jkn

It's not like iOS is impossible to hack now and it would be terrible that it becomes possible. There are other aspects of the system that allow malicious exploits more easily than this theoretical threat. So it doesn't make sense to preserve at all costs (e.g. making warrants unenforceable) an "impossibilty" that never was.

Apple says:

All that information needs to be protected from hackers and criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our knowledge or permission

As I understand, Apple complains about the introduction of this new threat model:

  1. criminal steals someone's iPhone,
  2. gets hold of a special iOS version that Apple keeps internally to assist the government,
  3. pushes the OS update to the iPhone by themselves,
  4. uses some tool to automate brute-forcing the user passcode

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation.

The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.

Now how serious is this threat? And how useful is it to have the FBI be able to look into a phone when they have a warrant? Does the balance between the right to privacy and the need to assist criminal investigation really tilt towards privacy in this specific case?

Meanwhile there are serious threats that do affect a lot of users in practice, where Apple does a good job but could do better still such as:

- Remote code execution on iOS (6 vulnerabilities in 2016 so far[1])

- Phishing, brute force and social engineering attacks (the improved two-factor authentication is not yet available to everyone[2])

Am I wrong in thinking that users are way more likely to be affected by these threats except when the government has a warrant?

If Apple is actually worried about the FBI getting access to the modified iOS version, they should focus their complaint on that and propose to do the whole data extraction in-house.

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/pr...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915

Right, so they are damaging the Java ecosystem. Though it's not clear this outweighs the benefit of drawing developers to the language in the first place.

My point is, intent matters in shaping the public's perception. Say someone releases (or maintains) an awesome Python 2 library. I certainly won't see that as evil, if they aren't doing it with the purpose of undermining Python 3.

However I would put Linux together with Android then: Linux was similarly replicating Unix APIs for the convenience of compatibility with existing code, and explicitely not aiming for full interoperability.

Octave is another project with an approach similar to Android: trying to provide an open-source Matlab that is mostly compatible, for convenience and to increase the appeal of the platform to Matlab developers, but they are not interested in compatibility for its own sake[1].

Mono falls in the middle, as they are not only providing an alternative runtime for .NET applications, they're also interesting in expanding the platform with new APIs such as POSIX bindings and Gtk#.

[1] At least that was the case a few years ago. It might have changed lately. And this disinterest for full compatibily was partly due there being no "Matlab standard" to implement. See this post from 2000 by the Octave maintainer (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-octave/2000-12/msg00...):

I never intended Octave to be a Matlab clone, nor am I really interested in creating such a thing, but that seems to be what many users of Octave want. It is not very interesting to me to simply reimplement all the features/bugs of Matlab.

I am finding it too constraining to try to maintain almost any level of compatibility with a proprietary product for which there is no standard. It stifles any creativity by the threat of future incompatibility. I see this is as a real problem, not just an imagined one.

Free software needs a vision beyond reimplementation of existing proprietary tools. Those of us who are interested in free software tools must become leaders rather than followers, and I am optimistic that this can happen for numerical software. But I don't believe it can happen if Octave continues down its current path.

Interesting indeed how the two cases are perceived differently. I wonder to what extent they really were similar, legally speaking. At least one important difference is that Microsoft did license Java from Sun. Microsoft was using the Java trademark and advertising J++ as "Java-compatible" although their implementation was not passing the compliance tests.

To go back to the perception of Microsoft and Google's actions by the community, I think it's not hard to explain:

On one hand, you have Microsoft developing a proprietary Java product with the goal of undermining cross-platform Java and locking users and developers to the Windows platform. Remember the famous internal Microsoft email:

"We should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps."

On the other hand, there is Google using Java for the purpose of delivering an open-source operating system. They didn't license Java, but I think the perception is that one should not require a license to use a programming language and/or implement its standard libraries. And compared to Microsoft, the perception is that any Java incompatibily introduced by Google in Android is not malicious but due to technical decisions (be they good or bad).

How were Google actions different from what the Apache Foundation did with the Harmony project (which Google used for their Java implementation), or from any other API implementation? Is it just that the copyright holder eventually released a GPL version of the code while Google chose to stick with their own implementation? I don't see how that is relevant.

API copyright being enforcable is huge for the industry, it means it was illegal for the Harmonly project to implement Java without a license, or for GNUStep to implement Cocoa, or for Mono to implement .NET Windows.Forms. Also 1991 Linux was probably illegal and Wine definitely is. These are just off the top of my head, just search for "open source implementation of" on Bing, chances are most of the results are about illegal projects, including open source implementation of various standards: standards don't necessarily come with a universal license grant, at least for patents (see e.g. the H.264 situation). I would be interested to know if things are different regarding copyright licenses.

Establishing and maintaining a high pressure on the other hand is a one time effort, for example screwing back the front of a ballpoint pen puts the spring inside under permanent pressure, and even gases can be contained at high pressure with no significant loss.

Indeed... This reminds me of a dialogue in Iain Banks' Use of Weapons, between a stranger and a woman from the Culture, a society technologically advanced to the point that machines do everything better than the humans:

     “Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman,   
  looking around the starship shell.

      “Why, of course!” she laughed.

      “Then why do you do it?”

      “It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out 
  those doors for the first time, heading for deep space,   three 
  hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite  
  happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine 
  could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was 
  you who actually did it.”

      “Hmm,” he said.

      (Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a 
  carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will 
  make you a clerk.)

      “Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, 
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, 
  where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing 
  inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding, 
  or swum underwater?”

      “Yes,” he agreed.

      The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, 
  and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because 
  of this?”

      He smiled. “I suppose not.”

      “You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” she 
  looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”

Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting:

Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I’m urging you to adopt such a rule.

And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147

[4] http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-offici...

  Timeline:
  December 2, 2014 — Reported the vulnerability to the Android security, @natashenka confirmed the repro works
  January 6, 2015 — Response form Android security saying that the fix was pushed in mid-December, I checked that the repro stopped working on all my phones
  January 9, 2015 — Public disclosure

Bluetooth is a good example... You can use regular (even Apple's) wireless keyboard on an Android phone out of the box. Even wireless mice, it's a fun thing to try, and see a mouse cursor appearing on the phone screen. I also like that I can plug a USB SDR device on my phone and explore the RF spectrum with an open source app. Something I would not dream to do on iOS, which can't event handle a USB thumb drive.

So I think the situation is very different between the two ecosystems, and it's great that people can choose according to what they value the most. Of course we want the best of both worlds and the two platforms are converging a bit along these lines but a device that allows any app to be installed will probably never be as secure as one that only takes from a curated list.

This left over 100 wealthy foreigners remaining in the canton. Depending on how much wealth they had and how it was distributed, 55 ended up paying more tax and 47 less. Their total cantonal tax bill of CHF13.8 million more than made up for the losses, so the canton did better than break even.

As Google announced today, however, virtually all major hardware vendors will soon support VP9 natively in their products and allow Google’s YouTube to stream HD content up to 4K directly to computers, TVs and mobile devices.

These new hardware partners include ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.[1]

I wonder if the VP9 situation changed for the worse since January, or if the article is simply misleading. It's hard to tell as the quotes in the article are mostly anectodal.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/02/googles-vp9-video-codec-get...

By the way, I think the impact of Android (the open source project) is underestimated. There is a huge number of research and industry projects that are based on the open platform, not just phone and tablet apps but all kind of hardware projects.[2]

So when I read a casual dismissal of these efforts (by knowledgeable people like you) I feel bad for the engineers and managers that work to promote open source inside the company.

On the other hand, Google is the biggest force behind the shift to the Cloud, and that shift means more and more users using closed-source web apps like Google Docs instead of open source applications like LibreOffice, so there is that...

[1] https://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/Program...

[2] As a random example see http://www.citlprojects.com/android_list.html

[1] Although Google's direction is arguably more stable than is usual for publicly traded companies, given the particular share structure designed to keep control in the hands of the founders.

[2] Mostly, being in generally good health and living in a country where basic health insurance is guaranteed and good enough, with premiums that don't depend on your health.

But then even if they weren't anonymized, I think Google would be one of the company I would trust the most for that. They know what they're doing in terms of security and of all the companies that know a lot about me, they're the one who consistently delivered great value from the data they have. I'm thinking of things like search, Google Now and the maps interface for my location history. Plus I'm happy that the monetization of my data serves to fund great projects like this one. It didn't have to be so...

I'm not sure what that means exactly and the numbers certainly encompass more than companies using Drive as a replacement of Office, but I found them suprisingly high. He also mentions a bit before that Drive now has 190 millions 30-day active users.

Onnes hastened to make observations with the small container of -271°C fluid before it all evaporated away. He found it had a lower surface tension than any previously observed liquid, and just 1/8th the density of water. The modest amount of the stuff he had been able to collect behaved very curiously in general, flowing with strange characteristics and evading easy observation as if enveloped in an SEP field.

Android has had a huge impact on the phone market in terms of openness, for manufacturers as well as for end users. I took advantage of this when I put CyanogenMod on my phone using the unlocking tool provided by HTC. I didn't even think of doing something like that with my pre-Android phones.

If you choose to buy a locked-down Android device, blame yourself and then blame Linus: he's the one strongly objecting to distributing Linux under the GPLv3 license, because he dislikes the very clause that would guarantee your freedom to tinker with you device's kernel. But even if every Android was as closed as a TiVo box, it would still be an open-source victory. It would just be a victory more relevant to the manufacturers world than to the users world.

Chrome OS device are similarly hackable, each Chromebook having a switch to turn on Developer Mode. I took advantage of this to run a Debian chroot in my Chromebook's linux system.

More generally, I find it ironic that people complain about Android and Chrome OS not being "real Linux". For years we have had flame wars about Linux vs GNU/Linux terminology, and now people say that Androids and Chromebooks don't really run Linux because they are not anything like a GNU environment. Turns out the Linux vs GNU/Linux distinction is actually useful.

If you're willing to go as far as leaving the walled garden, you can get e.g. Twilight on Android. Not what you asked for of course but this is actually a good example of where the closed nature of iOS hurts users.