Android is open, so we can just go in and remove that check... oh right.
Google Movies service is just another application running on Android.
If you had "Dsl Movies" application for Android (or iOS or Windows) you would have a right to protect your service from people trying to watch the movies for free or extract them from your service and post them on the internet.
Why do you think that Google has no such right to protect their movie service?
As to general snarkiness about openness of Android: please come back when you can download source code to iOS or WP7 or BlackBerry, compile it and then install on your device.
While I agree the snarkiness doesn't help his point and in fact has no bearing on the argument at all, to say Google is OK to not release the source for their self-proclaimed, open system because other vendors have not released the source for their self-proclaimed, extremely closed systems is ludicrous.
Anyway, this is much ado about nothing since I'm sure there will be a patched version out almost immediately.
* I don't actually own a Xoom, but that's not the point.
If you'd followed that you'd seen that you will end up with Gingerbread instead [1].
1: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/dalvik.git;a=heads
How is that remotely related to the article?
There are several ways to build vanilla Android just fine. The only Google App on my phone is Market. How are people so incredibly uninformed about Android still?
Manually managing app/tasks in Android is a recipe for really poor performance and battery life. Anything after Eclair will handle app killing very appropriately. I've only had one app that needed killing and even then, I haven't had to kill it recently at all with CM7 running the show.
My comment was a bit snarky, the but the point remains. I can't get my hands on the latest sources so I can add a fix to prevent applications from detecting rooted devices (a cat and mouse game for sure, but beside the point). My money would also be on Google shitting a very large brick and trying to find a subtile way to prevent my patch from working.
requiring some kind of credential, even if it's based on some bullshit notion of a "secured" system, is independent of the "openness" of the system.
In fact, your post is the same kind of ambiguous use of the "open" in "open source" that continuously comes up in these conversations. just...stop it.