This is untrue. While vegetarians have a range of reasons for their diet, the same does not hold for vegans. Veganism is an ethical stance - there is no health reason not to wear leather shoes. Also, there are no major religions that require veganism, as opposed to strict vegetarianism.
Note that veganism is NOT a dietary choice as you think it is. It's the whole lifestyle package. You are avoiding animal products in your shoes, jacket, and car upholstery. In my experience, I have never met a vegan who arrived there for a different reason than animal welfare.
My thoughts exactly. We need a real president with real priorities. While Obama was playing around with his Facebook page, Hillary was low-crawling through a hail of sniper fire, on a tarmac halfway around the globe. I heard that she was dragging along an 8 year old girl while signing an autograph with her other hand.
The proposal assumes that laws are self-contained, but in reality they exist in a context of other (possibly even more vague) laws. The tester group would need to be aware of ALL these other laws to declare a particular law vague. Take a simple case - "obscene materials shall not be displayed inside restaurants that serve minors". Do you already have a law that says restaurants cannot refuse to serve customers who have brought children? Not to mention the can of worms about what is obscene, conflicting federal laws and so on. The tester group would have to be judges, and you're right back at the massive clusterfuck that is the US judicial system.
The only solution is to disallow any lawyer or judge from interpreting a law. If there is a question as to whether a law is vague then it has to be determined by a panel of lay people. Take lawyers out of the equation and you have a set of laws that anyone can understand. If it doesn't make sense to a jury of your peers, it's vague and needs to be thrown out.
As I had mentioned, the algorithms are fairly well known - which is the problem. I would imagine there are multiple, possibly overlapping, patents which cover all this from various angles. Anyone trying to make a commercial product would have to deal with a legion of patent trolls and parasitic lawyers. The big players already provide storage systems and the small players can't afford the litigation. It's just not worth the effort.
You haven't put any thought into this - it takes about 20 seconds to answer your concerns given an introductory class in OS design.
Obviously computers will crash or be turned off. We have this wonderful concept in architecture design called "redundancy" which we can use to address problems like that:
Assume the probability of any computer being offline is d(c_n). For some computers you will have d(c) very low, such as user out of town often, other will have d(c) quite high, either the user leaves it on all the time or it has background processing to do.
Computing and updating d() is fairly easy given any modern management tool. Then create clusters of computers with a required availability so that you stripe data across the componenet computers taking into account d() of each computer. Availability of the cluster would be a function of your modified striping algorithm. When you save data, you just choose what availability you would settle for, and the right cluster is chosen.
Let me answer your next question in advance: if this is so obvious why is no one producing a product that's cheap and easy to implement? Because you'd have about 25 patent trolls lined up at the courthouse - too many teeth, not enough ass.
Well, here in the U.S. the guy who rides on the back of the garbage truck is a "sanitation engineer", so I think the word engineer is used more as a feel-good affirmation than as an actual descriptor.
I think the word should be reserved for positions that require significant technical, and especially mathematical knowledge. If you don't know at least some math that an advanced HS student wouldn't, then you're not an engineer. Sorry, but reading books on methodology doesn't make what you do complex.
I don't know if I'd characterize it as "mind-bogglingly complex". It's a series of registry edits. There will probably be appropriate.REG files released by various parties in the next few days, and if you're paranoid, it should take about 15 minutes to roll your own. As for users in non-managed environments, I don't know how many home users really try to access files that are over a decade old.
Let's examine the first sentence of your post in detail:
Have you ever wondered why we haven't
encountered You are assuming you would recognize another "intelligent" being if you saw one. More further down.
intelligent What do you mean by intelligent? Would developing an elaborate system of tunneling through rock be considered that? Please - no "I understand undergrad math" tangents - just because you understand prime numbers doesn't necessarily mean you're going to transmit them via radio.
life forms what do you mean by life? Are crystalline structures alive? Do you believe in Gaia theory and such?
other than ourselves? An
advanced race What do you mean by advanced? Us Xenians of Tau Ceti consider silence the pinnacle of achievement. You are measuring advancement by human standards. I have been hanging around these parts for the last 2 billion years, but know better than to advertise the fact.
with regular
slower-than-light Slower than what? I tunnel through rock. A few of the theoretical ones have speculated that it's possible to tunnel faster than you can crawl, but this is highly imaginative.
starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy Colonization is not even a concept understood or appreciated by YOUR whole planet, not to mention a totally alien one. Us Xenians like to stay close to home. Why would we want to go to a marginally hospitable planet?
within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale). By YOUR time scale, maybe. On Tau Ceti it takes 215 years to fully boil an egg. Don't confuse YOUR idea of "geological" for ours.
Where have you been the past decade? Obviously not hiding out in an underground bunker like you...
Would you care to enlighten the rest of us with a few legal opinions supporting your view? I'm sorry, but encryption is tailored towards people with reason, not rabid schizophrenics. If you think the government is putting nanobots into your yogurt, TrueCrypt will probably not help you very much.
I am a math dude, so it's pretty much impossible for me to ever overestimate the intelligence of a lawyer or a judge. I put them in the same category that I reserve for those who still believe it's possible to square a circle, or those who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. (Looking at you, Reverend Mike H.!)
Still, they must operate according to their rules. The rules seem idiotic to anyone who has taken a college course in axiomatic logic, but if you live in the US, you need to understand how to manipulate those rules.
Bottom line - without some evidence that a hidden volume exists, there is no way for a prosecutor to compel you to disclose the key to that (possibly nonexistent) volume. The dystopian scenario you are describing just would not happen without some fundamental change in our justice system.
Plausible deniability features are specifically meant to address scenarios such as yours. There's a separate thread going on about TrueCrypt and plausible deniability.
Random data is exactly what you'd expect to find if there were a hidden volume, as well. That's the entire point. Ok, I think you're missing the point a bit here. You find random data if:
1. There is no hidden volume. 2. There is a hidden volume.
So how exactly is the presence of random data remotely relevant to this discussion? You're going to find it no matter what, so how are you going to argue a point based on its presence? The prosecutor has to show some shred of evidence to prove that a hidden volume exists.
And again, we're not talking about conviction. We're talking about discovery. Assuming the kind of paranoid fantasy you're premising your argument on, why not just go one step further and assume that the bailiff is going to shoot you instantly if you're found guilty?
That's a whole different matter. The assumption so far has been that your use of encryption is not known in advance and the police just come in and seize your computer. They wouldn't keep imaging the drive as you suggest - the most common physical method would be to put a small bug inside the keyboard and record keystrokes.
There are a host of countermeasures for this that predate computer encryption. Any decent conspiracy theorist will be able to give you several ways to know if someone's been in your room while you were gone.
He'd be basing it on the presence of random data. Random data is exactly what you would expect to find if there were no hidden volume. Remember, when the partition/file is created, random data is laid down for all the blank space. This is a standard cryptographic technique. The only way to find a hidden volume would be to show that the data is not random, and you can't do that without the hidden volume's key.
I can certainly find any number of experts to explain all this to the judge. You think the prosecutor is going to find an expert who's willing to look like a jackass arguing a point that's obviously wrong?
Also, I'm not talking about appealing a conviction. I'm talking about appealing a subpoena. The costs are quite different, not to mention that you'd have lawyers lining up to take a case like this pro bono.
"And why did you set up a 100 MB partition to hold 1 MB of financial records?" Well, same reason I'm only using 35GB on a 500GB hard drive right now. Future expansion. Resizing the encrypted file after it's created could cause problems in stability, since I have such a huge hard drive I figured I'd be uber conservative and allocate WAY more room than I need.
Not exactly an unlikely argument. Please note my boot partition size:/dev/sda1 958M 74M 836M 9%/boot
I'm only using 9% of it. Which do you think is more likely - that I am hiding files in it or just wanted to throw way more room than necessary because hard drive space is cheap? You'll find hard drive space overbudgeting all over my computer, and I can find any number of experts that will tell the judge that overallocating room is completely reasonable.
Unless the prosecutor is stumbling drunk, he's not even going to try arguing this line...
I wonder about this too. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 and went way overboard on the simultaneous hardware upgrade. Not very smart, I now have a system with 8GB memory and a 512MB nVidia card that I don't actually do any gaming on.
To test memory usage and see if it actually made any difference, I launched 60 separate Firefox windows. I went to each one and pointed them to pages that had animations etc. Played video on a couple. With all that going on, Ubuntu was using about 700MB of memory and only running the CPUs at about 50%.
I've got all the eye candy like the cube and fire effects turned on. How can Microsoft need SO much more resources to do essentially the same thing? To be fair to them, they have good programmers and experience - they should definitely be able to compete in this area.
What's the prosecutor basing his claim on? You have to have some evidence to support that a hidden volume exists before asking a judge for the key. The physical equivalent in this case would be the prosecutor asking for the location of your hidden safe where there is nothing to indicate that you actually have one.
I really don't care about one corrupt judge - I'll just appeal at the next level. What you're talking about is a fundamental change in the justice system. It's pretty safe to assume that any court of appeals would take a dim view of a judicial decision this far out in left field.
As far as RIPA goes, here's a direct quote from the Wikipedia entry:
"It has been suggested that the "plausible deniability" features in free software such as TrueCrypt will make the task of investigations featuring RIPA much more difficult."
I think "much more difficult" is a bit of an understatement in this case.
You have no understanding of what a hidden volume is.
Assume I DID have a hidden volume.
Of course I have a TrueCrypt binary. I am not hiding the fact that I am using TrueCrypt. When the police search my hard drive they will find a file marked "truecrypt-encrypted-secrets". They will ask me about it and I will say it is for my financial records and cheerfully provide them with the password.
They will open the file and find a few mundane documents. What they will not see is that the raw data that comprises the end of the file is concealing a second set of encrypted documents, also using Truecrypt.
That part of the file is mathematically indistinguisable from random data. Without actually knowing the password, it is impossible to know it's there.
Addressing the technical requirements, it's not all that hard. If you can setup a partition with PGP, you're in the same ballpark as far as technical skills.
Without any proof of the existence of a hidden volume, there is no way for the government to compel discovery. I don't bother using a hidden volume myself because I'm not concerned with plausible deniability. But without being able to tell me apart from the users that do, a judge won't be able to do anything for the government.
LOGO was actually fun - the point was what your program did, not how pretty your code was...
Back in high school, after reading a book "Turtle Graphics" I created my own turtle environment in Basic on the Apple IIc. I set it up for multiple turtles so that I could give each of them rules (inadvertently modeling a predator-prey system long before I knew what it was). I remember one day I left the computer running on a fairly complex set of rules that had each turtle avoiding the edge, following and avoiding other turtles with 90 degree turns only, etc. etc.
When I came back about an hour and a half later after lunch I discovered that my program had drawn an intricate fractal swastika across the whole screen. The teacher and several other students had already seen this. Much fun explaining that one - thank heavens it was before the modern paranoid age of "zero tolerance" in schools.
Learning programming used to be more fun back then. Instead of clean code that did boring things, we wrote sloppy code that did fun things. Nowadays the pedagogues dictate what kids learn, not the geeks. I feel a bit sorry for the younger people learning CS nowadays because there's no way to convey what the atmosphere was like back in the 80s.
It looks like most of the posters agree that amateurs are just as good as the professionals.
In the interests of disclosure, I didn't actually read the postings that were several paragraphs long and filled with punctuation symbols, but if I spent my morning trying to read all that I wouldn't have time to update my blog.
I would imagine that we need exactly the opposite - a narrower focus rather than a broader one.
A lowest common denominator club would have zero appeal to me: I've been using Linux since Slackware version 1.00 and don't need to sit through yet another presentation on how to configure Apache. I believe the same would apply to most attendees of a user group - a Linux newbie is much more the exception than the rule.
Given the ubiquity of howtos on the web, what would make me drive 15 miles after work to attend a meeting?
Just one thing - the chance to be part of an expert discussion. If you have a presentation on how to use a Linux system and interface plug to download ODBC diagnostics from your car, I'm there. It's a chance to listen to people who know more about that particular niche hash it out. A presentation on reflashing a cell phone to run Linux might have no immediate utility for me, but it's something that will generate new ideas that I might be able to use under other circumstances.
In summary, to make user groups relevant, they have to appeal to the geeks. And specialization appeals to geeks much more than generalization.
I'm afraid you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how open source development happens.
Specifically, you are getting the cart before the horse. Company XYZ doesn't pick an arbitrary project from SourceForge and, strictly out of the goodness of their heart, task several paid programmers with working on it - with the goal of someday using it. Rather, they start using an existing product which is established (Linux, Apache, etc), and after heavy use realize that contributing to it is in their own best interest. Linux was successful BEFORE IBM invested a dime in it. Apache was successful before any corporation officially contributed a single line of code.
How exactly do you think corporations are going to "block" GPLv3 code? By the time the sofware is worth blocking, it has either gained a following or failed. If it already has a following, the only choice the corporation has is whether to jump on the bandwagon. 90% of corporations are USERS, not developers. GPLv3 makes absolutely no difference to my boss since he's not planning on redistributing any of the code. If 7Zip comes with GPLv3 rather than GPLv2, you really think he's going to skip on it and pay $40/license for WinZip?
Well, I certainly don't care. I'm planning on putting in an order for an OpenMoko neo1973. ( details at http://www.openmoko.com/, not affiliated with them ) The cell phone guru at work has offered to help me with the connectivity side. Why should I wait on the benevolent dictator of cute to grace me with the knowledge he feels fit to bestow? I'm the kind of whacko that thinks a microwave should ship with an API CD and serial port.
I'm not an Apple basher, but definitely not a fan. It amazes me that they took a freely developed OS, used it as the foundation for their own commercial OS, used that in turn as a foundation for their proprietary locked down phone, and now won't even let the original BSD freelance guys write code for the phone!
You can bet your last dollar anything I cobble together for the neo will be GPLv3.
Again, if you like Apple, go for it. I'm a utilitarian at heart and think it's perfectly OK to use technology without embracing the politics behind the scenes. But if so, you shouldn't honestly be asking for or expecting an unlock - you should take what they give you. Apple's business model is based on closed systems and keeping you locked in and everyone else locked out. If you support them then you implicitly support that philosophy.
Rather than having the FCC force manufacturers to make devices open, it would be more productive to buy from and support a manufacturer that chooses to be that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that veganism is NOT a dietary choice as you think it is. It's the whole lifestyle package. You are avoiding animal products in your shoes, jacket, and car upholstery. In my experience, I have never met a vegan who arrived there for a different reason than animal welfare.
My thoughts exactly. We need a real president with real priorities. While Obama was playing around with his Facebook page, Hillary was low-crawling through a hail of sniper fire, on a tarmac halfway around the globe. I heard that she was dragging along an 8 year old girl while signing an autograph with her other hand.
The proposal assumes that laws are self-contained, but in reality they exist in a context of other (possibly even more vague) laws. The tester group would need to be aware of ALL these other laws to declare a particular law vague. Take a simple case - "obscene materials shall not be displayed inside restaurants that serve minors". Do you already have a law that says restaurants cannot refuse to serve customers who have brought children? Not to mention the can of worms about what is obscene, conflicting federal laws and so on. The tester group would have to be judges, and you're right back at the massive clusterfuck that is the US judicial system.
The only solution is to disallow any lawyer or judge from interpreting a law. If there is a question as to whether a law is vague then it has to be determined by a panel of lay people. Take lawyers out of the equation and you have a set of laws that anyone can understand. If it doesn't make sense to a jury of your peers, it's vague and needs to be thrown out.
As I had mentioned, the algorithms are fairly well known - which is the problem. I would imagine there are multiple, possibly overlapping, patents which cover all this from various angles. Anyone trying to make a commercial product would have to deal with a legion of patent trolls and parasitic lawyers. The big players already provide storage systems and the small players can't afford the litigation. It's just not worth the effort.
Obviously computers will crash or be turned off. We have this wonderful concept in architecture design called "redundancy" which we can use to address problems like that:
Assume the probability of any computer being offline is d(c_n). For some computers you will have d(c) very low, such as user out of town often, other will have d(c) quite high, either the user leaves it on all the time or it has background processing to do.
Computing and updating d() is fairly easy given any modern management tool. Then create clusters of computers with a required availability so that you stripe data across the componenet computers taking into account d() of each computer. Availability of the cluster would be a function of your modified striping algorithm. When you save data, you just choose what availability you would settle for, and the right cluster is chosen.
Let me answer your next question in advance: if this is so obvious why is no one producing a product that's cheap and easy to implement? Because you'd have about 25 patent trolls lined up at the courthouse - too many teeth, not enough ass.
Well, here in the U.S. the guy who rides on the back of the garbage truck is a "sanitation engineer", so I think the word engineer is used more as a feel-good affirmation than as an actual descriptor.
I think the word should be reserved for positions that require significant technical, and especially mathematical knowledge. If you don't know at least some math that an advanced HS student wouldn't, then you're not an engineer. Sorry, but reading books on methodology doesn't make what you do complex.
I don't know if I'd characterize it as "mind-bogglingly complex". It's a series of registry edits. There will probably be appropriate .REG files released by various parties in the next few days, and if you're paranoid, it should take about 15 minutes to roll your own. As for users in non-managed environments, I don't know how many home users really try to access files that are over a decade old.
Would you care to enlighten the rest of us with a few legal opinions supporting your view? I'm sorry, but encryption is tailored towards people with reason, not rabid schizophrenics. If you think the government is putting nanobots into your yogurt, TrueCrypt will probably not help you very much.
I am a math dude, so it's pretty much impossible for me to ever overestimate the intelligence of a lawyer or a judge. I put them in the same category that I reserve for those who still believe it's possible to square a circle, or those who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. (Looking at you, Reverend Mike H.!)
Still, they must operate according to their rules. The rules seem idiotic to anyone who has taken a college course in axiomatic logic, but if you live in the US, you need to understand how to manipulate those rules.
Bottom line - without some evidence that a hidden volume exists, there is no way for a prosecutor to compel you to disclose the key to that (possibly nonexistent) volume. The dystopian scenario you are describing just would not happen without some fundamental change in our justice system.
Plausible deniability features are specifically meant to address scenarios such as yours. There's a separate thread going on about TrueCrypt and plausible deniability.
1. There is no hidden volume.
2. There is a hidden volume.
So how exactly is the presence of random data remotely relevant to this discussion? You're going to find it no matter what, so how are you going to argue a point based on its presence? The prosecutor has to show some shred of evidence to prove that a hidden volume exists.
And again, we're not talking about conviction. We're talking about discovery. Assuming the kind of paranoid fantasy you're premising your argument on, why not just go one step further and assume that the bailiff is going to shoot you instantly if you're found guilty?
That's a whole different matter. The assumption so far has been that your use of encryption is not known in advance and the police just come in and seize your computer. They wouldn't keep imaging the drive as you suggest - the most common physical method would be to put a small bug inside the keyboard and record keystrokes.
There are a host of countermeasures for this that predate computer encryption. Any decent conspiracy theorist will be able to give you several ways to know if someone's been in your room while you were gone.
I can certainly find any number of experts to explain all this to the judge. You think the prosecutor is going to find an expert who's willing to look like a jackass arguing a point that's obviously wrong?
Also, I'm not talking about appealing a conviction. I'm talking about appealing a subpoena. The costs are quite different, not to mention that you'd have lawyers lining up to take a case like this pro bono.
Not exactly an unlikely argument. Please note my boot partition size:
I'm only using 9% of it. Which do you think is more likely - that I am hiding files in it or just wanted to throw way more room than necessary because hard drive space is cheap? You'll find hard drive space overbudgeting all over my computer, and I can find any number of experts that will tell the judge that overallocating room is completely reasonable.
Unless the prosecutor is stumbling drunk, he's not even going to try arguing this line...
I wonder about this too. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 and went way overboard on the simultaneous hardware upgrade. Not very smart, I now have a system with 8GB memory and a 512MB nVidia card that I don't actually do any gaming on.
To test memory usage and see if it actually made any difference, I launched 60 separate Firefox windows. I went to each one and pointed them to pages that had animations etc. Played video on a couple. With all that going on, Ubuntu was using about 700MB of memory and only running the CPUs at about 50%.
I've got all the eye candy like the cube and fire effects turned on. How can Microsoft need SO much more resources to do essentially the same thing? To be fair to them, they have good programmers and experience - they should definitely be able to compete in this area.
What's the prosecutor basing his claim on? You have to have some evidence to support that a hidden volume exists before asking a judge for the key. The physical equivalent in this case would be the prosecutor asking for the location of your hidden safe where there is nothing to indicate that you actually have one.
I really don't care about one corrupt judge - I'll just appeal at the next level. What you're talking about is a fundamental change in the justice system. It's pretty safe to assume that any court of appeals would take a dim view of a judicial decision this far out in left field.
As far as RIPA goes, here's a direct quote from the Wikipedia entry:
"It has been suggested that the "plausible deniability" features in free software such as TrueCrypt will make the task of investigations featuring RIPA much more difficult."
I think "much more difficult" is a bit of an understatement in this case.
Assume I DID have a hidden volume.
Of course I have a TrueCrypt binary. I am not hiding the fact that I am using TrueCrypt. When the police search my hard drive they will find a file marked "truecrypt-encrypted-secrets". They will ask me about it and I will say it is for my financial records and cheerfully provide them with the password.
They will open the file and find a few mundane documents. What they will not see is that the raw data that comprises the end of the file is concealing a second set of encrypted documents, also using Truecrypt.
That part of the file is mathematically indistinguisable from random data. Without actually knowing the password, it is impossible to know it's there.
Addressing the technical requirements, it's not all that hard. If you can setup a partition with PGP, you're in the same ballpark as far as technical skills.
On my current setup with Ubuntu 7.10, it is fairly easy to set up TrueCrypt with hidden volumes.
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/hidden-volume.php
Without any proof of the existence of a hidden volume, there is no way for the government to compel discovery. I don't bother using a hidden volume myself because I'm not concerned with plausible deniability. But without being able to tell me apart from the users that do, a judge won't be able to do anything for the government.
LOGO was actually fun - the point was what your program did, not how pretty your code was...
Back in high school, after reading a book "Turtle Graphics" I created my own turtle environment in Basic on the Apple IIc. I set it up for multiple turtles so that I could give each of them rules (inadvertently modeling a predator-prey system long before I knew what it was). I remember one day I left the computer running on a fairly complex set of rules that had each turtle avoiding the edge, following and avoiding other turtles with 90 degree turns only, etc. etc.
When I came back about an hour and a half later after lunch I discovered that my program had drawn an intricate fractal swastika across the whole screen. The teacher and several other students had already seen this. Much fun explaining that one - thank heavens it was before the modern paranoid age of "zero tolerance" in schools.
Learning programming used to be more fun back then. Instead of clean code that did boring things, we wrote sloppy code that did fun things. Nowadays the pedagogues dictate what kids learn, not the geeks. I feel a bit sorry for the younger people learning CS nowadays because there's no way to convey what the atmosphere was like back in the 80s.
It looks like most of the posters agree that amateurs are just as good as the professionals. In the interests of disclosure, I didn't actually read the postings that were several paragraphs long and filled with punctuation symbols, but if I spent my morning trying to read all that I wouldn't have time to update my blog.
A lowest common denominator club would have zero appeal to me: I've been using Linux since Slackware version 1.00 and don't need to sit through yet another presentation on how to configure Apache. I believe the same would apply to most attendees of a user group - a Linux newbie is much more the exception than the rule.
Given the ubiquity of howtos on the web, what would make me drive 15 miles after work to attend a meeting?
Just one thing - the chance to be part of an expert discussion. If you have a presentation on how to use a Linux system and interface plug to download ODBC diagnostics from your car, I'm there. It's a chance to listen to people who know more about that particular niche hash it out. A presentation on reflashing a cell phone to run Linux might have no immediate utility for me, but it's something that will generate new ideas that I might be able to use under other circumstances.
In summary, to make user groups relevant, they have to appeal to the geeks. And specialization appeals to geeks much more than generalization.
Specifically, you are getting the cart before the horse. Company XYZ doesn't pick an arbitrary project from SourceForge and, strictly out of the goodness of their heart, task several paid programmers with working on it - with the goal of someday using it. Rather, they start using an existing product which is established (Linux, Apache, etc), and after heavy use realize that contributing to it is in their own best interest. Linux was successful BEFORE IBM invested a dime in it. Apache was successful before any corporation officially contributed a single line of code.
How exactly do you think corporations are going to "block" GPLv3 code? By the time the sofware is worth blocking, it has either gained a following or failed. If it already has a following, the only choice the corporation has is whether to jump on the bandwagon. 90% of corporations are USERS, not developers. GPLv3 makes absolutely no difference to my boss since he's not planning on redistributing any of the code. If 7Zip comes with GPLv3 rather than GPLv2, you really think he's going to skip on it and pay $40/license for WinZip?
Well, I certainly don't care. I'm planning on putting in an order for an OpenMoko neo1973. ( details at http://www.openmoko.com/, not affiliated with them ) The cell phone guru at work has offered to help me with the connectivity side. Why should I wait on the benevolent dictator of cute to grace me with the knowledge he feels fit to bestow? I'm the kind of whacko that thinks a microwave should ship with an API CD and serial port.
I'm not an Apple basher, but definitely not a fan. It amazes me that they took a freely developed OS, used it as the foundation for their own commercial OS, used that in turn as a foundation for their proprietary locked down phone, and now won't even let the original BSD freelance guys write code for the phone! You can bet your last dollar anything I cobble together for the neo will be GPLv3.
Again, if you like Apple, go for it. I'm a utilitarian at heart and think it's perfectly OK to use technology without embracing the politics behind the scenes. But if so, you shouldn't honestly be asking for or expecting an unlock - you should take what they give you. Apple's business model is based on closed systems and keeping you locked in and everyone else locked out. If you support them then you implicitly support that philosophy.
Rather than having the FCC force manufacturers to make devices open, it would be more productive to buy from and support a manufacturer that chooses to be that way.