Oh right, the transitional standard that no one other than Microsoft even has the information necessary to implement.
I guess I blocked that one out because I still can't believe the ISO was willing to throw sixty years worth of built up credibility down the toilet over it.
Wow, somebody better tell the Samba people that they wasted all their time on version 4 because they could have just used any of the existing free implementations of Kerberos that follow the RFC.
I didn't say AD failed to implement Kerberos, I said that AD isn't an open standard -- it includes a huge pile of nonstandard stuff that anyone wanting to interoperate has to reverse engineer. That sort of compliance-in-name-only plus EEE is the opposite an open standard.
That isn't what the GP said. The trouble is that Microsoft Office doesn't implement ISO OOXML, it deviates from it significantly. It's like saying that Active Directory is an open standard because it's a lot like Kerberos.
The results as far as I can see are pretty good, given realistic expectations.
It seems to me the real problem is that they stuffed a discrete GPU into the thing and then tried to compare it with desktop systems with discrete GPUs. That isn't the usage model for these at all. These only have 4 PCI-e lanes. Look at page 16 where they start to compare it with desktop systems where they're all using integrated graphics -- it comes out far closer.
And then you throw in the fact that these are dual-core processors being compared to desktop processors up to six cores. The ones with more cores get much higher scores on the benchmarks that are well-threaded. Who'da thunk it.
The idea that these are 90% as fast as modern desktop processors at all tasks is clearly false. But 90% as fast as desktop processors with integrated graphics, for a large subset of common tasks? It's not that implausible.
If you think the majority of people buy a console ever expecting "fair use" you're living in cloud cuckoo land. It is almost by definition a closed box, and Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo will do their damnedest to keep it that way.
That's the problem.
Though I doubt Sony would give a crap if someone produced firmware that turned their PS3 into a dedicated Linux box. What they do care about is people modifying their closed firmware to enable piracy, isoloaders, game hacks, PSN hacks, aimbots, trophy editors etc. etc.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
It isn't that aimbots and piracy are socially-beneficial things that must be preserved. It's that the measures required to eliminate them, first of all don't actually eliminate them, but more importantly the cure is worse than the disease. Shutting open systems out of popular culture just so we can stop some jackass from cheating at video games is too high a cost.
Probably because some of that lost revenue is from people who would have been customers.
[citation needed]
We all know that some pirates are displacing sales. We also know that some pirates are of the "try before you buy" type who go on to pay because they're socially responsible, and wouldn't have paid otherwise because they wouldn't lay out $50 for a game without trying it first. We know that some pirates will promote the game to their friends, who may buy it. Or make campaign maps or submit bug reports or do various other things that make the game more valuable to prospective customers, thereby increasing sales.
What we don't know is whether the positive effects outweigh the negative. We really have no idea. There is no good way to measure it. But chances are, it's pretty close to a wash.
Then you weigh in the cost of anti-piracy measures. Fair use, gone. Property rights in your own equipment? Sorry, that belongs to corporations now -- Linux is just for hackers anyway. Does the DRM think you're a pirate even though you're not? Guess you paid $50 for nothing. And I hope you like paying the Microsoft tax, because if corporations can intentionally exclude FOSS from being able to play various media, you end up paying big money for what would by all rights otherwise be free. Oh, and losing your ability to control it.
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it. The 360 is six years old now anyway. And using the same processors as are used in PCs would make porting easier for developers who optimize for specific processor architectures. Right now the major consoles are PowerPC with weird SPEs that take special attention, which is just an invitation to write architecture-specific code and ignore the PC.
I suspect if they went and talked to AMD they could come up with some kind of Fusion-based console that would clean the clock of all this ancient cruft and do it on the cheap, and then maybe we could get some new games that take advantage of more than six year old technology.
But since the extra cost is not accounted for in the price of each transaction it makes it harder to comparison shop - it becomes mentally easier to pay a higher price for an item at Amazon rather than purchase it elsewhere because the "total cost" appears to be lower.
That's because you're doing it wrong. If you're already paying for Amazon Prime then the total cost actually is lower. The cost of Prime is a sunk cost. You don't get it back just because you bought less stuff from Amazon, so you don't use it when comparing prices.
What makes it annoying (especially to competitors) is that it allows Amazon to scoop up all the high volume purchasers. If you buy enough stuff that a Prime subscription is cost effective then what Amazon is essentially doing is giving you a (shipping) discount on everything to keep you buying from them, because they know you buy a lot of stuff and they also know that their competitors try to undercut their prices. So as long as competitors are only undercutting the price for plebeians rather than the price-after-shipping for Prime subscribers, Amazon can capture the high volume customers by offering them this stealth discount. It's basically price discrimination in favor of high volume purchasers.
Right, so what I'm saying is, take the Linux kernel with whatever drivers someone has written for your device, and then install the Android VM and whatever else is required to get Android apps working on Maemo/MeeGo. Then you have a "Linux phone" which runs Android apps and any other part of Android you like, but can also run native apps and for that matter the whole GNU userland. Without really writing a huge amount of new code.
Getting the UI to be seamless would obviously take some work, but at first you could just do something like have an Android button in MeeGo that switches to the Android UI and vice versa.
They don't have to rewrite Qt and make it incompatible. They just have to [get Microsoft to] allow standard C++ on WP7. Microsoft likes to make ugly language changes like that under the fig leaf type safety or whatever because they like to make it difficult to make portable Windows programs. When the situation is reversed and they're trying to get the larger number of Android apps running on WP7, portability is their friend and excuses like type safety start to look pretty thin.
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting.
Sure, but isn't that why Nokia didn't? They didn't want to be one of a thousand other Android distributors?
Although it does bring an interesting point: Android is Linux too. Can anybody just mix and match code from Android and Meego and make something that e.g. runs Android apps and has the good bits from Meego, or is there some kind of licensing mess?
With or without it how will they fight the Nokia patent pool brought in court by their puppet master?
Why go to court? If only three people use it then it's hardly worth the effort. And if everybody starts writing Android apps with Qt, great! Just do the about face and tell all those Qt developers they employ to make Qt run on WP7 and suddenly WP7 has all the Android apps. Which would benefit both Nokia and Android at the expense of iOS, because it allows developers to target both platforms at once.
Nokia (or more specifically the MS guy who got into CEO position) essentially threw its entire 5 year "linux phone" development under the bus. Trolltech purchase is pennies in comparison.
The funny thing is they spent all the money on Meego, which still exists, and now they aren't using it. But now some other company, maybe one with a strong Intel partnership, can come along, scoop it up and run with it if they decide their existing OS is dying a slow death. Especially if the existing OS is already Linux-based and they could reuse some of their existing code. (Hello HP?)
QT isn't big enough to compete. The other juggernauts have the momentum and QT will fail. it is not because it is a bad technology - it just doesn't have the traction.
It's a framework, not a platform. Whether or not anybody else uses it is totally irrelevant to whether you can write an app with it and have it run on any Android phone. Or anything else they port the library to.
And if it works well and allows you to easily write portable software then plenty of people will use it, because there is no barrier (and significant advantages) to being an early adopter.
Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.
Certainly phones will get fast enough for most things, but for the things they're not good at -- playing high end video games, having a full size keyboard -- you still need a PC-like thing, and then you'll want them to talk to each other. Especially because the big problem phones have, and likely will continue to have for at least a few more years, is low storage availability. You can't fit 1000 hours of HD video of little Johnny learning to ride his bicycle and birthday parties and whatever on a 16GB flash drive, but you do want all that video to be immediately accessible when you're at Aunt Jenny's house and she spontaneously wants to see it. And you don't want it all on YouTube because it's private.
But the real interesting thing with a powerful phone is going to be that all that computing power is energy-efficient and therefore always-on, with an always-on network connection. The idea of a phone as a personal server is something that apparently hasn't much caught on yet, but it could be huge, especially once you start having them directly communicate with other phones. Distributed cloud FTW.
I can get a beagleboard and run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Qt could be used to design a UI for a smaller screen.
It's not as simple as that. You have to modify more than the UI framework, you pretty much have to rewrite the UI for all the individual applications too, and if you have to do that you might as well create a UI framework which is actually designed for phones. By which point you end up with something like Android.
I suspect your complaint is more that typically when you get an Android phone, the phone company acts like they own it and fills it full of crapware and lockdown fail. But you can always get the crapware-resistant Google version.
But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.
Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.
But I agree on the convergence. Somebody needs to come up with a docking station-like thing with a ~50W CPU, several gigs of RAM, a TB of disk, GigE and a 22"+ screen which will transition the OS instance from the phone to the dock, server VM style, when you plug them together.
Then the 'dock' can stay connected to the internet even while they're not together and act as a 1TB+ remote storage and backup device and home server which the phone can access (e.g. over an ssh tunnel) using the internet or 802.11. The storage on the phone becomes essentially a local fast-access cache of the most recently used data in the larger data collection at home. This is probably how the wheel of reincarnation is ultimately going to kill off cloud computing in this iteration -- people will start using their own PC remotely instead of somebody else's server, then as phones get more powerful they start to take on more of the load as between the phone and the PC because local is always faster, until the remote PC is pretty much just a remote backup device which allows you to play high end video games and have a bigger screen and full size keyboard when you dock with it.
And what is "the current legal environment" if not a top-down approach of mandating the way things should be, largely by those who have no expertise in the field of computer and network security? You are actually affirming my point. When speaking of a legal system, obedience is everything because disobedience is severely punished.
You know, it warms my heart to see that most everyone sees through the fact that this is a wasteful scam and the arguments are about why it is a scam.
This gives me hope that we can defeat this proposal the same way we thwarted other unproductive and harmful policies like the DMCA ban on circumvention tools, the Patriot Act and software patents....
You seem to be assuming the way they would implement this is to have your client send a second copy of the stream to the FBI. Certainly that is the easy way to do it, but also the trivially detectable way -- the app is using twice as much bandwidth as it should and half the packets are going to some server in Virginia.
The smart way is to combine ISP-level wiretapping in with a back door that CCs the encryption key to the Feds so that they can decipher what they capture from AT&T. Skype already has to open a third party connection to look up the IP address of the peer you want to call, and it's pretty easy for a couple dozen bytes to get lost in the noise.
If you really want to be sure you better have the source and a binary compiled by someone you trust (like yourself).
Would peer to peer services which offer end to end encryption like Skype be required to re-engineer their software to allow government wiretaps? This could be the end of personal use encryption as we know it.
They can't really stop personal use encryption at this point. Skype isn't fully open source, but that doesn't mean there can't or doesn't exist open source P2P encrypted communications software. And even if the official maintainers of that software were required to add a back door, the idea that no one would distribute a version with the back door removed is laughable. It's like trying to suppress DeCSS. Moreover, OpenSSL and OpenSSH are BSD licensed -- it's not like adding strong encryption to a communications app is rocket science. (Although for crying out loud, can somebody please fix the OpenSSL documentation?)
I would also expect Skype to strongly resist efforts to make them add a back door, if only because of the damage it would do to their reputation. Everybody knows that back doors are truck-sized security vulnerabilities that tempt black hats like chocolate cake tempts Michael Moore. People use Skype for confidential communications because it appears to be secure. Make it notoriously insecure and an alternative will appear which people will use instead.
Of course, that isn't to say that this proposal is puppies and unicorns and nobody needs to oppose it. People who demand good security -- including criminals -- will use software that has good security and no back doors. But there is still a need to protect innocent fools from organized criminals. Making the software that the average fool uses substantially less secure has the potential to make organized criminals much more effective -- remember, most people aren't terrorists, so intentionally creating a vulnerability that impacts both stupid innocents and stupid criminals will disproportionally impact the innocents because there are more of them.
Pundits like to state this, but I always wonder how Windows is an open system? Don't get me wrong: I love the various *nixes I run -- which includes Linux and Mac OS X (one open and one closed) -- but the only clear winner in a previous epic battle was Windows over Mac OS, but neither was open.
I think you're confusing "open source" with "open systems". Anybody can make a USB device, write a Windows driver and have it work on Windows. Anybody can write software that will run on Windows. Nobody needs Microsoft's permission.
And anyway, the reason that open systems win out in the end is that open sticks. If you have a real competitive market, the major players leapfrog each other every so often as the dominant player. Eventually it becomes the turn of an open system to be dominant. But once an open system reaches a critical mass, it stops being worth most competitors' while to develop a competing closed system instead of just using the open one. Nobody really makes serious closed competitors to TCP/IP or HTML4 or the like anymore.
The secret, if you can call it that, to holding on as long as possible as a closed competitor is to not really be all that closed.
To be fair, and I'm no more an MS fan than anyone, the GPL puts an onus on Microsoft to do things that they don't want to be arsed to do. As the owner of the "store" Microsoft becomes the "distributor" of GPL software. That means if you, AC, put a piece of GPLed software on the store, you are effectively obligating MS to host the source code and GPL somewhere as the distributor. You can say, "Well, I'll handle that, they don't have to worry about it.", but they do have to worry about it. If you decided next month to stop "handling that" and the software is still on the store, MS is left holding the bag. By forbidding GPL code they are covering their asses.
That isn't a GPL problem, it's a "code the developer doesn't own the copyright to" problem. If the developer licenses some code for inclusion in their app which has a license restriction requiring the developer to do X thing or they lose their right to redistribute the code, and the developer doesn't do X thing, the developer doesn't have the right to distribute the code. Which means that Microsoft doesn't either.
But Microsoft hasn't banned all software for which the developer doesn't own the entire copyright, they've only banned copyleft licensed software -- and have banned copyleft licensed software for which the developer owns all the copyrights.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh right, the transitional standard that no one other than Microsoft even has the information necessary to implement.
I guess I blocked that one out because I still can't believe the ISO was willing to throw sixty years worth of built up credibility down the toilet over it.
Wow, somebody better tell the Samba people that they wasted all their time on version 4 because they could have just used any of the existing free implementations of Kerberos that follow the RFC.
I didn't say AD failed to implement Kerberos, I said that AD isn't an open standard -- it includes a huge pile of nonstandard stuff that anyone wanting to interoperate has to reverse engineer. That sort of compliance-in-name-only plus EEE is the opposite an open standard.
That isn't what the GP said. The trouble is that Microsoft Office doesn't implement ISO OOXML, it deviates from it significantly. It's like saying that Active Directory is an open standard because it's a lot like Kerberos.
The results as far as I can see are pretty good, given realistic expectations.
It seems to me the real problem is that they stuffed a discrete GPU into the thing and then tried to compare it with desktop systems with discrete GPUs. That isn't the usage model for these at all. These only have 4 PCI-e lanes. Look at page 16 where they start to compare it with desktop systems where they're all using integrated graphics -- it comes out far closer.
And then you throw in the fact that these are dual-core processors being compared to desktop processors up to six cores. The ones with more cores get much higher scores on the benchmarks that are well-threaded. Who'da thunk it.
The idea that these are 90% as fast as modern desktop processors at all tasks is clearly false. But 90% as fast as desktop processors with integrated graphics, for a large subset of common tasks? It's not that implausible.
If you think the majority of people buy a console ever expecting "fair use" you're living in cloud cuckoo land. It is almost by definition a closed box, and Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo will do their damnedest to keep it that way.
That's the problem.
Though I doubt Sony would give a crap if someone produced firmware that turned their PS3 into a dedicated Linux box. What they do care about is people modifying their closed firmware to enable piracy, isoloaders, game hacks, PSN hacks, aimbots, trophy editors etc. etc.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
It isn't that aimbots and piracy are socially-beneficial things that must be preserved. It's that the measures required to eliminate them, first of all don't actually eliminate them, but more importantly the cure is worse than the disease. Shutting open systems out of popular culture just so we can stop some jackass from cheating at video games is too high a cost.
Probably because some of that lost revenue is from people who would have been customers.
[citation needed]
We all know that some pirates are displacing sales. We also know that some pirates are of the "try before you buy" type who go on to pay because they're socially responsible, and wouldn't have paid otherwise because they wouldn't lay out $50 for a game without trying it first. We know that some pirates will promote the game to their friends, who may buy it. Or make campaign maps or submit bug reports or do various other things that make the game more valuable to prospective customers, thereby increasing sales.
What we don't know is whether the positive effects outweigh the negative. We really have no idea. There is no good way to measure it. But chances are, it's pretty close to a wash.
Then you weigh in the cost of anti-piracy measures. Fair use, gone. Property rights in your own equipment? Sorry, that belongs to corporations now -- Linux is just for hackers anyway. Does the DRM think you're a pirate even though you're not? Guess you paid $50 for nothing. And I hope you like paying the Microsoft tax, because if corporations can intentionally exclude FOSS from being able to play various media, you end up paying big money for what would by all rights otherwise be free. Oh, and losing your ability to control it.
It's just not worth it.
By attempting to recall whether one bought enough things in the previous 12 months, I would think.
the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything.
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it. The 360 is six years old now anyway. And using the same processors as are used in PCs would make porting easier for developers who optimize for specific processor architectures. Right now the major consoles are PowerPC with weird SPEs that take special attention, which is just an invitation to write architecture-specific code and ignore the PC.
I suspect if they went and talked to AMD they could come up with some kind of Fusion-based console that would clean the clock of all this ancient cruft and do it on the cheap, and then maybe we could get some new games that take advantage of more than six year old technology.
But since the extra cost is not accounted for in the price of each transaction it makes it harder to comparison shop - it becomes mentally easier to pay a higher price for an item at Amazon rather than purchase it elsewhere because the "total cost" appears to be lower.
That's because you're doing it wrong. If you're already paying for Amazon Prime then the total cost actually is lower. The cost of Prime is a sunk cost. You don't get it back just because you bought less stuff from Amazon, so you don't use it when comparing prices.
What makes it annoying (especially to competitors) is that it allows Amazon to scoop up all the high volume purchasers. If you buy enough stuff that a Prime subscription is cost effective then what Amazon is essentially doing is giving you a (shipping) discount on everything to keep you buying from them, because they know you buy a lot of stuff and they also know that their competitors try to undercut their prices. So as long as competitors are only undercutting the price for plebeians rather than the price-after-shipping for Prime subscribers, Amazon can capture the high volume customers by offering them this stealth discount. It's basically price discrimination in favor of high volume purchasers.
Since when is Ubuntu the 'bad linux'?
Since they put the window buttons on the left hand side, if I remember correctly.
Right, so what I'm saying is, take the Linux kernel with whatever drivers someone has written for your device, and then install the Android VM and whatever else is required to get Android apps working on Maemo/MeeGo. Then you have a "Linux phone" which runs Android apps and any other part of Android you like, but can also run native apps and for that matter the whole GNU userland. Without really writing a huge amount of new code.
Getting the UI to be seamless would obviously take some work, but at first you could just do something like have an Android button in MeeGo that switches to the Android UI and vice versa.
They don't have to rewrite Qt and make it incompatible. They just have to [get Microsoft to] allow standard C++ on WP7. Microsoft likes to make ugly language changes like that under the fig leaf type safety or whatever because they like to make it difficult to make portable Windows programs. When the situation is reversed and they're trying to get the larger number of Android apps running on WP7, portability is their friend and excuses like type safety start to look pretty thin.
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting.
Sure, but isn't that why Nokia didn't? They didn't want to be one of a thousand other Android distributors?
Although it does bring an interesting point: Android is Linux too. Can anybody just mix and match code from Android and Meego and make something that e.g. runs Android apps and has the good bits from Meego, or is there some kind of licensing mess?
With or without it how will they fight the Nokia patent pool brought in court by their puppet master?
Why go to court? If only three people use it then it's hardly worth the effort. And if everybody starts writing Android apps with Qt, great! Just do the about face and tell all those Qt developers they employ to make Qt run on WP7 and suddenly WP7 has all the Android apps. Which would benefit both Nokia and Android at the expense of iOS, because it allows developers to target both platforms at once.
Nokia (or more specifically the MS guy who got into CEO position) essentially threw its entire 5 year "linux phone" development under the bus. Trolltech purchase is pennies in comparison.
The funny thing is they spent all the money on Meego, which still exists, and now they aren't using it. But now some other company, maybe one with a strong Intel partnership, can come along, scoop it up and run with it if they decide their existing OS is dying a slow death. Especially if the existing OS is already Linux-based and they could reuse some of their existing code. (Hello HP?)
QT isn't big enough to compete. The other juggernauts have the momentum and QT will fail. it is not because it is a bad technology - it just doesn't have the traction.
It's a framework, not a platform. Whether or not anybody else uses it is totally irrelevant to whether you can write an app with it and have it run on any Android phone. Or anything else they port the library to.
And if it works well and allows you to easily write portable software then plenty of people will use it, because there is no barrier (and significant advantages) to being an early adopter.
They announced it, I'm not sure that they ever actually released anything.
Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.
Certainly phones will get fast enough for most things, but for the things they're not good at -- playing high end video games, having a full size keyboard -- you still need a PC-like thing, and then you'll want them to talk to each other. Especially because the big problem phones have, and likely will continue to have for at least a few more years, is low storage availability. You can't fit 1000 hours of HD video of little Johnny learning to ride his bicycle and birthday parties and whatever on a 16GB flash drive, but you do want all that video to be immediately accessible when you're at Aunt Jenny's house and she spontaneously wants to see it. And you don't want it all on YouTube because it's private.
But the real interesting thing with a powerful phone is going to be that all that computing power is energy-efficient and therefore always-on, with an always-on network connection. The idea of a phone as a personal server is something that apparently hasn't much caught on yet, but it could be huge, especially once you start having them directly communicate with other phones. Distributed cloud FTW.
I can get a beagleboard and run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Qt could be used to design a UI for a smaller screen.
It's not as simple as that. You have to modify more than the UI framework, you pretty much have to rewrite the UI for all the individual applications too, and if you have to do that you might as well create a UI framework which is actually designed for phones. By which point you end up with something like Android.
I suspect your complaint is more that typically when you get an Android phone, the phone company acts like they own it and fills it full of crapware and lockdown fail. But you can always get the crapware-resistant Google version.
But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.
Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.
But I agree on the convergence. Somebody needs to come up with a docking station-like thing with a ~50W CPU, several gigs of RAM, a TB of disk, GigE and a 22"+ screen which will transition the OS instance from the phone to the dock, server VM style, when you plug them together.
Then the 'dock' can stay connected to the internet even while they're not together and act as a 1TB+ remote storage and backup device and home server which the phone can access (e.g. over an ssh tunnel) using the internet or 802.11. The storage on the phone becomes essentially a local fast-access cache of the most recently used data in the larger data collection at home. This is probably how the wheel of reincarnation is ultimately going to kill off cloud computing in this iteration -- people will start using their own PC remotely instead of somebody else's server, then as phones get more powerful they start to take on more of the load as between the phone and the PC because local is always faster, until the remote PC is pretty much just a remote backup device which allows you to play high end video games and have a bigger screen and full size keyboard when you dock with it.
And what is "the current legal environment" if not a top-down approach of mandating the way things should be, largely by those who have no expertise in the field of computer and network security? You are actually affirming my point. When speaking of a legal system, obedience is everything because disobedience is severely punished.
You know, it warms my heart to see that most everyone sees through the fact that this is a wasteful scam and the arguments are about why it is a scam.
This gives me hope that we can defeat this proposal the same way we thwarted other unproductive and harmful policies like the DMCA ban on circumvention tools, the Patriot Act and software patents. ...
Damn it.
tap-stream
You seem to be assuming the way they would implement this is to have your client send a second copy of the stream to the FBI. Certainly that is the easy way to do it, but also the trivially detectable way -- the app is using twice as much bandwidth as it should and half the packets are going to some server in Virginia.
The smart way is to combine ISP-level wiretapping in with a back door that CCs the encryption key to the Feds so that they can decipher what they capture from AT&T. Skype already has to open a third party connection to look up the IP address of the peer you want to call, and it's pretty easy for a couple dozen bytes to get lost in the noise.
If you really want to be sure you better have the source and a binary compiled by someone you trust (like yourself).
Would peer to peer services which offer end to end encryption like Skype be required to re-engineer their software to allow government wiretaps? This could be the end of personal use encryption as we know it.
They can't really stop personal use encryption at this point. Skype isn't fully open source, but that doesn't mean there can't or doesn't exist open source P2P encrypted communications software. And even if the official maintainers of that software were required to add a back door, the idea that no one would distribute a version with the back door removed is laughable. It's like trying to suppress DeCSS. Moreover, OpenSSL and OpenSSH are BSD licensed -- it's not like adding strong encryption to a communications app is rocket science. (Although for crying out loud, can somebody please fix the OpenSSL documentation?)
I would also expect Skype to strongly resist efforts to make them add a back door, if only because of the damage it would do to their reputation. Everybody knows that back doors are truck-sized security vulnerabilities that tempt black hats like chocolate cake tempts Michael Moore. People use Skype for confidential communications because it appears to be secure. Make it notoriously insecure and an alternative will appear which people will use instead.
Of course, that isn't to say that this proposal is puppies and unicorns and nobody needs to oppose it. People who demand good security -- including criminals -- will use software that has good security and no back doors. But there is still a need to protect innocent fools from organized criminals. Making the software that the average fool uses substantially less secure has the potential to make organized criminals much more effective -- remember, most people aren't terrorists, so intentionally creating a vulnerability that impacts both stupid innocents and stupid criminals will disproportionally impact the innocents because there are more of them.
Pundits like to state this, but I always wonder how Windows is an open system? Don't get me wrong: I love the various *nixes I run -- which includes Linux and Mac OS X (one open and one closed) -- but the only clear winner in a previous epic battle was Windows over Mac OS, but neither was open.
I think you're confusing "open source" with "open systems". Anybody can make a USB device, write a Windows driver and have it work on Windows. Anybody can write software that will run on Windows. Nobody needs Microsoft's permission.
And anyway, the reason that open systems win out in the end is that open sticks. If you have a real competitive market, the major players leapfrog each other every so often as the dominant player. Eventually it becomes the turn of an open system to be dominant. But once an open system reaches a critical mass, it stops being worth most competitors' while to develop a competing closed system instead of just using the open one. Nobody really makes serious closed competitors to TCP/IP or HTML4 or the like anymore.
The secret, if you can call it that, to holding on as long as possible as a closed competitor is to not really be all that closed.
To be fair, and I'm no more an MS fan than anyone, the GPL puts an onus on Microsoft to do things that they don't want to be arsed to do. As the owner of the "store" Microsoft becomes the "distributor" of GPL software. That means if you, AC, put a piece of GPLed software on the store, you are effectively obligating MS to host the source code and GPL somewhere as the distributor. You can say, "Well, I'll handle that, they don't have to worry about it.", but they do have to worry about it. If you decided next month to stop "handling that" and the software is still on the store, MS is left holding the bag. By forbidding GPL code they are covering their asses.
That isn't a GPL problem, it's a "code the developer doesn't own the copyright to" problem. If the developer licenses some code for inclusion in their app which has a license restriction requiring the developer to do X thing or they lose their right to redistribute the code, and the developer doesn't do X thing, the developer doesn't have the right to distribute the code. Which means that Microsoft doesn't either.
But Microsoft hasn't banned all software for which the developer doesn't own the entire copyright, they've only banned copyleft licensed software -- and have banned copyleft licensed software for which the developer owns all the copyrights.