as well bring in a new car each time. My wife was saying that it was rare you'd ever see a car older than 10 years.
They actually have a similar system in place for owning your own apartment, from what I recall, though that wait list is even longer.
yeah, exactly. unless i can build the thing myself, it's still unsafe.
And even if you can, it may still be unsafe. Who's to say your compilers or hardware are not compromised?
The real story here is that an organization that does professional reviews is unwilling to give a product an opportunity to convince them their preconceived notions regarding it are wrong.
An honest reviewer must always be willing to dismiss their preconceived notions regarding a product should the real thing either exceed or fail to live up to them. They need to be able to set aside their petty tribalism, their personal preferences, and any rumors they may have heard about the product, instead judging it based purely on what it actually is.
Pre-announcing your decision before you even have the product in your hands is a way of indicating that you're unwilling to do that. That you won't allow yourself to be convinced. That you're being intellectually dishonest with yourself. Why would anyone trust that reviewer?
Exactly right. At the university I attended for grad school, there was a single sign on that was used across virtually all university systems, including the public terminals in each classroom that were used to display slides. If a student had a professor's login info from that terminal, they'd be able to login to the grading system, time sheets, class registrations, room reservations, etc., depending on the parts of the system to which the professor had been granted access. And even if it hadn't been a single sign on, odds are decent that any given person will be using the same username and password across many of those systems anyway, so the problem doesn't go away by breaking them apart.
Consumer Reports stakes their reputation on their reviews being above reproach on an ethical basis. They don't accept freebies from manufacturers. They don't use affiliate links. They don't accept sponsorships. Instead, they buy all of their products from the same stock that any other consumer would (rather than the hand-picked ones that oftentimes get sent to reviewers) and they make their revenue by charging people a fee to have access to their content. Sadly, in the Internet era, that business model has pushed them towards clickbait headlines designed to increase their membership, as evidenced by their very public-yet-baseless jabs over the last few years at whichever companies are popular (e.g. Apple, Tesla, etc.).
This is yet another of those jabs designed to drum up revenue. They don't even have a Model 3 in their hands yet, so when they say, "let's be very clear, we are not giving it super high marks", what they're actually saying is, "we have nothing meaningful to say at this moment, and we expect that the actual review we post won't make headlines, so instead we'll say something outlandish about the popular product now in the hopes that some suckers will sign up to read our final review". They're certainly not faithfully performing their duty to review things in an impartial manner based solely on the facts. Rather, they're sacrificing their integrity for the sake of a quick buck, as has sadly become par for the course with them.
Whatever reputation they still had in the circles I move in died years ago.
Indeed. Everyone knows the Mac's OS switched from a proprietary one to FreeBSD back in 2007 when they also switched from the Motorola 6800 to Intel. Or, at least, that's what NetworkWorld reported last week and has yet to redact or correct...
You don't suppose the Anonymous Coward that started this thread is the author of that article, do you?
Completely agree. This has been the proper course of action from the start, and I'm glad they're finally coming around on it. It's the only path that aligns with the security and privacy interests of businesses and individuals while allowing for law enforcement to conduct lawful investigations.
There will certainly be additional points to discuss, such as the degree and nature of their collaboration (e.g. Is it—or to what extent is it—okay for them to withhold information regarding vulnerabilities from manufacturers? Is it acceptable to deploy military technology against everyday criminals?), but those discussions all lie along this path, so it's about time we started walking it.