One month, that is how long I give it before this gets used to block sites for non-piracy reasons. Like a site that talks about BitTorrent community activity or a competitor who infringes a patent for two random examples. Make my words, this will be used for political suppression even if it isn't the government doing it.
You're over two years - possibly much more - too late. The UK ISP industry already has the technology in place to block more-or-less any site they like and to administer that blocking from a single, central location which then gets pushed out to most of the big providers. The thing is it mostly went under the radar for two reasons:
1. It wasn't widely publicised. 2. It was mostly centred around blocking of child porn.
Odds on this is about adding another category to the list of things they consider acceptable to block.
The thing that did come up around that time was that not only are ISPs blocking dodgy material, many are doing so in a fashion that ensures the end user is blissfully unaware it's happening - either by resetting TCP connections or intercepting with an HTTP 404. At the time this all happened, one ISP was putting up a message saying "Sorry, I can't let you see that" (so the technology used does make that possible) but that ISP was in a minority.
1. The great majority of small sites (which an earlier poster has said "wouldn't notice the extra load") run on shared servers. The hosting company certainly would notice the extra load, they'd need more servers, therefore more electricity and floorspace, therefore higher costs, therefore hosting price goes up. Probably rather substantially.
2. HTTPS requires 1 IP address for every site you host. (There is the SNI extension but if this article is to be believed, it's not supported under IE on Windows XP, or for that matter Safari on any version of OS X prior to 10.5.6 - which means it's really not much of a solution yet).
3. Cost and Complication. Sure, hosting providers could bake into their control panel a process to generate a CSR, get it signed by a trusted CA and install the signed certificate without all the messing around this normally entails, but virtually every reputable CA that already has their root certificate in widespread use charges for signing. Oh look, more cost.
Why can't you use your own phone as you please, even more so if it's Android, an open platform?
The only reason I can think of is piracy, which seems to be the justification for everything nowadays.
Seriously, this is a genuine question, not some sort of philosophy.
I suspect it's got less to do with piracy and more to do with customer returns. These phones are fundamentally consumer items, and like most consumer items a high level of returns is an absolute killer for your profits.
Phone shops aren't really set up to deal with phones that have been significantly messed around. They can reload the software from a PC provided there's enough of the firmware left on the phone to support this, but that's about it. Combine a burgeoning community of hackers who are turning re-flashing a phone with an unsupported firmware from being pretty damn awkward to a point-click-done task (and thus appealing to many more people), the likelihood of such flashes putting the phone beyond the help of your local phone store and the fact that malware for Android has already been seen in the wild and suddenly the idea of a phone which cannot easily be messed around with starts to look quite attractive.
Sure, you can adopt a policy of "unsupported firmware, it's your problem", but this doesn't deal with the malware issue (malware's made it into the android marketplace before now) and you'd need to examine each phone coming in to check that it hadn't been reloaded with unsupported firmware.
"Do not buy an MP3 player - you can only listen to music that's available on MP3 or been ripped from CD. Instead, you should buy a bunch of musical instruments and then you can listen to whatever you like."
Anyone who you say that to will give you very funny looks. Then they'll point out things like "I don't want to learn to play an instrument. And besides - only listen to what's on CD or MP3? So I'm limited to.... well, I'm not really, am I?"
And so it is with locked down phones. "So if I go for an iPhone, I'm limited to what's in the app store - and if I want something that isn't in the app store, that's tough? Big deal. There's thousands of things in the app store, very little worth having that isn't."
"I can't upgrade it whenever I like? By the time a version of comes out that I want to upgrade to but can't, the phone will be worn out from being used every day for 2 years, I'll be at the end of my contract and eligible for a heavily subsidised upgrade to the latest model. So again, I don't see why I should care."
I don't think the general public really cares about locked bootloaders. However, they do care about half-decent phones, and IIRC the last half-decent phone Motorola produced that enjoyed any level of popularity on this side of the pond was the Razr.
You also do realise that most banks are private institutions who have received no government support (and so can spend their "stolen" bonus money however they damn well like it), don't you?
Lloyds TSB was pushed into taking on HBOS, which was insolvent, and as a result had to go cap in hand to the government. Lloyds own Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Birmingham Midshires.
Royal Bank of Scotland - who also own Natwest and Ulster Bank - also took a huge bailout.
They may not be an outright majority of banks - they may not even have more than 50% of the UK retail banking market - but to talk it down like "most banks... have received no government support" is to vastly understate the size of the bailout.
(something revolutionary that companies like Burger King and McDonalds have yet to grasp, hours on a website, amazing).
Most fast food chains are franchised, it's likely that individual branches have a fair degree of autonomy over their opening hours.
Getting the opening hours from every franchisee and putting them on a website would be relatively easy. Keeping them up to date, however, would be another matter entirely.
Sounds like an opportunity for modding the TCP stack to present random characteristics when analysed in this way. When the complaints flood in from some percentage of their users about being billed for having a million devices behind their router, the ISP might think twice about such a scheme.
Unless you're going to get Apple and Microsoft to update their TCP stacks to do this, that "some percentage" is going to be so small as to be quite practical to ignore.
This is a very badly worded headline, obviously intended to promote anti-US sentiment when the article itself does nothing of the sort.
I'll distil it for those who still can't be bothered to RTFA after I've said it's worth reading:
"Alexander Alvaro has spent some time trying to determine whether or not his bank details have been accessed by contacting the regulator in his own country (Germany). The regulator stalled him for several months by requesting ID in various formats, and hadn't even forwarded the request to US authorities until shortly before the article was written. The regulator confirmed that they don't hold this information themselves."
We have no evidence that the US authorities were approached earlier and that they're responsible for the stalling, we have no evidence to explain how long it takes for such requests to come back (it was only sent earlier this month, for all we know it's sent via snail mail). And to cap it all we have no evidence to suggest that the journalist responsible for this article thought to contact German authorities and ask the reason for the delay. The best we have is:
At the beginning of this month, the BFDI confirmed that Alvaro's request had finally been sent to US authorities [....] The agency criticized that the person requesting information about how personal data has been used must submit additional personal information in order to learn whether the US has made use of their data.
To me this suggests it's possible the journalist approached them and received a non-answer. But it's equally possible that the journalist is paraphrasing a form letter received by Alvaro saying "Dear Sir, we've sent your request to US authorities, apologies for the delay".
That's an awful lot of "ifs", most of which require the person on each end to jump through a lot of hoops.
Hence why Skype has become popular with end-users and SIP-based telephony is pretty much relegated to businesses that can call on the expertise to set it all up.
You would be amazed how many projects proudly announce they've solved problem "X" (where problem "X" is one that was solved in the real world 12-24 months previously).
Or, even more absurdly, proudly announce (complete with great big long academic papers explaining in excruciating detail) how problem "X" cannot be solved, and how it's not really that desirable to solve it anyway. Naturally, "X" is something that has already been solved by someone else and is now one of the biggest selling points they offer.
Oh, the individual wrongdoers will be handed over to the authorities.
But I guarantee you the people at the top who oversaw the lot won't be among those handed over. The people handed over will be the salesmen and their managers at the bottom end of the organisation. It's entirely possible that top executives communicated something along the lines of "We must do whatever is necessary to achieve our goals" but they won't have said "and if that means breaking the law, so be it". Or at least, not in writing.
It's a somewhat curious quirk of society that it is possible to set up an organisation with little or no attempt to ensure that everything is done above board or to reign in dubious practices and while the organisation as a whole may catch some grief, those who set it up and ran it will - in most cases - come to little grief.
The other downside is that they're still at the research stage - AFAIK there is no such thing as a functioning pebble bed reactor providing grid power anywhere on the planet.
Which is not to say there never will be one, but you can't present it as the solution to all our problems.
IANAL, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone's already tried that.
I'm going way off into the land of speculation here, so if any lawyers reading could correct me if I'm wrong that'd be great.
The problem is that AFAICT the legal system doesn't really see itself as some big scary sleeping monster you really shouldn't poke (even if that's how the general public sees it). It sees itself as an impartial place you and someone else can go to and say "We've got a dispute here. Could you help us sort it out?". Which means a letter saying "We'll take you to court" isn't perceived by the legal system as a threat, it's perceived as being roughly equivalent to "Look, there's obviously a dispute here. We can resolve it between ourselves or we can ask someone else to take a look at it. Which, let's face it, neither of us really want to be doing because it'll mean involving others who will want paying. Quite possibly by your good self. We propose resolving it by the following means...."
If you read a typical threatogram, it's usually worded quite carefully. It doesn't say "We will take you to court, you will be ordered to pay, you will have to pay our costs, we will send the bailiffs in, it will mess up your credit rating". It says "If we take you to court, and you lose you may be ordered to pay...."
It follows that it's quite hard to get the legal system to view such letters as extortion. As a result, a few UK businesses have actually adopted this as their business model - and I don't mean just record labels. Look up private parking companies or RLP.
The legal fees are nothing to do with the fine - Britain has a "loser pays" legal system so being ordered to pay legal fees isn't considered part of the fine.
On the plus side, this means there's a rather strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits - "no win, no fee" (assuming your solicitor takes the case on that basis) only applies to your legal team, not the other sides. On the minus side, it means that a big company can add a paragraph to their legal threatograms saying "Please note that if you lose in court, you'll have to pay our fees. We're up to £1,500 already and we haven't even started yet."
But, this CD with magic code method would require the ne'r do weller to be *in* the car, presumably with the ignition at least in ACC, to pull off.
What TFA doesn't say is if the hacked music file was an MP3 (which many modern car stereos can play directly) or a plain audio CD. A hacked MP3 could be pushed out on a p2p network.
Granted you'd need a bit of a perfect storm - someone who uses P2P to download the hacked MP3, to burn it direct to a CD for in-car listening and to have the exact model and revision of parts in their car necessary. I can't see it being terribly likely on its own.
The news here is that some US judge signed a subpoena based on that email... Some might argue that such as judge is somewhat stupid... To put it mildly...:)
Look at it this way:
The email confesses to sharing files. It also goes on to talk about leprechauns and unicorns, but that's not relevant to the core of the issue here, which is "did this person share files or didn't they? Well, they say they did".
The sender claims to be in Sweden. Well, good for them. But there's no evidence either way, and wouldn't it be interesting if it later transpired they were lying? Particularly as you could then say to the court - assuming it ever gets that far - "Mr. Defendant, you claimed to be in Sweden and beyond US justice. Yet here you are standing in a US courtroom, and the IP address you were using is based in the US. Can you explain that for us, please?"
Don't be stupid folks. If you're gonna do stuff like this, a) have a common version of a Linux Live-CD running b) use Tor for all access. c) setup a new gmail account. d) Let the unicorn speak to anyone you like using that gmail account over Tor **always**
If you slip even once and forget Tor or use your normal OS - even under Tor - you may be discovered.
Actually, when you put it like that I'm surprised nobody's developed a version of Bittorrent with Tor-like functionality already built in.
and you don't expect the lawyers to start asking for personal data because of trolling. (I'm going to shoot that president, and the vice-president of the United States with my ak47.)
The idea that a single off-the-cuff comment is hardly going to lead to all sorts of trouble coming down on you is an interesting view to take, however ITYF it's not shared by the majority of those in positions of authority.
The lawyers forget that Sweden is not a state of USA. The kid is safe while the lawyers make an ass of them selves. Sweden has its own laws:) They might aswell try to sue/dev/null
It isn't. Which means he almost certainly won't defend himself, and will be ordered to pay up.
I can't see him paying up, and for one person and $1000 it's hardly worth going to the trouble they did with the Pirate Bay people. But - and IANAL - I wonder if this would pose a problem at immigration if he ever chooses to visit the US? Of course, he may take the view "why on Earth would I ever want to visit the US?" but the US lawyers don't know that.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients. First post ?
Economies of scale, I'd think. IIRC most factory production is geared around (and indeed isn't economical unless) the idea of churning out tens of thousands of an item minimum. Preferably tens of thousands per month.
Something like that - unless it's being heavily pushed by someone who can give people something useful to do with it - isn't going to sell many. What are the likes of HP or Dell going to push? "Here, it's just like a desktop PC except you can't run any current software you're likely to want on it"?
I don't know if English isn't your first language or something, but nobody said installing Windows is a pain.
The pain is when your cousin Fred comes to you and says "Hi, my computers running slow, can you take a look? Won't take 10 minutes".
Of course you look and there's so much malware on there it's a wonder it can start at all. By this point it's well past the hope of any AV scanner or malware removal tool, the best option by far is to reinstall Windows. But there's a few problems with this:
Fred lost the install disc some time ago. Or he never had it, but when pressed about the recovery partition confirms that he deleted it because "he paid for a 320GB disk and he won't have 20GB of it wasted". Now, if you're familiar with Windows licensing you'll know that this is immediately a huge problem. Some OEMs will sell you a new disc, some won't - in any case, it costs hard cash and if Fred wanted to spend hard cash, he wouldn't have called his cousin in the first place.
Fred does have an install disc. But since he bought his computer, he's installed more pirated software than you can shake a stick at - and because it's a customised OEM install disc, you can't tell it to leave documents and installed software alone. Using it will cause anything else on the computer to be blown away. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fred vetoes your suggestion of doing this.
This leaves you with "try to recover the computer as best you can with a malware removal product". Which is seldom that technical unless/until you find yourself diving into the registry to remove stuff that was missed, but it's tedious and fantastically time consuming. And I don't mean "30 minutes rather than 10", I mean "10 hours babysitting the damn thing".
Slashdot Mirror
One month, that is how long I give it before this gets used to block sites for non-piracy reasons. Like a site that talks about BitTorrent community activity or a competitor who infringes a patent for two random examples. Make my words, this will be used for political suppression even if it isn't the government doing it.
You're over two years - possibly much more - too late. The UK ISP industry already has the technology in place to block more-or-less any site they like and to administer that blocking from a single, central location which then gets pushed out to most of the big providers. The thing is it mostly went under the radar for two reasons:
1. It wasn't widely publicised.
2. It was mostly centred around blocking of child porn.
Odds on this is about adding another category to the list of things they consider acceptable to block.
(For those who didn't know about this: Citation 1 Citation 2 - and the actual organisation responsible for this list)
The thing that did come up around that time was that not only are ISPs blocking dodgy material, many are doing so in a fashion that ensures the end user is blissfully unaware it's happening - either by resetting TCP connections or intercepting with an HTTP 404. At the time this all happened, one ISP was putting up a message saying "Sorry, I can't let you see that" (so the technology used does make that possible) but that ISP was in a minority.
Okay, let's look at this one issue at a time:
1. The great majority of small sites (which an earlier poster has said "wouldn't notice the extra load") run on shared servers. The hosting company certainly would notice the extra load, they'd need more servers, therefore more electricity and floorspace, therefore higher costs, therefore hosting price goes up. Probably rather substantially.
2. HTTPS requires 1 IP address for every site you host. (There is the SNI extension but if this article is to be believed, it's not supported under IE on Windows XP, or for that matter Safari on any version of OS X prior to 10.5.6 - which means it's really not much of a solution yet).
3. Cost and Complication. Sure, hosting providers could bake into their control panel a process to generate a CSR, get it signed by a trusted CA and install the signed certificate without all the messing around this normally entails, but virtually every reputable CA that already has their root certificate in widespread use charges for signing. Oh look, more cost.
Why can't you use your own phone as you please, even more so if it's Android, an open platform?
The only reason I can think of is piracy, which seems to be the justification for everything nowadays.
Seriously, this is a genuine question, not some sort of philosophy.
I suspect it's got less to do with piracy and more to do with customer returns. These phones are fundamentally consumer items, and like most consumer items a high level of returns is an absolute killer for your profits.
Phone shops aren't really set up to deal with phones that have been significantly messed around. They can reload the software from a PC provided there's enough of the firmware left on the phone to support this, but that's about it. Combine a burgeoning community of hackers who are turning re-flashing a phone with an unsupported firmware from being pretty damn awkward to a point-click-done task (and thus appealing to many more people), the likelihood of such flashes putting the phone beyond the help of your local phone store and the fact that malware for Android has already been seen in the wild and suddenly the idea of a phone which cannot easily be messed around with starts to look quite attractive.
Sure, you can adopt a policy of "unsupported firmware, it's your problem", but this doesn't deal with the malware issue (malware's made it into the android marketplace before now) and you'd need to examine each phone coming in to check that it hadn't been reloaded with unsupported firmware.
Let me give you an analogy.
"Do not buy an MP3 player - you can only listen to music that's available on MP3 or been ripped from CD. Instead, you should buy a bunch of musical instruments and then you can listen to whatever you like."
Anyone who you say that to will give you very funny looks. Then they'll point out things like "I don't want to learn to play an instrument. And besides - only listen to what's on CD or MP3? So I'm limited to.... well, I'm not really, am I?"
And so it is with locked down phones. "So if I go for an iPhone, I'm limited to what's in the app store - and if I want something that isn't in the app store, that's tough? Big deal. There's thousands of things in the app store, very little worth having that isn't."
"I can't upgrade it whenever I like? By the time a version of comes out that I want to upgrade to but can't, the phone will be worn out from being used every day for 2 years, I'll be at the end of my contract and eligible for a heavily subsidised upgrade to the latest model. So again, I don't see why I should care."
I don't think the general public really cares about locked bootloaders. However, they do care about half-decent phones, and IIRC the last half-decent phone Motorola produced that enjoyed any level of popularity on this side of the pond was the Razr.
You also do realise that most banks are private institutions who have received no government support (and so can spend their "stolen" bonus money however they damn well like it), don't you?
Lloyds TSB was pushed into taking on HBOS, which was insolvent, and as a result had to go cap in hand to the government. Lloyds own Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Cheltenham and Gloucester and Birmingham Midshires.
Royal Bank of Scotland - who also own Natwest and Ulster Bank - also took a huge bailout.
They may not be an outright majority of banks - they may not even have more than 50% of the UK retail banking market - but to talk it down like "most banks... have received no government support" is to vastly understate the size of the bailout.
(something revolutionary that companies like Burger King and McDonalds have yet to grasp, hours on a website, amazing).
Most fast food chains are franchised, it's likely that individual branches have a fair degree of autonomy over their opening hours.
Getting the opening hours from every franchisee and putting them on a website would be relatively easy. Keeping them up to date, however, would be another matter entirely.
Sounds like an opportunity for modding the TCP stack to present random characteristics when analysed in this way. When the complaints flood in from some percentage of their users about being billed for having a million devices behind their router, the ISP might think twice about such a scheme.
Unless you're going to get Apple and Microsoft to update their TCP stacks to do this, that "some percentage" is going to be so small as to be quite practical to ignore.
This is a very badly worded headline, obviously intended to promote anti-US sentiment when the article itself does nothing of the sort.
I'll distil it for those who still can't be bothered to RTFA after I've said it's worth reading:
"Alexander Alvaro has spent some time trying to determine whether or not his bank details have been accessed by contacting the regulator in his own country (Germany). The regulator stalled him for several months by requesting ID in various formats, and hadn't even forwarded the request to US authorities until shortly before the article was written. The regulator confirmed that they don't hold this information themselves."
We have no evidence that the US authorities were approached earlier and that they're responsible for the stalling, we have no evidence to explain how long it takes for such requests to come back (it was only sent earlier this month, for all we know it's sent via snail mail). And to cap it all we have no evidence to suggest that the journalist responsible for this article thought to contact German authorities and ask the reason for the delay. The best we have is:
At the beginning of this month, the BFDI confirmed that Alvaro's request had finally been sent to US authorities [....] The agency criticized that the person requesting information about how personal data has been used must submit additional personal information in order to learn whether the US has made use of their data.
To me this suggests it's possible the journalist approached them and received a non-answer. But it's equally possible that the journalist is paraphrasing a form letter received by Alvaro saying "Dear Sir, we've sent your request to US authorities, apologies for the delay".
That's an awful lot of "ifs", most of which require the person on each end to jump through a lot of hoops.
Hence why Skype has become popular with end-users and SIP-based telephony is pretty much relegated to businesses that can call on the expertise to set it all up.
You would be amazed how many projects proudly announce they've solved problem "X" (where problem "X" is one that was solved in the real world 12-24 months previously).
Or, even more absurdly, proudly announce (complete with great big long academic papers explaining in excruciating detail) how problem "X" cannot be solved, and how it's not really that desirable to solve it anyway. Naturally, "X" is something that has already been solved by someone else and is now one of the biggest selling points they offer.
Oh, the individual wrongdoers will be handed over to the authorities.
But I guarantee you the people at the top who oversaw the lot won't be among those handed over. The people handed over will be the salesmen and their managers at the bottom end of the organisation. It's entirely possible that top executives communicated something along the lines of "We must do whatever is necessary to achieve our goals" but they won't have said "and if that means breaking the law, so be it". Or at least, not in writing.
It's a somewhat curious quirk of society that it is possible to set up an organisation with little or no attempt to ensure that everything is done above board or to reign in dubious practices and while the organisation as a whole may catch some grief, those who set it up and ran it will - in most cases - come to little grief.
The other downside is that they're still at the research stage - AFAIK there is no such thing as a functioning pebble bed reactor providing grid power anywhere on the planet.
Which is not to say there never will be one, but you can't present it as the solution to all our problems.
Can we sue them for extortion, then?
IANAL, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone's already tried that.
I'm going way off into the land of speculation here, so if any lawyers reading could correct me if I'm wrong that'd be great.
The problem is that AFAICT the legal system doesn't really see itself as some big scary sleeping monster you really shouldn't poke (even if that's how the general public sees it). It sees itself as an impartial place you and someone else can go to and say "We've got a dispute here. Could you help us sort it out?". Which means a letter saying "We'll take you to court" isn't perceived by the legal system as a threat, it's perceived as being roughly equivalent to "Look, there's obviously a dispute here. We can resolve it between ourselves or we can ask someone else to take a look at it. Which, let's face it, neither of us really want to be doing because it'll mean involving others who will want paying. Quite possibly by your good self. We propose resolving it by the following means...."
If you read a typical threatogram, it's usually worded quite carefully. It doesn't say "We will take you to court, you will be ordered to pay, you will have to pay our costs, we will send the bailiffs in, it will mess up your credit rating". It says "If we take you to court, and you lose you may be ordered to pay...."
It follows that it's quite hard to get the legal system to view such letters as extortion. As a result, a few UK businesses have actually adopted this as their business model - and I don't mean just record labels. Look up private parking companies or RLP.
The fine was £3,000. About £130/word.
The legal fees are nothing to do with the fine - Britain has a "loser pays" legal system so being ordered to pay legal fees isn't considered part of the fine.
On the plus side, this means there's a rather strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits - "no win, no fee" (assuming your solicitor takes the case on that basis) only applies to your legal team, not the other sides. On the minus side, it means that a big company can add a paragraph to their legal threatograms saying "Please note that if you lose in court, you'll have to pay our fees. We're up to £1,500 already and we haven't even started yet."
we are all different.
I'm not.
But, this CD with magic code method would require the ne'r do weller to be *in* the car, presumably with the ignition at least in ACC, to pull off.
What TFA doesn't say is if the hacked music file was an MP3 (which many modern car stereos can play directly) or a plain audio CD. A hacked MP3 could be pushed out on a p2p network.
Granted you'd need a bit of a perfect storm - someone who uses P2P to download the hacked MP3, to burn it direct to a CD for in-car listening and to have the exact model and revision of parts in their car necessary. I can't see it being terribly likely on its own.
IIRC Chernobyl was considered obsolete and due to be decommissioned when it blew up in 1986.
Captain "Piece of jewellery worn on a necklace"?
The news here is that some US judge signed a subpoena based on that email... Some might argue that such as judge is somewhat stupid... To put it mildly... :)
Look at it this way:
Don't be stupid folks. If you're gonna do stuff like this,
a) have a common version of a Linux Live-CD running
b) use Tor for all access.
c) setup a new gmail account.
d) Let the unicorn speak to anyone you like using that gmail account over Tor **always**
If you slip even once and forget Tor or use your normal OS - even under Tor - you may be discovered.
Actually, when you put it like that I'm surprised nobody's developed a version of Bittorrent with Tor-like functionality already built in.
and you don't expect the lawyers to start asking for personal data because of trolling. (I'm going to shoot that president, and the vice-president of the United States with my ak47.)
The idea that a single off-the-cuff comment is hardly going to lead to all sorts of trouble coming down on you is an interesting view to take, however ITYF it's not shared by the majority of those in positions of authority.
The lawyers forget that Sweden is not a state of USA. The kid is safe while the lawyers make an ass of them selves. Sweden has its own laws :) They might aswell try to sue /dev/null
It isn't. Which means he almost certainly won't defend himself, and will be ordered to pay up.
I can't see him paying up, and for one person and $1000 it's hardly worth going to the trouble they did with the Pirate Bay people. But - and IANAL - I wonder if this would pose a problem at immigration if he ever chooses to visit the US? Of course, he may take the view "why on Earth would I ever want to visit the US?" but the US lawyers don't know that.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
Economies of scale, I'd think. IIRC most factory production is geared around (and indeed isn't economical unless) the idea of churning out tens of thousands of an item minimum. Preferably tens of thousands per month.
Something like that - unless it's being heavily pushed by someone who can give people something useful to do with it - isn't going to sell many. What are the likes of HP or Dell going to push? "Here, it's just like a desktop PC except you can't run any current software you're likely to want on it"?
I don't know if English isn't your first language or something, but nobody said installing Windows is a pain.
The pain is when your cousin Fred comes to you and says "Hi, my computers running slow, can you take a look? Won't take 10 minutes".
Of course you look and there's so much malware on there it's a wonder it can start at all. By this point it's well past the hope of any AV scanner or malware removal tool, the best option by far is to reinstall Windows. But there's a few problems with this:
This leaves you with "try to recover the computer as best you can with a malware removal product". Which is seldom that technical unless/until you find yourself diving into the registry to remove stuff that was missed, but it's tedious and fantastically time consuming. And I don't mean "30 minutes rather than 10", I mean "10 hours babysitting the damn thing".