If you would have bothered to read your own link you would have found a handy little link where you buy a licensed copy [tuxera.com] for any OS you care to run it on, how horrible! To think, they actually want to be paid for their R&D instead of giving you the right to have their work "free as in beer".
There was no need to do any R&D, there are already a large number of openly specified filesystems which offer the features exFAT is supposed to be used for (ie support for files over 2gb etc)... If MS did not have a monopoly influence over the market, then they would never be able to push their patent encumbered filesystem instead of the more open ones that are already tried, tested, and free for anyone to implement.
The trouble is that openness forces you to compete on a level playing field with everyone else, and doing so results in razor thin margins and lots of hard work... MS want to hold on to their fat margins from selling half assed products.
It has a patent covenant which cover a subset of the overall.net platform...
However the whole.net is a bait and switch, you have to go out of your way to avoid encumbered or non cross platform features when developing a.net application, so unless you explicitly intended from the start to create a cross platform application, your app will be tied to windows.
Turn a blackberry on and what does it do, boot up on its own and connect to the network... Same as an iphone or android does. What this means is that the details necessary to access the network and the keys to any encryption being used on the device are stored... ON THE DEVICE.
At-rest encryption really is a joke, on all devices. The only difference between the three platforms is that android and ios are far better understood, which is a combination of them being based on existing well understood platforms, and having good developer tools/documentation.
Read the comments by the pwn2own contestant who compromised a blackberry device... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/pwn2own-2011-blackberry-falls-to-webkit-browser-attack/8401 he basically says that the blackberry is *less* secure than android or ios, and the only reason it appears otherwise is because there is far less publicly available information about how the devices work.
That is Verizon's fault not RIM's. Maybe it's your mobile provider you should change.
No actually it is RIM's fault, since their service requires using the blackberry APNs and not the standard data APN offered by most mobile providers. Mobile providers typically charge extra for this because it costs them extra.
This "evolution" is largely down to the commercial development process... You need people to buy new versions, which means you have to add new fancy features to tempt people in, wether those features are needed or not... And then to deprecate the old versions and move people away from them, even if they were perfectly adequate.
It's an extra layer to protect a user either from running vulnerable software, or from doing something stupid...
I've seen many windows systems become infected when the users haven't done stupid things, they were browsing perfectly legitimate sites that just happened to have been hacked and got infected without having to do anything else.
Traditional rootkits exist for most unix systems, although they typically do not spread on their own - someone has to manually root your system and install them. There are even tools dedicated to finding/removing unix rootkits, eg http://www.rootkit.nl/projects/rootkit_hunter.html has a long list of rootkits it knows about.
I have found the same thing happen with most other AV engines too...
I have done a number of incident response jobs whereby a machine has become infected and its my job to work out what happened...
All machines were windows... All machines were running some kind of AV (multiple different vendors). Every machine had a persistent piece of malware present on it. The AV actually installed failed to detect the malware. Testing the malware with other AV engines found that some would find it, i never encountered anything totally new that wasn't detected by anything.
There are a number of AV products for linux and mac, and they pretty much exclusively work as you describe... They are typically designed for servers with windows clients.
How good is that at-rest encryption? Can you configure it so the key needs to be entered in order to boot the device? The only implementations i've seen were able to boot and start working (the screen was locked by default), therefore the crypto key must be on the device just waiting for someone with the right skills to find it...
Compromising any device gives you access to passwords stored on it, exploiting a blackberry would give you the same level of access as exploiting an iphone, the difference is that the blackberry is more of a black box and less understood by whitehats... You can guarantee that blackhats somewhere will be looking into them if they havent already... Read the comments made by the guy who compromised the blackberry at the pwn2own contest.
BES traffic cant be intercepted, but neither can SSL... The weaknesses in SSL have been down to certificate signing, but that's not a problem when you sign the certificate yourself and configure your phone to trust only that cert.
Other devices can be remote wiped, and can auto wipe after failed unlock attempts...
Android also has pretty granular app access policies, not sure what ios has in this regard.
What kind of email encryption and signing support do blackberry devices have? i couldn't see any options for s/mime or pgp on the one i had (aside from a third party costly pgp addon)....
Windows phone 7 doesn't really seem to fit anywhere...
To the general public, the windows brand is associated with desktop and laptop computers... I spoke to someone who is entirely non technical, who brought up a "windows phone" they had seen advertised on tv, and then stated they would never consider buying one because "why would i want windows on a phone?"
They believed that a windows phone would be plagued with malware and blue screens of death, basically bringing all the problems from the pc to their mobile. Now while this is an incorrect assumption, that's the assumption people make when they see the brand windows.
These same people are the ones keeping windows alive on the desktop, because they believe it is an inherent part of desktop computing and often either aren't aware of any alternatives existing at all, or are of the belief that linux is for geeks and macos is extremely expensive. For phones on the other hand, these people are already familiar with existing mobile platforms.
To people who have used earlier versions of windows mobile, the brand has often left a bad taste... Earlier versions were clunky and unreliable, and that's a major disincentive to try the current version... I know several people who had windows mobile 6.x devices, and all of them hated it and have since moved to other non microsoft phones.
To people who have decent knowledge of the smartphone market, windows phone 7 is woefully behind all the other offerings and not really worth considering at this point...
And to geeks, windows phone 7 isn't unix, isn't open, and is from a company known for making poor software.
Windows, the very name gives it away, is a desktop gui system... The interface is an extremely poor fit for use with anything other than a mouse and keyboard. The brand should really be kept where its appropriate because the name has negative connotations in any other field....
The xbox was fairly successful, largely because it disassociated itself from the windows brand...
OtherOS had no detrimental effects to regular gamers, it did not permit cheating in any way...
OtherOS did not make it easier to run copied games... It did make it easier to run homebrew, but that was the whole point of it in the first place, and the homebrew it could run was intentionally crippled so it could not compete with profit generating games.
Successful hacks against the ps3, which do make it easier to both cheat and run copied games only became available long after the OtherOS feature was removed.
They don't need to go out of business, they just need to drop support for the product you are using, which has happened many times before, and is due to happen again shortly to users of XP (hence this article) of which there are still millions.
Or they might decide to suddenly increase the price, or start charging you for security updates (like Oracle did not so long ago with Solaris).
As for MS going out of business, there's no reason why this couldn't happen.. Many large companies have gone under (or got so close they had to be bailed out) in recent years. Even if they were to sell off their source code to a third party, there's no telling how long and drawn out the process could be.
Corporations are trying to reduce their costs, so if forced to spend lots of money on software the money will have to come from somewhere else... So everyone loses except microsoft, certainly not good for the economy as a whole.
Not for your typical office user... And XP technically supports much more than 4GB, it's an artificial limitation to make you buy more expensive versions if you want to use more ram.
just because MS stops support doesn't mean you can not use the software anymore.
Actually, it could mean just that... Some versions of XP require activation or WGA, both of which need to be able to talk to MS. How will you do this once MS have turned off the servers they need to talk to? Also if security holes are discovered in XP and MS refuse to fix them, they will stay vulnerable forever... Linux at least is more modular (ie greater chance you can remove or manually upgrade the affected component) and gives you the opportunity to apply third party patches.
You'd be a fool to choose to depend on MS, just like you'd be a fool to rely on any single supplier... It's only good business sense to have backup options for anything thats remotely important.
A linux distro contains far more software than windows does. There are less reasons not to upgrade a linux system, new versions are free and your existing hardware is usually capable of running them with adequate performance.
On the other hand, there are plenty of linux based embedded devices running positively ancient versions of code, which are still being actively supported by the device vendors.
It's very different, because there are multiple organisations that provide linux support and nothing to prevent new organisations springing up, while only one organisation provides windows support. You wouldn't want to grow dependent on anything without there being a second source supplier who can step in if the first one fails. And similarly, multiple competing suppliers will result in better and cheaper service.
Sure, most software technically belongs to someone else... But the difference is between a single entity having total control over a piece of software.
If XP were open source, then considering how widely it's still used just because the original authors decide to stop supporting it, you can guarantee there would be several third parties stepping up to continue maintaining it. The more widely used a piece of code, the greater the chances that *someone* will be willing/able to maintain it, you don't have to do it yourself although that option is always available to you, and if you can't justify the cost yourself you could always pool your resources with other people who still use the same software.
Basically you have choices, you are not beholden to the whim of a single entity.
The simple fact of the matter is, that most people are not serious hardcore gamers, and/or don't have enough free time to devote to such levels of gaming...
As a result, very few if any games are worth $60 to most people... Now when there was no other choice, it didn't seem so unreasonable to buy a full priced game to only play once or twice, but now we finally have an alternative which is not illegal.
For me, and many other people i know, most games will only provide a couple of hours of entertainment at best. Sure there are rare exceptions, but in most cases i simply cannot justify paying anything like $60 when something for $1 would also provide me an hour or two of entertainment.
Plus there is the added convenience of a phone, most of the time when i find myself bored with nothing else to do i'm away from home... So in many ways, the $1 app actually provides greater value to me.
There is also the fact that game prices have just kept on going up, while quality has often come down... You get far too many games which are just fancy looking graphics combined with poor gameplay, games which are only trivial updates to existing games and games which are difficult to play because of draconian drm. Sure there is the occasional gem, but they're hard to find in the sea of crap.
If your watching the flash version on linux, look at the files created in/tmp... Flash downloads the video file into/tmp and gives it a random name, but its there ready for you to copy.
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If you would have bothered to read your own link you would have found a handy little link where you buy a licensed copy [tuxera.com] for any OS you care to run it on, how horrible! To think, they actually want to be paid for their R&D instead of giving you the right to have their work "free as in beer".
There was no need to do any R&D, there are already a large number of openly specified filesystems which offer the features exFAT is supposed to be used for (ie support for files over 2gb etc)... If MS did not have a monopoly influence over the market, then they would never be able to push their patent encumbered filesystem instead of the more open ones that are already tried, tested, and free for anyone to implement.
The trouble is that openness forces you to compete on a level playing field with everyone else, and doing so results in razor thin margins and lots of hard work...
MS want to hold on to their fat margins from selling half assed products.
It has a patent covenant which cover a subset of the overall .net platform...
However the whole .net is a bait and switch, you have to go out of your way to avoid encumbered or non cross platform features when developing a .net application, so unless you explicitly intended from the start to create a cross platform application, your app will be tied to windows.
Turn a blackberry on and what does it do, boot up on its own and connect to the network... Same as an iphone or android does.
What this means is that the details necessary to access the network and the keys to any encryption being used on the device are stored... ON THE DEVICE.
At-rest encryption really is a joke, on all devices. The only difference between the three platforms is that android and ios are far better understood, which is a combination of them being based on existing well understood platforms, and having good developer tools/documentation.
Read the comments by the pwn2own contestant who compromised a blackberry device... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/pwn2own-2011-blackberry-falls-to-webkit-browser-attack/8401
he basically says that the blackberry is *less* secure than android or ios, and the only reason it appears otherwise is because there is far less publicly available information about how the devices work.
That is Verizon's fault not RIM's. Maybe it's your mobile provider you should change.
No actually it is RIM's fault, since their service requires using the blackberry APNs and not the standard data APN offered by most mobile providers. Mobile providers typically charge extra for this because it costs them extra.
This "evolution" is largely down to the commercial development process... You need people to buy new versions, which means you have to add new fancy features to tempt people in, wether those features are needed or not... And then to deprecate the old versions and move people away from them, even if they were perfectly adequate.
It's an extra layer to protect a user either from running vulnerable software, or from doing something stupid...
I've seen many windows systems become infected when the users haven't done stupid things, they were browsing perfectly legitimate sites that just happened to have been hacked and got infected without having to do anything else.
Traditional rootkits exist for most unix systems, although they typically do not spread on their own - someone has to manually root your system and install them. There are even tools dedicated to finding/removing unix rootkits, eg http://www.rootkit.nl/projects/rootkit_hunter.html has a long list of rootkits it knows about.
I have found the same thing happen with most other AV engines too...
I have done a number of incident response jobs whereby a machine has become infected and its my job to work out what happened...
All machines were windows...
All machines were running some kind of AV (multiple different vendors).
Every machine had a persistent piece of malware present on it.
The AV actually installed failed to detect the malware.
Testing the malware with other AV engines found that some would find it, i never encountered anything totally new that wasn't detected by anything.
There are a number of AV products for linux and mac, and they pretty much exclusively work as you describe... They are typically designed for servers with windows clients.
How good is that at-rest encryption? Can you configure it so the key needs to be entered in order to boot the device? The only implementations i've seen were able to boot and start working (the screen was locked by default), therefore the crypto key must be on the device just waiting for someone with the right skills to find it...
Compromising any device gives you access to passwords stored on it, exploiting a blackberry would give you the same level of access as exploiting an iphone, the difference is that the blackberry is more of a black box and less understood by whitehats... You can guarantee that blackhats somewhere will be looking into them if they havent already... Read the comments made by the guy who compromised the blackberry at the pwn2own contest.
BES traffic cant be intercepted, but neither can SSL... The weaknesses in SSL have been down to certificate signing, but that's not a problem when you sign the certificate yourself and configure your phone to trust only that cert.
Other devices can be remote wiped, and can auto wipe after failed unlock attempts...
Android also has pretty granular app access policies, not sure what ios has in this regard.
What kind of email encryption and signing support do blackberry devices have? i couldn't see any options for s/mime or pgp on the one i had (aside from a third party costly pgp addon)....
How does that whole device encryption work, does it force you to enter the key on power up?
Windows phone 7 doesn't really seem to fit anywhere...
To the general public, the windows brand is associated with desktop and laptop computers...
I spoke to someone who is entirely non technical, who brought up a "windows phone" they had seen advertised on tv, and then stated they would never consider buying one because "why would i want windows on a phone?"
They believed that a windows phone would be plagued with malware and blue screens of death, basically bringing all the problems from the pc to their mobile. Now while this is an incorrect assumption, that's the assumption people make when they see the brand windows.
These same people are the ones keeping windows alive on the desktop, because they believe it is an inherent part of desktop computing and often either aren't aware of any alternatives existing at all, or are of the belief that linux is for geeks and macos is extremely expensive. For phones on the other hand, these people are already familiar with existing mobile platforms.
To people who have used earlier versions of windows mobile, the brand has often left a bad taste... Earlier versions were clunky and unreliable, and that's a major disincentive to try the current version... I know several people who had windows mobile 6.x devices, and all of them hated it and have since moved to other non microsoft phones.
To people who have decent knowledge of the smartphone market, windows phone 7 is woefully behind all the other offerings and not really worth considering at this point...
And to geeks, windows phone 7 isn't unix, isn't open, and is from a company known for making poor software.
Windows, the very name gives it away, is a desktop gui system... The interface is an extremely poor fit for use with anything other than a mouse and keyboard. The brand should really be kept where its appropriate because the name has negative connotations in any other field....
The xbox was fairly successful, largely because it disassociated itself from the windows brand...
You also lose the ability to play new games, not just PSN...
OtherOS had no detrimental effects to regular gamers, it did not permit cheating in any way...
OtherOS did not make it easier to run copied games...
It did make it easier to run homebrew, but that was the whole point of it in the first place, and the homebrew it could run was intentionally crippled so it could not compete with profit generating games.
Successful hacks against the ps3, which do make it easier to both cheat and run copied games only became available long after the OtherOS feature was removed.
Only all the successful console hacks seem to have occurred after removal of the OtherOS feature....
And other consoles which never had any such features have also been hacked.
They don't need to go out of business, they just need to drop support for the product you are using, which has happened many times before, and is due to happen again shortly to users of XP (hence this article) of which there are still millions.
Or they might decide to suddenly increase the price, or start charging you for security updates (like Oracle did not so long ago with Solaris).
As for MS going out of business, there's no reason why this couldn't happen.. Many large companies have gone under (or got so close they had to be bailed out) in recent years. Even if they were to sell off their source code to a third party, there's no telling how long and drawn out the process could be.
Corporations are trying to reduce their costs, so if forced to spend lots of money on software the money will have to come from somewhere else...
So everyone loses except microsoft, certainly not good for the economy as a whole.
Not for your typical office user...
And XP technically supports much more than 4GB, it's an artificial limitation to make you buy more expensive versions if you want to use more ram.
just because MS stops support doesn't mean you can not use the software anymore.
Actually, it could mean just that...
Some versions of XP require activation or WGA, both of which need to be able to talk to MS. How will you do this once MS have turned off the servers they need to talk to?
Also if security holes are discovered in XP and MS refuse to fix them, they will stay vulnerable forever... Linux at least is more modular (ie greater chance you can remove or manually upgrade the affected component) and gives you the opportunity to apply third party patches.
You'd be a fool to choose to depend on MS, just like you'd be a fool to rely on any single supplier... It's only good business sense to have backup options for anything thats remotely important.
RedHat release patches for 10 years (at least for paying customers): https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
There are many differences however...
A linux distro contains far more software than windows does.
There are less reasons not to upgrade a linux system, new versions are free and your existing hardware is usually capable of running them with adequate performance.
On the other hand, there are plenty of linux based embedded devices running positively ancient versions of code, which are still being actively supported by the device vendors.
It's very different, because there are multiple organisations that provide linux support and nothing to prevent new organisations springing up, while only one organisation provides windows support.
You wouldn't want to grow dependent on anything without there being a second source supplier who can step in if the first one fails. And similarly, multiple competing suppliers will result in better and cheaper service.
Sure, most software technically belongs to someone else...
But the difference is between a single entity having total control over a piece of software.
If XP were open source, then considering how widely it's still used just because the original authors decide to stop supporting it, you can guarantee there would be several third parties stepping up to continue maintaining it. The more widely used a piece of code, the greater the chances that *someone* will be willing/able to maintain it, you don't have to do it yourself although that option is always available to you, and if you can't justify the cost yourself you could always pool your resources with other people who still use the same software.
Basically you have choices, you are not beholden to the whim of a single entity.
The simple fact of the matter is, that most people are not serious hardcore gamers, and/or don't have enough free time to devote to such levels of gaming...
As a result, very few if any games are worth $60 to most people... Now when there was no other choice, it didn't seem so unreasonable to buy a full priced game to only play once or twice, but now we finally have an alternative which is not illegal.
For me, and many other people i know, most games will only provide a couple of hours of entertainment at best. Sure there are rare exceptions, but in most cases i simply cannot justify paying anything like $60 when something for $1 would also provide me an hour or two of entertainment.
Plus there is the added convenience of a phone, most of the time when i find myself bored with nothing else to do i'm away from home... So in many ways, the $1 app actually provides greater value to me.
There is also the fact that game prices have just kept on going up, while quality has often come down... You get far too many games which are just fancy looking graphics combined with poor gameplay, games which are only trivial updates to existing games and games which are difficult to play because of draconian drm. Sure there is the occasional gem, but they're hard to find in the sea of crap.
If your watching the flash version on linux, look at the files created in /tmp... Flash downloads the video file into /tmp and gives it a random name, but its there ready for you to copy.