If more people would Vote Tetrahedron, this wouldn't be a problem. But, ooooh nooooo, [whiny voice] "Each layer has these hexagonal shapes in it! It reminds me of witches! Wiiiiitch!!"
When you say "keep" the government out of your internet, you're implying the government isn't already neck-deep involved. Nobody would even know who Comcast is, if it weren't for all those government-granted charters.
Customer:Why do I have to pay a COMCAST SUBSCRIBER FEE for downloading movies?
That is the very best answer. Any blackmail that users' ISPs try to levy on others, should be passed right back to those users, and as directly as possible, rather than amortized across all users. There's nothing wrong with someone paying for stuff, as long as it ends up becoming a market force that favors those who are able to minimize that cost.
If Comcast can charge Level3 whatever the hell they want without there being any counter-pressure, then everyone eventually loses. If whatever Comcast charges Level3 ends up raising the price of Comcast from Comcast's customers' point of view, then we'll still have a relatively healthy (and fair!) situation (ignoring the fact that Comcast doesn't have competition in some areas).
The USCG doesn't care whether Syfert folds, they just want to discourage other attorneys from offering the same type of legal assistance.
In that case, they ought to just host a torrent and run a tracker for this paperwork packet. Or just include the whole thing with their threat letters. There goes your market, Syfert.
The notice was on display: in an unlit cellar (with no stairs leading to it), in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
One drive is too few. All mechanical drives must be used in RAID1 pairs. (Or RAID5 if you're super-stingy and have extreme disk space requirements but IMHO that's almost always the wrong answer.)
Then, for PVRs, I figure the ideal number of pairs (mythtv storage groups) is tuners+1, so you can record and play without any seeking or fragmentation of the recordings, thus 6 drives is the ideal for an hdhomerun-fed system. (The +1 is a simplification; it can theoretically rise to approach the number of frontends, but no number can guarantee that multiple playbacks won't have seeking, so 1 is a reasonably good answer.)
I ended up with 8 instead of 6 as a historical accident. 6-8 drives might be niche, I'll admit, because seeking to avoid seeking is ridiculously geeky. But more-than-one ain't. I'd say single-drive is the nichier, the "naive about the inevitably high failure rate inherent in the modern drive market" niche.;-) Nobody can stay in that niche forever, without eventually receiving a painful signal that they should leave it.
If your day hasn't come yet, I am happy for you, but this happiness is tinged with the bittersweet melancholy of knowing the future. It is like looking at a flower in its prime -- so elegant in its simplicity, yet so fragile and ephemeral. As the flower will someday turn to dust, the computer will someday be without any drives at all, displaying nothing but a bleakly flashing cursor and boot error message from the BIOS, as its sole drive sits in a UPS truck somewhere in the RMA pipeline. Such is the inevitable destiny of all flowers and all drives.
There's still a niche that isn't very well served, where these low-power Fusion CPUs appear they could kick some major ass: the always-on-24/7 lightly-loaded server. I'm currently using Athlon II xxxe for this, but I'd happily downgrade processing power in exchange for lower wattage.
Shit, Atom would be good enough, if the motherboards had enough SATA ports or slots for me to add SATA cards, but I never found any that did. Gimme a 9W or 18W processor on a board that I can somehow hook up 8 drives to, and that'll be my new mythbackend. If commflagging or transcoding takes a little longer, I just don't care; Atom 330 is nearly good enough for that that anyway, and it looks like Fusion is better than Atom in every way.
I'd think just about every home or office would need at least one box like this, but according to the market, I'm wrong. WTF?
..that don't involve manually distributing your certificates and CRL to every workstation in the company?
Here's where you went wrong. If you insist on keeping this constraint at any cost, then you have lost. Pay that cost (you don't get to have intranet sites) instead of getting what you want, and accept that you got the lesser of two "evils" (from a very perverted point of view).
The main problem with looking at it that way, is that you (or someone) already did what you claim you want to avoid. Those workstations don't just magically trust Verisign utterly and completely as an introducer while not trusting you a bit. They trust Verisign and not you, because web browsers got installed on them, with preferences configured to to that (and Verisign's business model is to count on people being lazy and keeping those settings). Go ahead and set up your company CA, then bite the bullet and tell all your workstations to believe it (instead of seeking to avoid this step) and get it over with.
Why more people don't mention Rope when they're talking about their favorite Hitchcock movies, I don't understand. Great movie. And (on topic!) the whole movie is just something like 3(?) takes.
Agent A and B's supervisor: "You spent 2 days finding this guy based on seeing a PGP header in some packet, brought him in for questioning, he turned over the key the first time you threatened him, and now you have his LolCat pictures? And then since you didn't secretly execute him, he told the press what happened and now they're talking about me on the TV news? I've had it with you two. You're fired."
Agent C: "Boss, I have no problems with secretly executing everyone we find."
Supervisor: "Great, I'm sure no one will ever find out about that, thereby getting me into any kind of trouble. That sounds like a perfect plan!! No wait, I just realized, that's totally batshit insane, isn't it? You're fired too, Agent C. Agent D, we need to reserve the secret executions for the important stuff."
Agent D: "But how do we know what's the important stuff, until after we threaten people?"
Supervisor: "We don't. I guess this is the end of trawling the whole fucking internet looking for random things that might turn out to be interesting."
Yeah, and get ready to be flogged with a wet noodle until you give up your passwords...
This is a tired and irrelevant argument, when talking about using encryption to prevent widespread passive trawling.
If "they" come to you, and they are more powerful and willing to use force against you, you have lost. Just give 'em the passwords (assuming you have them). And at that point you know that they are interested in you, so assuming they allow you any recourse (i.e. they don't just disappear you) then you can take it. OTOH when you are passively snooped because you didn't encrypt, you have no recourse at all, because you don't even know it happened.
And if "they" have to go after a hundred million people, their budget will probably be exhausted long before they get to you.
The rubber hose is almost never relevant. We're not talking about corner cases where a spy or captured soldier is having to keep an important state secret; we're talking about mainstream resistance to protect your love letters and bank codes and the party RSVP that a burglar can use to determine you won't be home tomorrow night. Encryption is a damn good answer.
unreadable packets will be dropped
Cross that bridge when you come to it. If they insist, then let them install h264 decoders on all their routers to figure out which low-entropy packets are ciphertext and which ones aren't. Let them tell all their campaign contributors, "Sorry, you can't have a VPN. You'll just have to trust your competitors to not pay attention to your trade secrets."
Banning (or preventing) encryption ain't gonna happen. I'm not saying they'll be powerless to prevent privacy, but the odds are on the citizenry's side here, big time.
What were they thinking, just giving the:CueCat away? They should have sold it for $20 but told everyone it cost them $50 and was subsidized and hell no, you're not allowed to write drivers for it. Digital Convergence could have made a killing!
I think it's just fine to update to WPA2. I've got no problem with people throwing on more encryption to the access point.
My problem is with anyone viewing that as a serious solution to anything. If the stuff that WPA2 is encrypting isn't already ciphertext and being sent to an already-authenticated endpoint, then you haven't solved anything. Remember in the first paragraph, when I said the access point? Wait a minute.. which access point? If you have just made an encrypted connection (using "test" as a the password) to the N900 in the pocket of guy at the next table, then you're still trusting arbitrary random people with your plaintext, so what was the point of encrypting?
And even if it's really Starbucks' access point, you're trusting them. And you're trusting Starbucks' ISP, and you're trusting whoever is on that mysterious floor in the AT&T building, and you're trusting the ISP of whoever is providing the service you're connecting to. Wow, good thing you encrypted one little link in the chain.
Upgrade your fucking applications and set 'em to use TLS (*). And upgrade your server to work with that. End-to-end encryption doesn't mean each router needs to decrypt and re-encrypt (although that's fine to do!); it means the client and server are encrypting with keys only known to those two points. Do it right, and then throw on more depth if that makes you feel better. Wifi is the wrong place to start working on your problem.
(*) Oh, and if you're updating your software to use TLS, consider GNU TLS so that you can upgrade to better trust models like OpenPGP. If you're going to encrypt things, you might as well reduce dependencies on centralized too-easily-coercible single-point-of-failure CAs, so that the MitM risks can be lowered. X.509 is a joke. Which of these two questions is more worrysome?
Did they send a letter to Verisign?
Did they get to all of
any of: that guy I met at the LUG 3 years ago, or the guy he met at another LUG, or the guy he met at a conference
any of: that hippy I met at the university, or his drug dealer, or his drug dealer, or that dealer's brother
any of: that Swiss traveller I met, or the guy he met in another city after looking the place up on biglumber, or that guy's wife
any of: that debian developer I met, who knows the guy whose service I'm using
where each path was compromised years ago (before they signed), and every single one of them kept it under their hat all these years, in anticipation of the day that I would finally connect to this server?
One threat is common sense and already known to be happening, and the other threat requires batshit insane paranoia. I say: require paranoia before you get worried. Don't let them get you, unless everyone is (and always has been) out to get you.;-)
Sounds the like the same defect. The server can distinguish between a "TV" vs a "computer" (whatever the hell that means) just like it can distinguish between a "mobile" and a "not mobile" (whatever the hell that means). The N900 is mobile but from a software perspective it nearly isn't. A laptop is a mobile but the mainstream says it's not. It's just going to get more blurry, just as the distinction between "TV" and "computer" did.
And that defect is Flash. Because of the fact that people are not in control of the software they use, they're having to get proprietary blobs from Adobe, and those blobs are coming with particular identifiers which let people make these arbitrary distinctions. It's kind of sad; I wonder if embedded TV software is going to become the same disaster that phones did.
It sounds like we need an implementation of RTMP, and probably some more improvements to wannabe competing implementations like Gnash; the whole point being to let Flash really become a standard (where people can choose which implementation to load and expect it to Just Work), so that Adobe can either be brought under the users' control or eliminated.
All those years of bitching about Windows and saying "This isn't normal!" and being right. At some undefinable point, the bizarre alien weirdness became old enough and accepted enough to pass as "normal." The facts changed underneath me.
Damn you, AC, for pointing that out. Another little part of me just died. Fuck you. Fuck you with a chainsaw, for being right.
[Deep breath] Ok, so Windows is [choke]..
Nnn..
Nnnnn..
Fuck you.
Windows is nnnn
Fuck.
Windows is normal.
It's normal, like how dog shit sometimes appearing in the back hall of the house is normal, now that I've had this puppy for 8 months. It wasn't normal and then, one day, it was normal. Ok, I get it. You bastard. AC, did I mention "fuck you?" I just wanna make sure we're clear on this: fuck you for implying Windows is normal and being right. Probably right. Right under protest. Fuck you.)
So.. if that OS is that way (you know what I mean), even so: Windows users have the option of not installing (or removing if preloaded) AV software, don't they? Isn't the owner still ultimately empowered to take on the job of cleaning up their malware?
(I'm still in shock. Tomorrow we might have to fight about the N word applying to that OS. I gotta gather my wits here. If someone wants to step in and explain how that AC just tricked me, go for it,)
I don't understand why worrying is what this makes people do... [if software does a bad thing] someone has the power to kill it.
The reason people dislike it, is that the normal way for personal computers to operate is that the owner of the device (who is also typically the user), is the "someone" that you mention. And a lot of us are still used to the normal way (I guess that's why I call it "normal";-). The evil here is not the killswitch; it's whose hand is on the switch.
If the phone were larger and had a full size keyboard and monitor, a lot of people would say that worrying is the right thing to do. But since we call it a "phone" (or a "game console" or an "ebook reader") the rules are magically different even though there's nothing about how the device is used, which should change who its master is.
That said, while "a lot" of people would object to a desktop PC working this way, maybe some wouldn't. There does seem to be a level of frustration with users (typically Windows PC owners) installing malware, and this isn't the first time someone has proposed giving up and taking the power and authority out of their hands. What's interesting, though, is when you cross the line going down to a certain size (Apple's tablet being the new threshold) it's no longer just an idea, but is actually happening.
Imagine if desktop PCs had evolved like the handheld ones are. Pretty sad. And pretty scary to think that the phone/gameconsole mindset still might infect the desktop. Why can't the next Mac come with IOS or the next Dell come with Windows Phone 7 or the next whitebox x86 come with Android -- and "brick" if the user tries to install something that doesn't suck? Throw in lock-in subsidies from ISPs, and people might actually buy 'em, and then desktop developers who want access to the widest market, might find themselves having to kiss the ass of the repository maintainers (a.k.a. "app store"), not be allowed to write competing apps, etc. This kind of shit would have totally prevented a lot of tech that we all take for granted today. Lame.
I would never think: Hey lets download something large to my phone and stream it to my TV. It sounds retarded actually.
And even if you did have such an idea, if you wanted to stream video over wireless, modern TVs have their own players in 'em, so you would just run minidlna or something like that on your phone, so that the compressed video would be sent over wireless and decoded with ffmpeg on the TV. You wouldn't have the phone decode the video (a kind of intense thing to be doing on a battery-powered device), and then fill up precious radio spectrum with uncompressed video.
Not that I think it's totally crazy to want to use a TV as an output device for a handheld, or that it's crazy to want to do that wirelessly, but streaming video is exactly the wrong time to do that. If you're doing video, just have the the handheld serve up the files, thereby using the bandwidth more efficiently and having the TV, which is drawing power from the wall, do the decoding.
The proposed application and tech here, just don't go well together.
No, Apple is not fighting the good fight. If Apple users gained some benefit from Apple's decision to deprive users of useful programs, you might be able to make a case for that, but this is all penalty for no gain.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, have you ever tried to stack spheres ?
If more people would Vote Tetrahedron, this wouldn't be a problem. But, ooooh nooooo, [whiny voice] "Each layer has these hexagonal shapes in it! It reminds me of witches! Wiiiiitch!!"
When you say "keep" the government out of your internet, you're implying the government isn't already neck-deep involved. Nobody would even know who Comcast is, if it weren't for all those government-granted charters.
Physicists assume a spherical ball, but government has passed laws requiring balls to have 4 legs, a head, and a tail.
That is the very best answer. Any blackmail that users' ISPs try to levy on others, should be passed right back to those users, and as directly as possible, rather than amortized across all users. There's nothing wrong with someone paying for stuff, as long as it ends up becoming a market force that favors those who are able to minimize that cost.
If Comcast can charge Level3 whatever the hell they want without there being any counter-pressure, then everyone eventually loses. If whatever Comcast charges Level3 ends up raising the price of Comcast from Comcast's customers' point of view, then we'll still have a relatively healthy (and fair!) situation (ignoring the fact that Comcast doesn't have competition in some areas).
In that case, they ought to just host a torrent and run a tracker for this paperwork packet. Or just include the whole thing with their threat letters. There goes your market, Syfert.
Great, a government telling the media to not report on something. That will squash all public interest in the topic!
The notice was on display: in an unlit cellar (with no stairs leading to it), in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
I think Congress should mandate that anyone who wants a pony, should be provided with one.
One drive is too few. All mechanical drives must be used in RAID1 pairs. (Or RAID5 if you're super-stingy and have extreme disk space requirements but IMHO that's almost always the wrong answer.)
Then, for PVRs, I figure the ideal number of pairs (mythtv storage groups) is tuners+1, so you can record and play without any seeking or fragmentation of the recordings, thus 6 drives is the ideal for an hdhomerun-fed system. (The +1 is a simplification; it can theoretically rise to approach the number of frontends, but no number can guarantee that multiple playbacks won't have seeking, so 1 is a reasonably good answer.)
I ended up with 8 instead of 6 as a historical accident. 6-8 drives might be niche, I'll admit, because seeking to avoid seeking is ridiculously geeky. But more-than-one ain't. I'd say single-drive is the nichier, the "naive about the inevitably high failure rate inherent in the modern drive market" niche. ;-) Nobody can stay in that niche forever, without eventually receiving a painful signal that they should leave it.
If your day hasn't come yet, I am happy for you, but this happiness is tinged with the bittersweet melancholy of knowing the future. It is like looking at a flower in its prime -- so elegant in its simplicity, yet so fragile and ephemeral. As the flower will someday turn to dust, the computer will someday be without any drives at all, displaying nothing but a bleakly flashing cursor and boot error message from the BIOS, as its sole drive sits in a UPS truck somewhere in the RMA pipeline. Such is the inevitable destiny of all flowers and all drives.
Damn, that looks exactly like what I wanted. Very nice find. Thank you, AC.
There's still a niche that isn't very well served, where these low-power Fusion CPUs appear they could kick some major ass: the always-on-24/7 lightly-loaded server. I'm currently using Athlon II xxxe for this, but I'd happily downgrade processing power in exchange for lower wattage.
Shit, Atom would be good enough, if the motherboards had enough SATA ports or slots for me to add SATA cards, but I never found any that did. Gimme a 9W or 18W processor on a board that I can somehow hook up 8 drives to, and that'll be my new mythbackend. If commflagging or transcoding takes a little longer, I just don't care; Atom 330 is nearly good enough for that that anyway, and it looks like Fusion is better than Atom in every way.
I'd think just about every home or office would need at least one box like this, but according to the market, I'm wrong. WTF?
Here's where you went wrong. If you insist on keeping this constraint at any cost, then you have lost. Pay that cost (you don't get to have intranet sites) instead of getting what you want, and accept that you got the lesser of two "evils" (from a very perverted point of view).
The main problem with looking at it that way, is that you (or someone) already did what you claim you want to avoid. Those workstations don't just magically trust Verisign utterly and completely as an introducer while not trusting you a bit. They trust Verisign and not you, because web browsers got installed on them, with preferences configured to to that (and Verisign's business model is to count on people being lazy and keeping those settings). Go ahead and set up your company CA, then bite the bullet and tell all your workstations to believe it (instead of seeking to avoid this step) and get it over with.
Get the dropdown right on the first try. No submit button for you!
AJAX isn't necessarily a bad thing, but incompetent web developers replacing good interfaces with bad ones, sure is.
Why more people don't mention Rope when they're talking about their favorite Hitchcock movies, I don't understand. Great movie. And (on topic!) the whole movie is just something like 3(?) takes.
Agent A and B's supervisor: "You spent 2 days finding this guy based on seeing a PGP header in some packet, brought him in for questioning, he turned over the key the first time you threatened him, and now you have his LolCat pictures? And then since you didn't secretly execute him, he told the press what happened and now they're talking about me on the TV news? I've had it with you two. You're fired."
Agent C: "Boss, I have no problems with secretly executing everyone we find."
Supervisor: "Great, I'm sure no one will ever find out about that, thereby getting me into any kind of trouble. That sounds like a perfect plan!! No wait, I just realized, that's totally batshit insane, isn't it? You're fired too, Agent C. Agent D, we need to reserve the secret executions for the important stuff."
Agent D: "But how do we know what's the important stuff, until after we threaten people?"
Supervisor: "We don't. I guess this is the end of trawling the whole fucking internet looking for random things that might turn out to be interesting."
Citizens: "Yay, we won."
This is a tired and irrelevant argument, when talking about using encryption to prevent widespread passive trawling.
If "they" come to you, and they are more powerful and willing to use force against you, you have lost. Just give 'em the passwords (assuming you have them). And at that point you know that they are interested in you, so assuming they allow you any recourse (i.e. they don't just disappear you) then you can take it. OTOH when you are passively snooped because you didn't encrypt, you have no recourse at all, because you don't even know it happened.
And if "they" have to go after a hundred million people, their budget will probably be exhausted long before they get to you.
The rubber hose is almost never relevant. We're not talking about corner cases where a spy or captured soldier is having to keep an important state secret; we're talking about mainstream resistance to protect your love letters and bank codes and the party RSVP that a burglar can use to determine you won't be home tomorrow night. Encryption is a damn good answer.
Cross that bridge when you come to it. If they insist, then let them install h264 decoders on all their routers to figure out which low-entropy packets are ciphertext and which ones aren't. Let them tell all their campaign contributors, "Sorry, you can't have a VPN. You'll just have to trust your competitors to not pay attention to your trade secrets."
Banning (or preventing) encryption ain't gonna happen. I'm not saying they'll be powerless to prevent privacy, but the odds are on the citizenry's side here, big time.
What were they thinking, just giving the :CueCat away? They should have sold it for $20 but told everyone it cost them $50 and was subsidized and hell no, you're not allowed to write drivers for it. Digital Convergence could have made a killing!
Making stuff work is a crime.
I think it's just fine to update to WPA2. I've got no problem with people throwing on more encryption to the access point.
My problem is with anyone viewing that as a serious solution to anything. If the stuff that WPA2 is encrypting isn't already ciphertext and being sent to an already-authenticated endpoint, then you haven't solved anything. Remember in the first paragraph, when I said the access point? Wait a minute .. which access point? If you have just made an encrypted connection (using "test" as a the password) to the N900 in the pocket of guy at the next table, then you're still trusting arbitrary random people with your plaintext, so what was the point of encrypting?
And even if it's really Starbucks' access point, you're trusting them. And you're trusting Starbucks' ISP, and you're trusting whoever is on that mysterious floor in the AT&T building, and you're trusting the ISP of whoever is providing the service you're connecting to. Wow, good thing you encrypted one little link in the chain.
Upgrade your fucking applications and set 'em to use TLS (*). And upgrade your server to work with that. End-to-end encryption doesn't mean each router needs to decrypt and re-encrypt (although that's fine to do!); it means the client and server are encrypting with keys only known to those two points. Do it right, and then throw on more depth if that makes you feel better. Wifi is the wrong place to start working on your problem.
(*) Oh, and if you're updating your software to use TLS, consider GNU TLS so that you can upgrade to better trust models like OpenPGP. If you're going to encrypt things, you might as well reduce dependencies on centralized too-easily-coercible single-point-of-failure CAs, so that the MitM risks can be lowered. X.509 is a joke. Which of these two questions is more worrysome?
where each path was compromised years ago (before they signed), and every single one of them kept it under their hat all these years, in anticipation of the day that I would finally connect to this server?
One threat is common sense and already known to be happening, and the other threat requires batshit insane paranoia. I say: require paranoia before you get worried. Don't let them get you, unless everyone is (and always has been) out to get you. ;-)
Sounds the like the same defect. The server can distinguish between a "TV" vs a "computer" (whatever the hell that means) just like it can distinguish between a "mobile" and a "not mobile" (whatever the hell that means). The N900 is mobile but from a software perspective it nearly isn't. A laptop is a mobile but the mainstream says it's not. It's just going to get more blurry, just as the distinction between "TV" and "computer" did.
And that defect is Flash. Because of the fact that people are not in control of the software they use, they're having to get proprietary blobs from Adobe, and those blobs are coming with particular identifiers which let people make these arbitrary distinctions. It's kind of sad; I wonder if embedded TV software is going to become the same disaster that phones did.
It sounds like we need an implementation of RTMP, and probably some more improvements to wannabe competing implementations like Gnash; the whole point being to let Flash really become a standard (where people can choose which implementation to load and expect it to Just Work), so that Adobe can either be brought under the users' control or eliminated.
I challenge you to a narrative contest. I will type, using a keyboard. You will enter text however you think best with whatever equipment you choose.
I don't know if I'll win, but if I don't win, it'll be because you chose keyboard too.
All those years of bitching about Windows and saying "This isn't normal!" and being right. At some undefinable point, the bizarre alien weirdness became old enough and accepted enough to pass as "normal." The facts changed underneath me.
Damn you, AC, for pointing that out. Another little part of me just died. Fuck you. Fuck you with a chainsaw, for being right.
[Deep breath] Ok, so Windows is [choke] ..
Nnn..
Nnnnn..
Fuck you.
Windows is nnnn
Fuck.
Windows is normal.
It's normal, like how dog shit sometimes appearing in the back hall of the house is normal, now that I've had this puppy for 8 months. It wasn't normal and then, one day, it was normal. Ok, I get it. You bastard. AC, did I mention "fuck you?" I just wanna make sure we're clear on this: fuck you for implying Windows is normal and being right. Probably right. Right under protest. Fuck you.)
So .. if that OS is that way (you know what I mean), even so: Windows users have the option of not installing (or removing if preloaded) AV software, don't they? Isn't the owner still ultimately empowered to take on the job of cleaning up their malware?
(I'm still in shock. Tomorrow we might have to fight about the N word applying to that OS. I gotta gather my wits here. If someone wants to step in and explain how that AC just tricked me, go for it,)
The reason people dislike it, is that the normal way for personal computers to operate is that the owner of the device (who is also typically the user), is the "someone" that you mention. And a lot of us are still used to the normal way (I guess that's why I call it "normal" ;-). The evil here is not the killswitch; it's whose hand is on the switch.
If the phone were larger and had a full size keyboard and monitor, a lot of people would say that worrying is the right thing to do. But since we call it a "phone" (or a "game console" or an "ebook reader") the rules are magically different even though there's nothing about how the device is used, which should change who its master is.
That said, while "a lot" of people would object to a desktop PC working this way, maybe some wouldn't. There does seem to be a level of frustration with users (typically Windows PC owners) installing malware, and this isn't the first time someone has proposed giving up and taking the power and authority out of their hands. What's interesting, though, is when you cross the line going down to a certain size (Apple's tablet being the new threshold) it's no longer just an idea, but is actually happening.
Imagine if desktop PCs had evolved like the handheld ones are. Pretty sad. And pretty scary to think that the phone/gameconsole mindset still might infect the desktop. Why can't the next Mac come with IOS or the next Dell come with Windows Phone 7 or the next whitebox x86 come with Android -- and "brick" if the user tries to install something that doesn't suck? Throw in lock-in subsidies from ISPs, and people might actually buy 'em, and then desktop developers who want access to the widest market, might find themselves having to kiss the ass of the repository maintainers (a.k.a. "app store"), not be allowed to write competing apps, etc. This kind of shit would have totally prevented a lot of tech that we all take for granted today. Lame.
And even if you did have such an idea, if you wanted to stream video over wireless, modern TVs have their own players in 'em, so you would just run minidlna or something like that on your phone, so that the compressed video would be sent over wireless and decoded with ffmpeg on the TV. You wouldn't have the phone decode the video (a kind of intense thing to be doing on a battery-powered device), and then fill up precious radio spectrum with uncompressed video.
Not that I think it's totally crazy to want to use a TV as an output device for a handheld, or that it's crazy to want to do that wirelessly, but streaming video is exactly the wrong time to do that. If you're doing video, just have the the handheld serve up the files, thereby using the bandwidth more efficiently and having the TV, which is drawing power from the wall, do the decoding.
The proposed application and tech here, just don't go well together.
No, Apple is not fighting the good fight. If Apple users gained some benefit from Apple's decision to deprive users of useful programs, you might be able to make a case for that, but this is all penalty for no gain.