I don't know why you'd wager that. They've specifically described they're using a worthless technique for anonymizing the data (random ID changes on a 24 hour cycle). You will never get a clearer sign of either bad intentions or total ineptitude, and it doesn't matter which it is.
Leaving aside the iTunes store for just a moment (though I'd like to see for myself how well it works if you try to use it without accepting their location sharing feature and EULA).
iAds collects the data unless the whole location service system is turned off, and it's on by default.
And there's nothing anonymous about their system - the anonymity is a lie, as I already explained.
Why is it you can't understand that exactly?
I hope you're getting paid for posting so incoherently - because Apple does do astroturf PR, and trolling for them does have a going rate.
Picture it. Some guy is following you down an alley carrying the gun. They're muttering to themselves, spittle dribbling down their chin. "My gun cannot hurt you. So I am entitled to shoot you if I want to."
I suddenly appear! I'm a cop! You say, "Save me, oh save me!!!"
And I say... wait for it...
"Prove that ANY of that IS happening, or STFU."
I don't see that nonsense in Android's policy, btw.:)
Hey, since you're cool with it, will you share your GPS location with me in real time? I want to share it with some other people. I might be able to make some money off it.
Android asks permission for any location data to be collected system-wide very clearly when the phone first sets itself up. They always have. It's very clear and easy to understand, and it's opt-in. This is very different than the system-wide opt-out Apple gives you. What's more, Android actually honors it, without disabling huge features (equivalent to iTunes store) or giving themselves loopholes (like iAds).
Individual apps can know your location. It's a separate issue whether they can also talk to the internet. You get to see for yourself all powers they have - it's up to you, not Google (or Apple). Then you get to decide if you trust them to know your location and be able to talk to home at the same time. I trust google maps with that. I don't trust Bob's To-Do List with that.
There is nothing like this in the Apple world. It's night and day. Android can be exploited if users make bad choices during the time between when a dangerous app developer gets in the market and when they are kicked out. Meanwhile Apple is virtually promising to violate your privacy, and record your every move for themselves, and for their "partners and affiliates." And they are trying to fool you into thinking they aren't.
Orwell's fictional government never had any tools as powerful for monitoring their citizens movement as what Apple now has. I know reading 1984 is less fashionable than referencing it, so your confusion there is forgivable I guess.
Apple opts everyone into this location sharing system. They don't make a choice, unless you can choose to not "participate in iAds." Most don't even know it's there. Poll any 100 iPhone users and see how many of them can even explain to you what this system is and how this system really works. But they "agreed" to it in a EULA somewhere, sometime - a trick so bad that it's of questionable legal enforceability even in the USA.
It doesn't hurt that Apple is using deceptive practices like "fake anonymizing" that doesn't actually protect anyone's identity, but fools some people into making them think they are.
You're clearly confused, for instance. Your initial post conflated Apple knowing your address to Apple knowing every step you take throughout your day. I notice you're not apologizing for that mistake yet - but we will all accept your retraction and apology any time.
Just curious - are you actually just that bad at understanding these things, or are you one of the PR contractors Apple hires to confuse people on purpose? Cause you could be getting paid for this, if you're not already.
What's your credit card number? Don't worry, I won't charge anything. Who has the time? I just want to have it, you know, just in case I might need it. And I'd like to share it with my partners and affiliates. In they, you know, might need it too.
Apps have to ask permission. Already this is retarded - feel free to say no to location tracking, as long as you don't want iTunes store on your iDevice?
Yeah, awesome.
But what about page 9? It appears iAd collects this information independently, as long as location services are enabled on the phone at all. I'm of the understanding they are by default.
Shall I quote? I shall.
As specified in the updated Policy and the iPhone 4 and iPod touch SLAs, customers may opt out of interest-based advertising by visiting the following site from their mobile device: https:lloo.apple.com. Customers also may opt out of location-based advertising by toggling the device's location-based service capabilities to "Off."IO For customers who do not toggle location-based service capabilities to "Off," Apple collects information about the device's location (latitude/longitude coordinates) when an ad request is made. This information is transmitted securely to the Apple iAd server via a cellular network connection or Wi-Fi Internet connection. The latitude/longitude coordinates are converted immediately by the server to a five-digit zip code. Apple does not record or store the latitude/longitude coordinates-Apple stores only the zip code. Apple then uses the zip code to select a relevant ad for the customer...
Hence on page 12, when answering "which consumers Apple is monitoring," it is forced to answer, basically, "everyone who sees iAds."
Apple collects anonymous Wi-Fi Access Point, Cell Tower and GPS Information from devices that have location services turned on, have explicitly authorized apps to use their location, and are actively running one of the apps. Anonymous Wi-Fi Access Point Information and GPS coordinates may also be collected when an iPhone is using GPS to search for a cellular network. Diagnostic location data is only collected from users who have expressly agreed to send this information to Apple. Device location data (by zip code only) is collected from users who participate in the iAd network.[EMPHASIS ADDED].
And I guess you still have no comment on their prima facie disengenuous anonymization technique?
What must pass for a logical reason in your mind? They automatically opted everyone into sharing their every move all day long.
I would respect them more if they simply said, "You bought our phones, so we will spy on your every move. If you don't like it, don't buy them." Instead they make it twice as bad by insulting your intelligence with an "anonymization" scheme so obviously ineffective that it really makes it clear what contempt they have for their customers.
They not only want to spy on your every move, but they think you are stupid, and they want to fool you into thinking they haven't given themselves that power.
This is so obviously evil they could probably go to jail for it in Europe.
It's bad enough the cell providers have this data - but they have it by tower, and you can't build a cell system without it. Apple has no such excuse.
Wow, a new ID every 24 hours, huh? Am I supposed to be impressed? What do you think, are they deliberately creating "anonymizing" measures they can circumvent, or are they just retarded?
Let's just assume it actually works as they say and there isn't some easy way to link the random ID the real phone. Say, by web server logs. Duh.
If I get 24 hours, I get where you woke up this morning and where you'll go to bed tonight. I almost certainly know where you live, and then I know where you were all day. The lat/long itself during stationary periods especially at night is an identifier.
If you guys are comfortable letting Apple or anyone else have this, it's just because your brain hasn't digested what it means yet. Don't worry, wait for the first few scandals. It will take a few years - maybe long enough for every asshole company to start doing this. But it will get easier to understand.
This response by apple is an intelligence test for Congress and for the American public. Sharpen your pencils, let's see if you pass...
They say they combat Moore's law by increasing the difficulty of the hashing problem. How does the difficulty "increase"? Who increases it? How is the decision made in a decentralized way? If it's made system-wide in the middle of processing, do I have to discard a lot of work and restart from the decision point? If it's not, what's the risk any given bit of work will fail? How easy is it to confuse this heuristic?
They say, "New transactions are broadcast to all nodes." Sounds like Gnutella v1. This scales how?
They say a someone with enough CPU power to commit fraud would benefit more from "using it to generate new coins" - but this is hazy to me. And even if you believe this - is it still true when the # of coins is fixed? Or is this not a specious argument?
"A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain," And determining the longest chain is practical how? You either ask everyone (can't scale) or ask a subset (vulnerable a variety of ordinary attacks).
"Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification." Translation: the simplified payment verification process he mentions: it's useless and he shouldn't have mentioned it.
It seems that each node relies on many neighbors to verify every transaction competitively. I'm still trying to understand how chains formed and maintained. How are blocks really aggregated out of transactions? The specifics - a real implementation - seems not to be addressed in the paper. The devil's in the details. Must an attacker outsmart everyone, or only out-compete those other nodes interested in the same transaction? There just doesn't seem to be any there there.
“As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner.” Isn’t it possible to play back transaction history and link one key pair to another?
“An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.” So let's get to the fundamentals. Why? I have a string of bits I've never seen before. It might be real money, in the form of a non-arbitrarily-large digital “coin”... It might also just be a cryptographically sound invention. Maybe this is the part where I simply got lost. What really makes a peer understand a new string of bits represents “money?" Its cryptographic congruence? The agreement of other peers? Both, right? But then it feels like the answers in real life involve talking to substantially all of the peers in the world, and those peers remembering everything that happens everywhere.
I have to say, I admire the obvious cleverness of the author. But I think this paper needed to be a lot longer than 9 pages, and I have a sinking suspicion that all this amounts to the equivalent of a young cryptographer's first effortlessly breakable cypher.
No offense to you for trying to summarize it, but this sounds like utter horseshit.
I am still hunting for an intelligible explanation of why I can't forge money, copy money, or invalidate money, let alone why this isn't a privacy non-starter. And I'm not sure the Bitcoin "technical paper" counts.
I can create hashes, too. And I have lots of peers that will say whatever I want. Will you give me a cup of coffee for it?
All the redundant pithy comments about the real money supply aren't funny, either.
This is going to seem like a fraud unless you can explain how any string of bits, regardless of how they were generated, can be considered to be owned, or transferred, in a world where they can be copied instantly for free, and in a world where I can bring 100,000 new peers into your network with their own versions of history and clever ideas on how to abuse your protocol...
If the word gains traction over time (instead of joining the graveyard of Internet Fad Words), it will gradually begin sounding more mature and ordinary. Then writers and editors will change their attitude towards it.
But right now, the problem is not its construction or metaphorical appropriateness, but its newness, its faddishness, and most of all, the "feel" of it in English, which I can best describe as "twee."
You are aware that there will be many, many different kinds of devices made, forever?
To the extent that a common open OS and/or a set of APIs can make it as easy as possible to develop for a large number of devices, that's a... good... thing.... right?
This FUD made sense to someone inside Apple because they honestly fantasize about a world where everyone just buys Apple.
To the rest of the world, there will be innovative new devices every day. No, they will not all be the same. That's the point of innovation. You can either try to build a common platform to let developers take advantage of that, or... what, each has its own operating system??
No one wants to start from scratch on a new platform just because a new feature has been introduced on a system that's otherwise just like many others. I am still amazed that we have so many people who can confuse this elementary bit of software architecture (reuse, modularity, expandability) as a "problem" called "fragmentation."
Screen size variations? Different input devices? Are you kidding me?How did PC and Mac people ever survive? You make it sound as if mankind had not yet figured out how to abstract input devices or use a layout manager.
Ironically most android devices are almost vanishingly similar in terms of capabilities, compared to most other hardware ecosystems.
It's the carriers. All of them want their cut of any business that gets done on their phones, and each of them wants to cut their own extortionate deal with Google if Google is to have their own store on the phones. That's true both in the US and abroad. Most already have a "store" of their own ("V-Cast," for instance), where petty dreams of ego and closed platforms play out in pathetic dead-on-the-vine user experiences that hardly anyone even knows are there, despite the fact that they're in millions of pockets.
Apple broke this mold by taking control away from the carrier, and Google took it even further by giving that control largely to the developers.
If you're wondering why Apple is still only on AT&T, and for years the only way you could get an iphone running overseas was to jailbreak it, now you know. A big part of it's down to the asshole cell providers.
So if this is an Android vs. iPhone comparison, I hardly think iPhone comes out ahead. Google is playing faster and looser to get more marketshare, whereas Steve's ego is keeping them off any provider that doesn't do it his way. It's a big reason why Verizon went with Android. Steve now considers himself the God of Cell Phones, and assumed that all other providers would kneel at his feet to get the iphone. To his surprise, the 200B telecommunications CEO didn't like being talked to "that way" by the 40B hipster device manufacturer CEO, and said, "fuck you buddy, I'll crush you like a bug. I can buy and sell you six times over. etc. etc." And sure enough Apple wasn't the only game in town after all...
The fascinating thing about "fragmentation" is that it's a problem we just made up. Apple's Mac line, let alone the Windows world, have more hardware and software diversity in one minute than Android has all year. Yet no one goes around suggesting that "fragmentation will hurt the PC market's long term chances of success."
This feels like a FUD bullet point created by an Apple astroturfing firm, whether it actually is or not. The whole "fragmentation" line of thinking presumes a world we have never had, and which I doubt anyone would willingly choose: one where a single manufacturer rules, producing a few nearly perfect products in a graceful, gradual schedule.
The funniest part is that this meme is useful for identifying people with no Android developer experience. After having used both the Apple SDK and the Android SDK pretty extensively, you can see why Android will win in the marketplace, and win so quickly. Never has there been such a beautifully organized, transparent, open, easy zero-to-development experience. In a world where most platforms don't even think about API versioning until it's too late, Android builds in an elegant management system from the beginning. "All 5" API revisions are accessible via a pullout menu. You default to the lowest, so that your app is compatible with all devices. Easy done.
And if you need something that a newer OS revision offers, everything about it makes it easy to target the minimum revision required.
The documentation is organized and straightforward. Running and debugging your app is a keystroke away, with a hardware-level emulator that's trivially configured to match whichever devices you prefer to test on - or all of them.
It's ironic, really. Hardly anyone has ever done such a good job of managing fragmentation, yet all this refinement for a platform that has less diversity (especially at this early point in its life) than almost any open platform I've seen that's this widely used.
I agree that it's dangerous ground. If we create a legal environment where a search engine that happens to be distributed rather than centralized is automatically considered illegal, that's bad. Similarly, I think we all agree that the courts really can't get in the business of back-dooring mandates for all software developers to use certain vaguely specified, futile, and damaging methods to prevent potential copyright violations by others.
Here's the thing, though. It takes wilful blindness to equate Limewire with Firefox or Google. If you look at the facts of the case, it's obvious, and the judge couldn't ignore it. The fact is, FF and GOOG have many widely known and significant non-infringing uses. They're entirely planned and marketed as legitimate tools for legal tasks. And no matter how we feel about it, we can't really deny that none of that can be said about Limewire.
That won't stop some of us from trying to deny it anyway. But it's just not credible.
They had opportunities to try to thread the needle and find a legal niche for themselves. I'm not even talking about becoming a legal music store. There were so many little things they could have done differently to portray themselves as a google or a firefox. But almost every time they had a decision between trying to be legitimate or helping their marketshare or convenience, they put marketshare and convenience first.
The fact is, Limewire was conceived entirely as a tool for copyright infringement. It was marketed and run that way. It was too obvious for the court to ignore. And in the end, it was that conduct that sank them.
I see. Sounds like a very sensible policy. So would I be correct in saying that Limewire can (and probably will) appeal?
And that it's merely a confusing bit of argot to say they can't specifically appeal this ruling on the RIAA's motion for summary judgment? But rather, they must wait until there's a Final Judgment (the outcome of which is now virtually certain)?
I hoped I could find you a market share survey, but unfortunately nothing came up easily just on Google. So here is what I recommend.
Get Firefox and a flash video downloader add-on. And then start downloading some flash videos from various sites and check them out. By volume most of the flash video sites have not upgraded and transcoded to support F9's h264. The enormous time, expense, and difficulty, together with the diminishing quality returns (VP6 is "pretty good") guarantee it.
Lastly, the thing to consider is where the audience is. Google and Youtube are by far the web's largest source of h264 video views. I would venture to guess even a multiple of all the other sources put together. So if they were to over time prefer another codec - you can see what might have the MPEG-LA shareholders a bit put out.
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I don't know why you'd wager that. They've specifically described they're using a worthless technique for anonymizing the data (random ID changes on a 24 hour cycle). You will never get a clearer sign of either bad intentions or total ineptitude, and it doesn't matter which it is.
No, I just read things carefully and tend to understand what I'm reading. (cough, cough)
Apple tries to fool you that the data is anonymous when it's not. And do you have a choice to not get iAds?
Meditate on this, grasshopper, and see if you find any enlightenment.
Leaving aside the iTunes store for just a moment (though I'd like to see for myself how well it works if you try to use it without accepting their location sharing feature and EULA).
iAds collects the data unless the whole location service system is turned off, and it's on by default.
And there's nothing anonymous about their system - the anonymity is a lie, as I already explained.
Why is it you can't understand that exactly?
I hope you're getting paid for posting so incoherently - because Apple does do astroturf PR, and trolling for them does have a going rate.
Picture it. Some guy is following you down an alley carrying the gun. They're muttering to themselves, spittle dribbling down their chin. "My gun cannot hurt you. So I am entitled to shoot you if I want to."
I suddenly appear! I'm a cop! You say, "Save me, oh save me!!!"
And I say... wait for it...
"Prove that ANY of that IS happening, or STFU."
I don't see that nonsense in Android's policy, btw. :)
Hey, since you're cool with it, will you share your GPS location with me in real time? I want to share it with some other people. I might be able to make some money off it.
Intelligence test... failed.
Android asks permission for any location data to be collected system-wide very clearly when the phone first sets itself up. They always have. It's very clear and easy to understand, and it's opt-in. This is very different than the system-wide opt-out Apple gives you. What's more, Android actually honors it, without disabling huge features (equivalent to iTunes store) or giving themselves loopholes (like iAds).
Individual apps can know your location. It's a separate issue whether they can also talk to the internet. You get to see for yourself all powers they have - it's up to you, not Google (or Apple). Then you get to decide if you trust them to know your location and be able to talk to home at the same time. I trust google maps with that. I don't trust Bob's To-Do List with that.
There is nothing like this in the Apple world. It's night and day. Android can be exploited if users make bad choices during the time between when a dangerous app developer gets in the market and when they are kicked out. Meanwhile Apple is virtually promising to violate your privacy, and record your every move for themselves, and for their "partners and affiliates." And they are trying to fool you into thinking they aren't.
Orwell's fictional government never had any tools as powerful for monitoring their citizens movement as what Apple now has. I know reading 1984 is less fashionable than referencing it, so your confusion there is forgivable I guess.
Apple opts everyone into this location sharing system. They don't make a choice, unless you can choose to not "participate in iAds." Most don't even know it's there. Poll any 100 iPhone users and see how many of them can even explain to you what this system is and how this system really works. But they "agreed" to it in a EULA somewhere, sometime - a trick so bad that it's of questionable legal enforceability even in the USA.
It doesn't hurt that Apple is using deceptive practices like "fake anonymizing" that doesn't actually protect anyone's identity, but fools some people into making them think they are.
You're clearly confused, for instance. Your initial post conflated Apple knowing your address to Apple knowing every step you take throughout your day. I notice you're not apologizing for that mistake yet - but we will all accept your retraction and apology any time.
Just curious - are you actually just that bad at understanding these things, or are you one of the PR contractors Apple hires to confuse people on purpose? Cause you could be getting paid for this, if you're not already.
What's your credit card number? Don't worry, I won't charge anything. Who has the time? I just want to have it, you know, just in case I might need it. And I'd like to share it with my partners and affiliates. In they, you know, might need it too.
Did you read the letter?
Apps have to ask permission. Already this is retarded - feel free to say no to location tracking, as long as you don't want iTunes store on your iDevice?
Yeah, awesome.
But what about page 9? It appears iAd collects this information independently, as long as location services are enabled on the phone at all. I'm of the understanding they are by default.
Shall I quote? I shall.
As specified in the updated Policy and the iPhone 4 and iPod touch SLAs, customers may opt out of interest-based advertising by visiting the following site from their mobile device: https:lloo.apple.com. Customers also may opt out of location-based advertising by toggling the device's location-based service capabilities to "Off."IO
For customers who do not toggle location-based service capabilities to "Off," Apple collects information about the device's location (latitude/longitude coordinates) when an ad request is made. This information is transmitted securely to the Apple iAd server via a cellular network connection or Wi-Fi Internet connection. The latitude/longitude coordinates are converted immediately by the server to a five-digit zip code. Apple does not record or store the latitude/longitude coordinates-Apple stores only the zip code. Apple then uses the zip code to select a relevant ad for the customer...
Hence on page 12, when answering "which consumers Apple is monitoring," it is forced to answer, basically, "everyone who sees iAds."
Apple collects anonymous Wi-Fi Access Point, Cell Tower and GPS Information from
devices that have location services turned on, have explicitly authorized apps to use their location, and are actively running one of the apps. Anonymous Wi-Fi Access Point Information and GPS coordinates may also be collected when an iPhone is using GPS to search for a cellular network. Diagnostic location data is only collected from users who have expressly agreed to send this information to Apple. Device location data (by zip code only) is collected from users who participate in the iAd network. [EMPHASIS ADDED].
And I guess you still have no comment on their prima facie disengenuous anonymization technique?
What must pass for a logical reason in your mind? They automatically opted everyone into sharing their every move all day long.
I would respect them more if they simply said, "You bought our phones, so we will spy on your every move. If you don't like it, don't buy them." Instead they make it twice as bad by insulting your intelligence with an "anonymization" scheme so obviously ineffective that it really makes it clear what contempt they have for their customers.
They not only want to spy on your every move, but they think you are stupid, and they want to fool you into thinking they haven't given themselves that power.
This is so obviously evil they could probably go to jail for it in Europe.
It's bad enough the cell providers have this data - but they have it by tower, and you can't build a cell system without it. Apple has no such excuse.
When did it become so fashionable to become so vehemently confused?
They know where you live, so they can correlate it with your GPS coordinates at night. Then they know every single step everyone takes all day long.
And yes, in case you read the book and were wondering, that actually is worse than anything Orwell imagined Big Brother could have in 1984.
Wow, a new ID every 24 hours, huh? Am I supposed to be impressed? What do you think, are they deliberately creating "anonymizing" measures they can circumvent, or are they just retarded?
Let's just assume it actually works as they say and there isn't some easy way to link the random ID the real phone. Say, by web server logs. Duh.
If I get 24 hours, I get where you woke up this morning and where you'll go to bed tonight. I almost certainly know where you live, and then I know where you were all day. The lat/long itself during stationary periods especially at night is an identifier.
If you guys are comfortable letting Apple or anyone else have this, it's just because your brain hasn't digested what it means yet. Don't worry, wait for the first few scandals. It will take a few years - maybe long enough for every asshole company to start doing this. But it will get easier to understand.
This response by apple is an intelligence test for Congress and for the American public. Sharpen your pencils, let's see if you pass...
Have a look at the technical paper. Can anyone explain...
They say they combat Moore's law by increasing the difficulty of the hashing problem. How does the difficulty "increase"? Who increases it? How is the decision made in a decentralized way? If it's made system-wide in the middle of processing, do I have to discard a lot of work and restart from the decision point? If it's not, what's the risk any given bit of work will fail? How easy is it to confuse this heuristic?
They say, "New transactions are broadcast to all nodes." Sounds like Gnutella v1. This scales how?
They say a someone with enough CPU power to commit fraud would benefit more from "using it to generate new coins" - but this is hazy to me. And even if you believe this - is it still true when the # of coins is fixed? Or is this not a specious argument?
"A user only needs to keep a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain," And determining the longest chain is practical how? You either ask everyone (can't scale) or ask a subset (vulnerable a variety of ordinary attacks).
"Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification." Translation: the simplified payment verification process he mentions: it's useless and he shouldn't have mentioned it.
It seems that each node relies on many neighbors to verify every transaction competitively. I'm still trying to understand how chains formed and maintained. How are blocks really aggregated out of transactions? The specifics - a real implementation - seems not to be addressed in the paper. The devil's in the details. Must an attacker outsmart everyone, or only out-compete those other nodes interested in the same transaction? There just doesn't seem to be any there there.
“As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner.” Isn’t it possible to play back transaction history and link one key pair to another?
“An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.” So let's get to the fundamentals. Why? I have a string of bits I've never seen before. It might be real money, in the form of a non-arbitrarily-large digital “coin”... It might also just be a cryptographically sound invention. Maybe this is the part where I simply got lost. What really makes a peer understand a new string of bits represents “money?" Its cryptographic congruence? The agreement of other peers? Both, right? But then it feels like the answers in real life involve talking to substantially all of the peers in the world, and those peers remembering everything that happens everywhere.
I have to say, I admire the obvious cleverness of the author. But I think this paper needed to be a lot longer than 9 pages, and I have a sinking suspicion that all this amounts to the equivalent of a young cryptographer's first effortlessly breakable cypher.
No offense to you for trying to summarize it, but this sounds like utter horseshit.
I am still hunting for an intelligible explanation of why I can't forge money, copy money, or invalidate money, let alone why this isn't a privacy non-starter. And I'm not sure the Bitcoin "technical paper" counts.
I can create hashes, too. And I have lots of peers that will say whatever I want. Will you give me a cup of coffee for it?
All the redundant pithy comments about the real money supply aren't funny, either.
This is going to seem like a fraud unless you can explain how any string of bits, regardless of how they were generated, can be considered to be owned, or transferred, in a world where they can be copied instantly for free, and in a world where I can bring 100,000 new peers into your network with their own versions of history and clever ideas on how to abuse your protocol...
What is this, a planned economy? Why is Bill Gates is begging for communist government help?
Obviously, the free market will just solve this problem on its own, in the process continuing to make America the greatest nation in the world.
If the word gains traction over time (instead of joining the graveyard of Internet Fad Words), it will gradually begin sounding more mature and ordinary. Then writers and editors will change their attitude towards it.
But right now, the problem is not its construction or metaphorical appropriateness, but its newness, its faddishness, and most of all, the "feel" of it in English, which I can best describe as "twee."
Sounds like good editorial policy to me.
"Tweet" is almost as bad as "blogosphere."
You are aware that there will be many, many different kinds of devices made, forever?
To the extent that a common open OS and/or a set of APIs can make it as easy as possible to develop for a large number of devices, that's a... good... thing.... right?
This FUD made sense to someone inside Apple because they honestly fantasize about a world where everyone just buys Apple.
To the rest of the world, there will be innovative new devices every day. No, they will not all be the same. That's the point of innovation. You can either try to build a common platform to let developers take advantage of that, or... what, each has its own operating system??
No one wants to start from scratch on a new platform just because a new feature has been introduced on a system that's otherwise just like many others. I am still amazed that we have so many people who can confuse this elementary bit of software architecture (reuse, modularity, expandability) as a "problem" called "fragmentation."
Screen size variations? Different input devices? Are you kidding me? How did PC and Mac people ever survive? You make it sound as if mankind had not yet figured out how to abstract input devices or use a layout manager.
Ironically most android devices are almost vanishingly similar in terms of capabilities, compared to most other hardware ecosystems.
It's the carriers. All of them want their cut of any business that gets done on their phones, and each of them wants to cut their own extortionate deal with Google if Google is to have their own store on the phones. That's true both in the US and abroad. Most already have a "store" of their own ("V-Cast," for instance), where petty dreams of ego and closed platforms play out in pathetic dead-on-the-vine user experiences that hardly anyone even knows are there, despite the fact that they're in millions of pockets.
Apple broke this mold by taking control away from the carrier, and Google took it even further by giving that control largely to the developers.
If you're wondering why Apple is still only on AT&T, and for years the only way you could get an iphone running overseas was to jailbreak it, now you know. A big part of it's down to the asshole cell providers.
So if this is an Android vs. iPhone comparison, I hardly think iPhone comes out ahead. Google is playing faster and looser to get more marketshare, whereas Steve's ego is keeping them off any provider that doesn't do it his way. It's a big reason why Verizon went with Android. Steve now considers himself the God of Cell Phones, and assumed that all other providers would kneel at his feet to get the iphone. To his surprise, the 200B telecommunications CEO didn't like being talked to "that way" by the 40B hipster device manufacturer CEO, and said, "fuck you buddy, I'll crush you like a bug. I can buy and sell you six times over. etc. etc." And sure enough Apple wasn't the only game in town after all...
The fascinating thing about "fragmentation" is that it's a problem we just made up. Apple's Mac line, let alone the Windows world, have more hardware and software diversity in one minute than Android has all year. Yet no one goes around suggesting that "fragmentation will hurt the PC market's long term chances of success."
This feels like a FUD bullet point created by an Apple astroturfing firm, whether it actually is or not. The whole "fragmentation" line of thinking presumes a world we have never had, and which I doubt anyone would willingly choose: one where a single manufacturer rules, producing a few nearly perfect products in a graceful, gradual schedule.
The funniest part is that this meme is useful for identifying people with no Android developer experience. After having used both the Apple SDK and the Android SDK pretty extensively, you can see why Android will win in the marketplace, and win so quickly. Never has there been such a beautifully organized, transparent, open, easy zero-to-development experience. In a world where most platforms don't even think about API versioning until it's too late, Android builds in an elegant management system from the beginning. "All 5" API revisions are accessible via a pullout menu. You default to the lowest, so that your app is compatible with all devices. Easy done.
And if you need something that a newer OS revision offers, everything about it makes it easy to target the minimum revision required.
The documentation is organized and straightforward. Running and debugging your app is a keystroke away, with a hardware-level emulator that's trivially configured to match whichever devices you prefer to test on - or all of them.
It's ironic, really. Hardly anyone has ever done such a good job of managing fragmentation, yet all this refinement for a platform that has less diversity (especially at this early point in its life) than almost any open platform I've seen that's this widely used.
In short, LOL.
I agree that it's dangerous ground. If we create a legal environment where a search engine that happens to be distributed rather than centralized is automatically considered illegal, that's bad. Similarly, I think we all agree that the courts really can't get in the business of back-dooring mandates for all software developers to use certain vaguely specified, futile, and damaging methods to prevent potential copyright violations by others.
Here's the thing, though. It takes wilful blindness to equate Limewire with Firefox or Google. If you look at the facts of the case, it's obvious, and the judge couldn't ignore it. The fact is, FF and GOOG have many widely known and significant non-infringing uses. They're entirely planned and marketed as legitimate tools for legal tasks. And no matter how we feel about it, we can't really deny that none of that can be said about Limewire.
That won't stop some of us from trying to deny it anyway. But it's just not credible.
They had opportunities to try to thread the needle and find a legal niche for themselves. I'm not even talking about becoming a legal music store. There were so many little things they could have done differently to portray themselves as a google or a firefox. But almost every time they had a decision between trying to be legitimate or helping their marketshare or convenience, they put marketshare and convenience first.
The fact is, Limewire was conceived entirely as a tool for copyright infringement. It was marketed and run that way. It was too obvious for the court to ignore. And in the end, it was that conduct that sank them.
I see. Sounds like a very sensible policy. So would I be correct in saying that Limewire can (and probably will) appeal?
And that it's merely a confusing bit of argot to say they can't specifically appeal this ruling on the RIAA's motion for summary judgment? But rather, they must wait until there's a Final Judgment (the outcome of which is now virtually certain)?
Can you explain the phrase:
The decision was not a final judgment, so it is not appealable.
This is the one detail I really don't understand. Are you saying Limewire has no avenues for appeal at all, just because this judgment was not final?
I hoped I could find you a market share survey, but unfortunately nothing came up easily just on Google. So here is what I recommend.
Get Firefox and a flash video downloader add-on. And then start downloading some flash videos from various sites and check them out. By volume most of the flash video sites have not upgraded and transcoded to support F9's h264. The enormous time, expense, and difficulty, together with the diminishing quality returns (VP6 is "pretty good") guarantee it.
Lastly, the thing to consider is where the audience is. Google and Youtube are by far the web's largest source of h264 video views. I would venture to guess even a multiple of all the other sources put together. So if they were to over time prefer another codec - you can see what might have the MPEG-LA shareholders a bit put out.