Until malware seriously impacts those who are affected by it, interest by people to defend against it will remain minimal. Spammers thrive in this environment, because people don't care and can get away with it.
I am still for a forced disconnect of any spamming botnet member until he has cleaned up his machine. When you drive your car on a public road, you have responsibility for it being roadworthy. Same logic applies to computers on the Internet. If you don't connect it to anything, I don't care how many kinds of malware your machine contains. If you go online, and you don't have working headlights, so to speak, you need to be taken off the road.
I've had this argument inside ISPs. I am disgusted to this day by their cowardice. They fear customers would leave for competitors. Yeah, they probably would. That's why we need laws and regulations here, so everyone is in the same boat, at least within the same jurisdiction.
So I applaud this move, though I think it should've come much earlier.
Thanks. Those are some excellent links and what I've checked looks solid. While I don't see a crypto analysis of Cryptree, it was published in a couple peer-reviewed papers, and from what I read (I'm not a cryptographer, just someone with an interest in crypto) it looks good. And they pass the usual snake-oil tests (no "custom crypto algorithms", etc.). Also the ETH has a really good reputation over here in Europe.
Make sure you distinguish between manual email access and automatic access.
Not in my case. When I'm away I either turn my phone off or disable data roaming (when I'm in a foreign country). And if I die in a car or airplane crash, the phone will either be destroyed as well or sooner or later run out of battery.
But you idea is good. What it needs is integration into smartphones. Basically, the phone would be your "ping" and it would trigger on something like unlock - really easy logic. If you unlocked your phone, you're not dead. And few of us don't do that for more than a day or two unless we're outdoor trecking.
Very interesting. But one thing bothers me: I can't find an external audit or some other assurance that they actually do what they claim to do and that their crypto is any good. There's allegedly a paper out describing the crypto, but I can't find it.
Is there any 3rd party verification of their claims?
Encryption is when you want to keep people out. In the scenario you've outlined, you need to let people in, but only certain people. That screams physical security.
While I agree on physical security for other reasons, your reasoning regarding crypto is dead wrong.
For example, there are a couple interesting key-sharing systems where you could encrypt everything, break the key up in 5 parts, and distribute them to family members that hate each other plus one to your lawyer, so that 3 of the 4 family parts plus the lawyer part need to come together to regenerate the whole key.
There are few problems that you can not apply crypto to. Practicality is the main issue - very likely, nobody else in the family would understand the protocol and math necessary to get the key back.
Aside from the funny part, this is actually not bad.
When I'm not on holiday or otherwise far away with no Internet, I don't think there's ever a, say, 48 hour period in which my mailserver would not register an access to my IMAP account. So with a bit of fiddling so I can tell it to stop checking for the next 2 weeks because I'm away, this would work fairly reliably.
Now if only someone had this already coded up... (I'm sure someone has, waiting for the links to be posted...)
Get someone you trust who is tech-savvy and hand him a list of where everything can be found. No passwords, keep those on a piece of paper in a safe, or a locked box somewhere in your house (fireproof would be good).
Your grieving non-geek relatives will not only not bother hacking your passwords, their primary problem will be that they won't even know where to look for stuff. I know I listed all my savings accounts and such because should something happen to me, those left would simply never think about some of the non-obvious ones.
But people are genuinely feeling confined by the iOS restrictions to the point that they hack the device or avoid buying it entirely.
Again, the question is not if there are people who feel so - I agree there are. The question is how many there are, compared to the number who like the device just like it is, which seem to be tons and tons given the sales numbers. We can only guess how many of those wouldn't mind a more open app sources model, and only barely bought the device anyways, and how many don't care one way or the other, and how many would be confused and found it too technical and difficult if they had to choose an app store, maybe to the point of not buying.
In light of all that speculation, the hard facts are these: Apple has designed something, including the restrictive App Store model, that is constantly selling out - a phenomenon that we knew only from new game consoles before that. None of the people suggesting "improvements" to the model have a track record even coming close. I know truth isn't a democratic process, but here's some evidence that how ever many people don't buy an iPhone or iPad because of the App Store model, it doesn't matter because they still sell out for weeks after launch, and after that continue to sell as quickly as they can make them.
and gatekeeper does just that
Uh, no. It's a user-space process. It can be toggled off. Yes, it might be a step towards an OS lockdown. I will give you that much. But it would need to be completely rewritten in kernel space to lock you out of your own device.
All military personnel working under the Blue Helmet are first and foremost members of their own national armies
That's the point. The UN doesn't have any sticks of its own, it does borrow sticks from its members on occasion.
But yes, NATO or not, the whole point of the UN is that it is the place where member countries agree on whether or not it is ok to intervene somewhere.
Which side are you arguing? First you suggest that people would be happier in a walled garden where there was restricted choice? Then you suggest that it turns out they'd really like a convertible.
That shows you still don't understand the argument.
Imagine that the convertible had not been invented, yet. People don't want one, because they don't know it is possible. That is the walled garden world. People are happy because they don't know there are other options.
The Tyranny of Choice is not about having no choice. Everyone agrees that would be bad. However, it has also been shown that the maximum amount of choice does not equal the maximum amount of happiness. There's a "sweet spot" of choices, and offering more options beyond that makes people feel unhappy, powerless and frustrated.
You obviously believe that more choice is always better than less choice, as most americans and many europeans do. However, that point of view has scientifically proven to be incorrect. You might want to adapt your viewpoint to the facts.
And the Gatekeeper security tool in Lion
Finally, some actual facts instead of babbling!
Well, first it's in Mountain Lion, not in Lion, so get your facts right. Second, even in Mountain Lion it is not active so far, so nobody knows what its ultimate fate may be. But let's assume that it does show up with the functionality discovered so far:
First, it is still a user-configurable option. It doesn't take my root away from me, and as long as it doesn't do that, it doesn't restrict me. Two, it really isn't new at all. It's just an expansion of a very old feature of OS X, the one that currently warns you when you're running any binary for the first time, telling you that, for example, Firefox downloaded this binary from the Internet yesterday. What Gatekeeper does is that in addition to the "yes" and "no" buttons you currently have, it adds either binary signing and key verification - something that windows has had for years, or it checks if its an App Store download. This last is probably the function you are referring to. Now if you read it in full context, it has a very different meaning, doesn't it? What it really is exactly what you are asking for: The user can decide that he wants to play only in the walled garden, or not, by changing his Gatekeeper settings. For many non-geek users, it is probably a good idea to turn it on, because they rarely install software from other sources.
Currently the default is to allow only software from app store
Source? All the sources I could find say that the current default in the developer previews is for signed apps only, and that Apple is pushing developers to get a Dev ID so they can sign their apps.
The hooks are right there. What more do you want?
Don't be ridiculous. An extended Quarantine (that's what the feature is called currently, again it has been in OS X in primitive form for a long time, long before iOS ever existed) is not coming even near what you are alleging. Among other things, it only affects downloads. That's one of the criticisms leveraged against Gatekeeper as an anti-malware tool: It won't do good against files brought in via USB stick.
I just noticed they have the crusades with a much higher death toll there. So much for quick sourcing on the Internet. Anyway, the main argument doesn't rest on the numbers.
In comparing numbers of dead, never forget to scale for total population. For example, the total death toll of the crusades is estimated at about 200,000 - but then, the total world population at the time is estimated at 250-300 mio. people. So you'd have to kill at least 5 mio. today to get rid of the same percentage of the population.
I wanted to write something like that, but you made the point much better than I could've. Exactly that is the problem. As long as everyone is rational, MAD works. But it only takes one madman or religious fanatic and you have a real danger of a cascading catastrophic system failure.
The UN isn't a body of power. That's the part both its fans and the NWO paranoids get wrong all the time. The UN is largely everyone getting together and talking things out. That there is nobody with a big stick to enforce the rules is exactly what makes it so challenging - but it couldn't be any different, because if there were you'd need another level to get the big guy in line.
The UN can not stop Assad from using tanks because everyone involved, especially countries like the USA, do not want the UN to have powers like that - for fear of having those powers used against themselves. Funny how every time the UN wants to do something at all, every American on/. is complaining and whining about the evil overlord, like when they want to give slightly more regulatory oversight over the Internet to some UN body - and yet when they are not themselves affected, they whine how the UN is so powerless that it can't stop Assad. Well, the answer to "why" is staring you in the face: Because you don't want it. If the UN could stop Assad's tanks, then it could also take over for ICANN.
But the vocal minority can be misleading, we know that.
who buys one because it IS locked down
Agreed, I doubt anyone does. But as I said: The lockdown can be part of a bigger reason. The whole experience is certainly something people desire, and we also know from many other experiences that people actually do prefer a "one stop shopping" experience. So by offering one and only one experience, the iPad may well be more attractive to a larger group of people than if there were a freedom of choice. See The Tyranny of Choice.
is not going to affect "non-technical users"
Wrong, it is. The effect is not in the personal iPad use, it is in looking at the iPad of your more geeky friend and noticing that he has stuff on there that you don't and can't find in the App Store. It fragments the device experience. It's not just that you don't open the hood - it's that your mechanic friend's car does things that yours doesn't. Visible things, not just 1% more fuel efficiency, but, say, he can turn his into a convertible and you can't.
The recent changes to OSX in Lion are evidence of that trend.
Remind me, which ones? Launchpad or the inversion of the scroll bar?;-)
You need to engage the argument honestly. So far you haven't.
I've yet to see an argument, honestly. You speculate on the future - everyone can do that. You vaguely hint, but you don't have any evidence. None. We talked about what it would take to prevent a computer from running any software, to limit it to a single installation source - where's the evidence that things are moving in that direction? Where's the evidence that root access is going to go away? That's a huge, major change that would most likely be implemented in steps, like changes to the OS so that you can actually install, configure and run the system without having root access. Or changes to the kernel so that it runs only signed binaries, that would require a key infrastructure, again not something that you would implement over night, so show me the kernel hooks.
You've got nothing but ideas. But ideas are a dime a dozen. And yes, speculating in the other direction is trivial, but I'm not going to do it just to prove a point. I'm looking for facts, not more wild goose hunts.
And thatâ(TM)s Microsoft. The company just isnâ(TM)t cool anymore.
The most important change is that the mainstream media's position on MS has shifted. It used to be that Bill Gates was the hero of a generation to all but the geeks, and MS the greatest company on earth to all but the geeks, and Windows had no alternative except for the geeks.
These days, iOS and Android get more headlines on a new release than Windows does. Even new OS X releases get mainstream media coverage. And Bill is gone, he did well to step down at the high point, and Balmer has never been liked by anyone in the media. MS isn't a great company anymore, that is the latest shift, there are now quite a few serious, critical and in-depth articles, and they will keep coming.
MS has lost the PR war. This is going to be its end. Not that it's going to go away, the company is way too huge to simply pack up and leave. But the dominance is over, and their markets are ready to be taken over by other people, because "nobody ever got fired for buying..." has stopped to be true.
But that does not give a useful data point. You would have to compare the number who don't buy because of the walled garden to the number who do buy because of it. But it isn't that easy. The walled garden is part of a whole that a lot of people like a lot - the seamless experience that makes an iPad useable to people with absolutely no tech-know-how whatsoever.
Now do you have a single bit of evidence indicating that allowing an alternative to the app store for loading apps would make them sell less?
No, but then again I'm not making the bold claims here that the world is coming to an end and we will all become slaves to the evil overlords, remember?
but what about an ipad with a keyboard and trackpad in a laptop form factor?
One, that's another baseless speculation about what could theoretically be. Also, it's old and has been speculated pretty much ever since the original iPad came out. Two, it's another strawman distracting from the point we were discussing - the claimed "coming soon" lockdown of the Apple consumer desktop products.
And that is the face of the new consumer mac.
No, it is what you claim again and again to be that, with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Sorry, Sunday school tactics don't work here, the truth value of a baseless statement does not increase with each repetition.
So, I sum up that you have a lot of bold claims about how exactly future Apple consumer computers will look like, but aside from speculations, "what-if"s and simply repeating the claim, you have no evidence whatsoever for anything you say.
I think we're done here, because speculations are a dime a dozen. Speculating in the opposite direction would be just as easy.
You are assuming you'll have local root without jail breaking?
Sorry, but aside from a trip to crazy town, what actual evidence do you have that any of this is going to happen? I'm tired of baseless speculations. You are starting to sound like the redneck idiots who claim that Obama is going to sell the country to China or whatever.
Their entire walled garden approach makes purchasing their hardware less interesting.
Market data disagrees. Their stuff sells like crazy. Do you have even a single bit of evidence indicating that a different approach to software distribution would make them sell even more?
and even being the only way to load apps by default.
But that simply isn't true. You are starting off with a wrong assumption. You do remember that we were talking about desktop computers, yes?
because they will be bullies 100 times worse than the Americans at their worst
Now I'm curious to see that happen, because I'm not sure it is even possible. And I live in Europe, not one of the 20 or so countries that american wars have left devastated for decades.
Let's talk again when China's track record comes near, shall we?
No, the point is to show that a leopard doesn't change its spots. Gates is still the abusive business man, even when he switches sectors from IT to philantropy. This isn't even news, many reports like this have been appearing for many years now. But they are rarely reported in any mainstream press. Gates is doing an excellent job controlling his public image these days (don't for a second think that someone of his wealth does not employ a small PR staff).
Basically, the gist is that he uses the foundation money to buy exclusively from companies that he is a shareholder of. Since the foundation is so huge, and he has convinced many others to contribute, so that in many areas his foundation enjoys a monopoly - oh, look, that word again - he can control some of the markets involved, and he does it. And not necessarily to the advantage of the poor and sick.
Wait, the WTO essentially wants to force them to exporting their raw materials? That's a very strange definition of "free market". Last I checked, coercion was one of the things that a free market does not allow for.
I'm very sceptical, that wouldn't be like Apple at all. I'm half expecting a much cheaper iPad in addition to the existing ones, but not with a different form factor.
Reasons are plenty, one of them is that apps are all designed for this size, from button size to the occasional ruler app. There have been similar rumors for the iPhone several times, and they've all turned out to be wrong.
Macbook 2014 has some locked down osx/ios derivative that only accepts new application installation via the app store.
Sorry, not good enough. Application signing might be a way, because a) you can not prevent installation on a system where I have local root and b) applications don't even have to be installed, just running them works like charm.
So if you were to modify the kernel so that it only ever runs signed binaries... that is technically possible.
What would the Apple incentive be to do this? They are known for many things, not all of which everyone likes, but fucking over their customers the way MS regularily does hasn't been among them so far. You forget a major difference: Apple is a hardware vendor, why would they do something that makes purchasing their hardware less interesting? MS can do that because they don't care about hardware, it's not their margins.
Slashdot Mirror
Until malware seriously impacts those who are affected by it, interest by people to defend against it will remain minimal. Spammers thrive in this environment, because people don't care and can get away with it.
I am still for a forced disconnect of any spamming botnet member until he has cleaned up his machine. When you drive your car on a public road, you have responsibility for it being roadworthy. Same logic applies to computers on the Internet. If you don't connect it to anything, I don't care how many kinds of malware your machine contains. If you go online, and you don't have working headlights, so to speak, you need to be taken off the road.
I've had this argument inside ISPs. I am disgusted to this day by their cowardice. They fear customers would leave for competitors. Yeah, they probably would. That's why we need laws and regulations here, so everyone is in the same boat, at least within the same jurisdiction.
So I applaud this move, though I think it should've come much earlier.
Thanks. Those are some excellent links and what I've checked looks solid. While I don't see a crypto analysis of Cryptree, it was published in a couple peer-reviewed papers, and from what I read (I'm not a cryptographer, just someone with an interest in crypto) it looks good. And they pass the usual snake-oil tests (no "custom crypto algorithms", etc.). Also the ETH has a really good reputation over here in Europe.
I think I'll give them a spin.
Make sure you distinguish between manual email access and automatic access.
Not in my case. When I'm away I either turn my phone off or disable data roaming (when I'm in a foreign country). And if I die in a car or airplane crash, the phone will either be destroyed as well or sooner or later run out of battery.
But you idea is good. What it needs is integration into smartphones. Basically, the phone would be your "ping" and it would trigger on something like unlock - really easy logic. If you unlocked your phone, you're not dead. And few of us don't do that for more than a day or two unless we're outdoor trecking.
Wuala - http://wuala.com/
Very interesting. But one thing bothers me: I can't find an external audit or some other assurance that they actually do what they claim to do and that their crypto is any good. There's allegedly a paper out describing the crypto, but I can't find it.
Is there any 3rd party verification of their claims?
Encryption is when you want to keep people out. In the scenario you've outlined, you need to let people in, but only certain people. That screams physical security.
While I agree on physical security for other reasons, your reasoning regarding crypto is dead wrong.
For example, there are a couple interesting key-sharing systems where you could encrypt everything, break the key up in 5 parts, and distribute them to family members that hate each other plus one to your lawyer, so that 3 of the 4 family parts plus the lawyer part need to come together to regenerate the whole key.
There are few problems that you can not apply crypto to. Practicality is the main issue - very likely, nobody else in the family would understand the protocol and math necessary to get the key back.
Aside from the funny part, this is actually not bad.
When I'm not on holiday or otherwise far away with no Internet, I don't think there's ever a, say, 48 hour period in which my mailserver would not register an access to my IMAP account. So with a bit of fiddling so I can tell it to stop checking for the next 2 weeks because I'm away, this would work fairly reliably.
Now if only someone had this already coded up... (I'm sure someone has, waiting for the links to be posted...)
The problem with a commercial offer is that quite likely the company will die before its subscribers do.
Get someone you trust who is tech-savvy and hand him a list of where everything can be found. No passwords, keep those on a piece of paper in a safe, or a locked box somewhere in your house (fireproof would be good).
Your grieving non-geek relatives will not only not bother hacking your passwords, their primary problem will be that they won't even know where to look for stuff. I know I listed all my savings accounts and such because should something happen to me, those left would simply never think about some of the non-obvious ones.
But people are genuinely feeling confined by the iOS restrictions to the point that they hack the device or avoid buying it entirely.
Again, the question is not if there are people who feel so - I agree there are. The question is how many there are, compared to the number who like the device just like it is, which seem to be tons and tons given the sales numbers. We can only guess how many of those wouldn't mind a more open app sources model, and only barely bought the device anyways, and how many don't care one way or the other, and how many would be confused and found it too technical and difficult if they had to choose an app store, maybe to the point of not buying.
In light of all that speculation, the hard facts are these: Apple has designed something, including the restrictive App Store model, that is constantly selling out - a phenomenon that we knew only from new game consoles before that.
None of the people suggesting "improvements" to the model have a track record even coming close. I know truth isn't a democratic process, but here's some evidence that how ever many people don't buy an iPhone or iPad because of the App Store model, it doesn't matter because they still sell out for weeks after launch, and after that continue to sell as quickly as they can make them.
and gatekeeper does just that
Uh, no. It's a user-space process. It can be toggled off. Yes, it might be a step towards an OS lockdown. I will give you that much. But it would need to be completely rewritten in kernel space to lock you out of your own device.
what reason do they have to deny it if they did it?
My thoughts exactly. The fact that they could have done it and nobody would be very surprised is what gives this denial plausability.
The Taliban is a malevolent organization, but they are not comic book villains plotting nefarious acts for evil's sake.
Like all real-life villains, they consider themselves the good guys.
From your link:
All military personnel working under the Blue Helmet are first and foremost members of their own national armies
That's the point. The UN doesn't have any sticks of its own, it does borrow sticks from its members on occasion.
But yes, NATO or not, the whole point of the UN is that it is the place where member countries agree on whether or not it is ok to intervene somewhere.
Which side are you arguing? First you suggest that people would be happier in a walled garden where there was restricted choice? Then you suggest that it turns out they'd really like a convertible.
That shows you still don't understand the argument.
Imagine that the convertible had not been invented, yet. People don't want one, because they don't know it is possible. That is the walled garden world. People are happy because they don't know there are other options.
The Tyranny of Choice is not about having no choice. Everyone agrees that would be bad. However, it has also been shown that the maximum amount of choice does not equal the maximum amount of happiness. There's a "sweet spot" of choices, and offering more options beyond that makes people feel unhappy, powerless and frustrated.
You obviously believe that more choice is always better than less choice, as most americans and many europeans do. However, that point of view has scientifically proven to be incorrect. You might want to adapt your viewpoint to the facts.
And the Gatekeeper security tool in Lion
Finally, some actual facts instead of babbling!
Well, first it's in Mountain Lion, not in Lion, so get your facts right. Second, even in Mountain Lion it is not active so far, so nobody knows what its ultimate fate may be. But let's assume that it does show up with the functionality discovered so far:
First, it is still a user-configurable option. It doesn't take my root away from me, and as long as it doesn't do that, it doesn't restrict me.
Two, it really isn't new at all. It's just an expansion of a very old feature of OS X, the one that currently warns you when you're running any binary for the first time, telling you that, for example, Firefox downloaded this binary from the Internet yesterday. What Gatekeeper does is that in addition to the "yes" and "no" buttons you currently have, it adds either binary signing and key verification - something that windows has had for years, or it checks if its an App Store download. This last is probably the function you are referring to. Now if you read it in full context, it has a very different meaning, doesn't it? What it really is exactly what you are asking for: The user can decide that he wants to play only in the walled garden, or not, by changing his Gatekeeper settings. For many non-geek users, it is probably a good idea to turn it on, because they rarely install software from other sources.
Currently the default is to allow only software from app store
Source?
All the sources I could find say that the current default in the developer previews is for signed apps only, and that Apple is pushing developers to get a Dev ID so they can sign their apps.
The hooks are right there. What more do you want?
Don't be ridiculous. An extended Quarantine (that's what the feature is called currently, again it has been in OS X in primitive form for a long time, long before iOS ever existed) is not coming even near what you are alleging. Among other things, it only affects downloads. That's one of the criticisms leveraged against Gatekeeper as an anti-malware tool: It won't do good against files brought in via USB stick.
I just noticed they have the crusades with a much higher death toll there. So much for quick sourcing on the Internet. Anyway, the main argument doesn't rest on the numbers.
In comparing numbers of dead, never forget to scale for total population. For example, the total death toll of the crusades is estimated at about 200,000 - but then, the total world population at the time is estimated at 250-300 mio. people. So you'd have to kill at least 5 mio. today to get rid of the same percentage of the population.
Wikipedia has a nice list you can sort by percentage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
I wanted to write something like that, but you made the point much better than I could've. Exactly that is the problem. As long as everyone is rational, MAD works. But it only takes one madman or religious fanatic and you have a real danger of a cascading catastrophic system failure.
The UN isn't a body of power. That's the part both its fans and the NWO paranoids get wrong all the time. The UN is largely everyone getting together and talking things out. That there is nobody with a big stick to enforce the rules is exactly what makes it so challenging - but it couldn't be any different, because if there were you'd need another level to get the big guy in line.
The UN can not stop Assad from using tanks because everyone involved, especially countries like the USA, do not want the UN to have powers like that - for fear of having those powers used against themselves. Funny how every time the UN wants to do something at all, every American on /. is complaining and whining about the evil overlord, like when they want to give slightly more regulatory oversight over the Internet to some UN body - and yet when they are not themselves affected, they whine how the UN is so powerless that it can't stop Assad. Well, the answer to "why" is staring you in the face: Because you don't want it. If the UN could stop Assad's tanks, then it could also take over for ICANN.
I know several vocal groups of people.
But the vocal minority can be misleading, we know that.
who buys one because it IS locked down
Agreed, I doubt anyone does. But as I said: The lockdown can be part of a bigger reason. The whole experience is certainly something people desire, and we also know from many other experiences that people actually do prefer a "one stop shopping" experience. So by offering one and only one experience, the iPad may well be more attractive to a larger group of people than if there were a freedom of choice. See The Tyranny of Choice.
is not going to affect "non-technical users"
Wrong, it is. The effect is not in the personal iPad use, it is in looking at the iPad of your more geeky friend and noticing that he has stuff on there that you don't and can't find in the App Store. It fragments the device experience. It's not just that you don't open the hood - it's that your mechanic friend's car does things that yours doesn't. Visible things, not just 1% more fuel efficiency, but, say, he can turn his into a convertible and you can't.
The recent changes to OSX in Lion are evidence of that trend.
Remind me, which ones? Launchpad or the inversion of the scroll bar? ;-)
You need to engage the argument honestly. So far you haven't.
I've yet to see an argument, honestly. You speculate on the future - everyone can do that. You vaguely hint, but you don't have any evidence. None. We talked about what it would take to prevent a computer from running any software, to limit it to a single installation source - where's the evidence that things are moving in that direction? Where's the evidence that root access is going to go away? That's a huge, major change that would most likely be implemented in steps, like changes to the OS so that you can actually install, configure and run the system without having root access. Or changes to the kernel so that it runs only signed binaries, that would require a key infrastructure, again not something that you would implement over night, so show me the kernel hooks.
You've got nothing but ideas. But ideas are a dime a dozen. And yes, speculating in the other direction is trivial, but I'm not going to do it just to prove a point. I'm looking for facts, not more wild goose hunts.
And thatâ(TM)s Microsoft. The company just isnâ(TM)t cool anymore.
The most important change is that the mainstream media's position on MS has shifted. It used to be that Bill Gates was the hero of a generation to all but the geeks, and MS the greatest company on earth to all but the geeks, and Windows had no alternative except for the geeks.
These days, iOS and Android get more headlines on a new release than Windows does. Even new OS X releases get mainstream media coverage. And Bill is gone, he did well to step down at the high point, and Balmer has never been liked by anyone in the media. MS isn't a great company anymore, that is the latest shift, there are now quite a few serious, critical and in-depth articles, and they will keep coming.
MS has lost the PR war. This is going to be its end. Not that it's going to go away, the company is way too huge to simply pack up and leave. But the dominance is over, and their markets are ready to be taken over by other people, because "nobody ever got fired for buying ..." has stopped to be true.
Lots of people are like me.
But that does not give a useful data point. You would have to compare the number who don't buy because of the walled garden to the number who do buy because of it. But it isn't that easy. The walled garden is part of a whole that a lot of people like a lot - the seamless experience that makes an iPad useable to people with absolutely no tech-know-how whatsoever.
Now do you have a single bit of evidence indicating that allowing an alternative to the app store for loading apps would make them sell less?
No, but then again I'm not making the bold claims here that the world is coming to an end and we will all become slaves to the evil overlords, remember?
but what about an ipad with a keyboard and trackpad in a laptop form factor?
One, that's another baseless speculation about what could theoretically be. Also, it's old and has been speculated pretty much ever since the original iPad came out.
Two, it's another strawman distracting from the point we were discussing - the claimed "coming soon" lockdown of the Apple consumer desktop products.
And that is the face of the new consumer mac.
No, it is what you claim again and again to be that, with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Sorry, Sunday school tactics don't work here, the truth value of a baseless statement does not increase with each repetition.
So, I sum up that you have a lot of bold claims about how exactly future Apple consumer computers will look like, but aside from speculations, "what-if"s and simply repeating the claim, you have no evidence whatsoever for anything you say.
I think we're done here, because speculations are a dime a dozen. Speculating in the opposite direction would be just as easy.
You are assuming you'll have local root without jail breaking?
Sorry, but aside from a trip to crazy town, what actual evidence do you have that any of this is going to happen? I'm tired of baseless speculations. You are starting to sound like the redneck idiots who claim that Obama is going to sell the country to China or whatever.
Their entire walled garden approach makes purchasing their hardware less interesting.
Market data disagrees. Their stuff sells like crazy. Do you have even a single bit of evidence indicating that a different approach to software distribution would make them sell even more?
and even being the only way to load apps by default.
But that simply isn't true. You are starting off with a wrong assumption. You do remember that we were talking about desktop computers, yes?
because they will be bullies 100 times worse than the Americans at their worst
Now I'm curious to see that happen, because I'm not sure it is even possible. And I live in Europe, not one of the 20 or so countries that american wars have left devastated for decades.
Let's talk again when China's track record comes near, shall we?
No, the point is to show that a leopard doesn't change its spots. Gates is still the abusive business man, even when he switches sectors from IT to philantropy. This isn't even news, many reports like this have been appearing for many years now. But they are rarely reported in any mainstream press. Gates is doing an excellent job controlling his public image these days (don't for a second think that someone of his wealth does not employ a small PR staff).
Basically, the gist is that he uses the foundation money to buy exclusively from companies that he is a shareholder of. Since the foundation is so huge, and he has convinced many others to contribute, so that in many areas his foundation enjoys a monopoly - oh, look, that word again - he can control some of the markets involved, and he does it. And not necessarily to the advantage of the poor and sick.
Wait, the WTO essentially wants to force them to exporting their raw materials? That's a very strange definition of "free market". Last I checked, coercion was one of the things that a free market does not allow for.
I'm very sceptical, that wouldn't be like Apple at all. I'm half expecting a much cheaper iPad in addition to the existing ones, but not with a different form factor.
Reasons are plenty, one of them is that apps are all designed for this size, from button size to the occasional ruler app. There have been similar rumors for the iPhone several times, and they've all turned out to be wrong.
Macbook 2014 has some locked down osx/ios derivative that only accepts new application installation via the app store.
Sorry, not good enough. Application signing might be a way, because a) you can not prevent installation on a system where I have local root and b) applications don't even have to be installed, just running them works like charm.
So if you were to modify the kernel so that it only ever runs signed binaries... that is technically possible.
What would the Apple incentive be to do this? They are known for many things, not all of which everyone likes, but fucking over their customers the way MS regularily does hasn't been among them so far. You forget a major difference: Apple is a hardware vendor, why would they do something that makes purchasing their hardware less interesting? MS can do that because they don't care about hardware, it's not their margins.