Given that Google, Apple and Facebook are to the Democrats what the oil and military industrial industry are to the Republicans, there is no way that they will be brought to heel like Microsoft was a generation ago.
Posts by Blarkon
87 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2010
Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments
Perl Foundation faces more departures after pausing Community Affairs Team
Status seeking drives out competence
All communities that reach a certain size end up being torn apart by those that seek status through social means. It's just easier to see in technical communities where introverted nerds get removed by extroverted status seekers. Social recognition becomes more important than technical contribution and the technical contributors eventually abandon ship.
Frustration with Elite:Dangerous boils over into 'Refund Quest'
Zippy one-liners, broken promises: Doctor Who on the Orient Express
Oracle claims knockout blow in IP lawsuit
MPAA, meet the Streisand effect: Picture ass. slaps Reddit with takedown
Reddit owned by a big company
Reddit is ultimately a company with assets that doesn't want to end up getting dragged through court for providing a forum for linking to pirated material. If you started posting links to pirated content in the Reg comments section, you'd similarly expect to see it deleted.
Bing's the thing in Microsoft's push for cheap Windows devices
FSF slams Mozilla for 'shocking' Firefox DRM ankle-grab
Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted
Dropbox nukes bloke's file share in DMCA brouhaha – then admits it made a 'HASH OF IT'
When big biz is forced to compete: Now Microsoft latest to cut cloud prices
Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly
'Amazon has destroyed the unicorn factory' ... How clouds are making sysadmins extinct
Google offers up its own flesh to the world's braying cloud hordes
Feds indict four over alleged Android app copyright infringement
No matter the price, Reg users will find an excuse to pirate
The average Reg commentard's attitude to piracy:
- Price your app low - you're indicating that it's rubbish so it's okay to pirate it.
- Price your app high - you're ripping off the customer and it's okay to pirate it
- Price your app a bit higher than low - you're not competitive because most apps are around $1 so it's okay to pirate it
- Give it away for free and charge for in app purchases. You're too greedy and it's okay to pirate the full cracked version.
In the long run the average Reg commentard can find more "valid excuses to pirate content" than Eskimos have words for snow.
Google, Netflix ready next weapon in net neutrality battle: The fury of millions
Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid
Sniff, sniff, what's that burning smell? Oh, it's Google's patent-filing office working flat out
Google BLASTS BACK at Apple, Microsoft, Sony in Android patent WAR
How quickly we forget
The Google defenders around here seem to forget that Google themselves thought that the patents were worth at least 900 million bucks. What was Google going to do if they purchased them? Here's a hint. They weren't going to give them to the EFF and Linux - they were going to do exactly what this entity is doing to Google. Google was even invited into the consortium that purchased the patents - but wanted to go their own way.
Oooh! My NAUGHTY SKIRT keeps riding up! Hello, INTERNET EXPLORER
It's the '90s all over again: Apple repeats mistakes as low-cost tablets pile up
Web Daddy Berners-Lee DRMs HTML5 into 2016
EFF should rename itself "Anti Copyright"
For the EFF - "electronic rights" seem to come down to being able to pirate content without consequence. They've been muted to the point of whispering about all the NSA stuff and our right to privacy. You don't see them shouting from the rooftops about that - the only thing that gets them excited is if someone suggests stopping the torrenting of Game of Thrones.
Microsoft: Our clouds don't bleed you to death
Microsoft tweaks WinPhone YouTube app to fix Google gripes
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
Acer reveals 'floating' screen to save desktop, self
Internet freedom groups urge W3C to keep DRM out of HTML
Pushing content to apps and off the web
If the EFF wins this round, the trickle of content off the web and into specific apps becomes a flood. Content distribution can occur directly to people's tablets, phones and PCs directly via apps written for that purpose. In the long run, good content thrives where there is revenue and the web so far has turned out to be a really rubbish medium when it comes to ensuring that the people who create the content get paid for it.
Free online Uni courses pressure vendors to drop training costs
In a good course you pay to access the instructor's knowledge
If you've ever taken a course with a good instructor, what you're really paying for is access to their time over the course of a couple of days to have them answer any question you have about a specific technology. MOOCs may provide you with the basic content - but you can pretty much pick that up by looking at the product documentation if you've got the time. If you take an instructor led course on Exchange, the value is in being in the room with an expert on Exchange for a week.
You can figure out if the person presenting the course isn't an expert pretty quickly. If you do, you ask for a refund. If you sit on a course where you know the instructor is a muppet, you're wasting your time and whoever paid for the course's money.
Microsoft exec selling his Surface tablet
Obama says patent trolls 'extort money', pledges reform
Re: Patents are a wondrous thing...
Patents predate the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and there is some evidence that a similar idea was present in ancient Greece.
But sure - get rid of the system so really big companies like Google and Microsoft can copy novel technical ideas without paying the person that came up with that idea - or allow that person to sell the rights to that idea to anyone who finds it valuable (rather than forcing them only to be able to sell them to the big companies).
Windows RT jailbreak smash: Run ANY app on Surface slabs
The 'Digital Economy' in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be
Samba 4 arrives with full Active Directory support
only makes sense for expensive unix consultants
Given how much a good UNIX/Linux admin costs on an hourly basis, this needs to be turnkey to the point of pressing a single button to beat the cost advantage of purchasing a Windows license. Good UNIX/Linux admins can cost 2 to 3 times per hour what a Windows admin costs.
One week left before US faces clamp down on piracy
Legitimate usage
That would be those hundreds of millions of Linux users torrenting stuff. Torrentfreak.com has a nice tracker of the most frequently torrented files. Pirate Bay has a list of the top 100
Go to that site and find the first item on that list of the top 100 that is legit. (to save you some time, all of the files are rips of copyrighted materials)
If you are going to write about copyright infringement - at least do it honestly.
Evildoers can now turn all sites on a Linux server into silent hell-pits
Web Applications are the vector
Incorrectly configured web applications are a vector. Just because you're managing a Linux box doesn't mean that the developers who coded the web applications on the server haven't done something stupid. Those web applications don't come from repositories - they are likely developed either in house, or your organization has paid someone to develop them.
4chan founder Moot threatens site for using his handle
Oprah Winfrey too late to save Microsoft's Windows 8
British Ruby conference cancelled after diversity row
How to get Open Source conferences cancelled
This objection seems to apply to most technical conferences, and especially those of the open source variety. All someone has to do now is claim that conference X doesn't have a "representative quota of minorities" on the speaker schedule where "representative quota" is a malleable value (looks like Susser was going for 1/3rd of all speakers - so good luck with that guys)
Patent trolling to go under anti-trust spotlight
Patent Troll = whoever is suing me at the time
While there are some bad actors, a lot of the screaming about Patent Trolls is coming out of the PR departments of very well funded companies that simply don't want to pay to license technology. For something that supposedly "stifles innovation" - we seem to have had an unprecedented level of innovation in the last 30 years.
It's sort of like how conservatives always go on about how regulation is harming their business when their real aim is to get rid of the very regulation that stops them from screwing over everyone else. The companies that go on the loudest about how bad patents are seem to be very successful already and don't appear to have been stifled to the point of choking. They just don't want to pay licensing fees and they are in the process of convincing enough people to go along with it to ensure that the next generation of people who come up with bright ideas - who might challenge the status quo - won't be able to benefit from those ideas and overthrow those that are currently at the top of the heap.
Oprah Winfrey tweets her love of Surface – from her iPad
Why IT chiefs are irrelevant to Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy
Google rolls out new, cheaper Chromebooks 'for everyone'
Microsoft reveals Windows RT OEMs
Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review
Microsoft: Azure now holds FOUR TREELLION objects
Google files EU complaint over Nokia/Microsoft patent trolling
Google's Biz Model
In the long run China and India are going to do to Google what Google has done to everyone else. Bruce Sterling even had this in one of his novels - where China and India said "cool, IP doesn't matter" - and just steal it wholesale and wiped out the US economy as you can't have a knowledge economy without some sort of value on knowledge. Google doesn't believe that inventors should be rewarded financially for their effort and they are happy to destroy the emerging information economy pursuing the freetard jihad.
Ubuntu will hit the big time on Amazon: Here's how

Chromebook - Emperor of the Galaxy of Cloud Laptops
The question is, can Ubuntu match the market share of the current reigning champion of the "Cloud is the Computer" - the Chromebook. We all know that the Chromebook can kick more buttock than a millipede with a headache, which is why it clearly dominates the client operating system market share stats.
Can an Ubuntu cloud computer going to be able to compete with the monolithic success of the Chromebook?
Pirate stomping by Google et Cie won't work, says expert
So what you are saying is that for every infringing item on a search engine, the person who created the work needs to go to court.
It costs roughly 10K-20K to pursue one case of someone posting a work through the courts. That's one case. If you have hundreds of copies of your stuff posted online ...
To put that in perspective, the average advance on a book is between 5-10K and most don't earn their money back. Taking one takedown through court is likely to cost more than most works earn and the only one making a profit is the lawyers. (well that and the advertising company running adds against the pirated content)
What *is* the problem with someone listed as the copyright holder on the work contacting a search engine and saying "can you remove these links to my work please"?
(the reality is that people on the search engine end don't want to do the cursory validation of "yes that person seems to be the registered copyright holder of that work")
There needs to be a way for creators to get this sort of thing remediated without it costing them thousands in legal fees.