Obstruction of justice is typically things like bribing witnesses, which is specifically mentioned in the law. Not refusing to unlock oa locked cell-phone, which the courts have held requires a warrant in other circumstances.

From the information in the article, this sounds like an attempt to scare a citizen into doing something.

Attempts to widen this particular law to cover less serious crimes get rejected by the courts: the very first case on the subject inCanII says (emphasis added)

[19] Moreover, an assertion that the mere attempt by an accused to identify an informant is a crime, fails to take into account that the types of conduct which constitute obstruction of justice, even though not fully articulated in the Criminal Code, are relatively well and narrowly defined in the law, and must remain so narrowly defined in order to have certainty in the law. Offences against the administration of justice have always included such conduct as attempting to influence a jury or to threaten a witness, or publishing sensitive information when a matter is working its way through the justice system, a general category of conduct which lawyers sometimes call an infraction of the sub judice rule. I have been unable to find a single suggestion anywhere in the law that an accused cannot take steps to identify a police informant; the court should act with restraint in opening new classes of obstruction of justice. Although obstruction of justice is an evolving concept, its main tendency is to narrow the categories of conduct which may constitute a crime rather than to enlarge them: Sunday Times. Recent examples of the narrowing of the categories include the removal of scandalizing the court as a matter of contempt, Kopyto, and the striking down of the publication ban on bail hearings, White.

Only on-disk, non-addressable controller proms are "read" by the software in the proms.

The boot prom has to boot stuff or the product can't be sold, and in this case is used to boot a program that runs on the hardware that continuously reads the prom. That HW can verify it, and all the other proms which are reachable from the CPU, including all sorts of stuff plugged into the various busses. That includes some disks, the ones we were worried about viruses wiping.

For some specific disks, you may have to pull the drive and clamp directly to the prom's pins.Those are the ones a spy would want to subvert.

Boot from a randomly chosen Linux rescue disk, and check the various proms. You've used the boot rom to boot a CD/DVD, but what you've booted is wildly different from the Windows systems that are the common target, so the attackers will have great difficulty in hiding what they've done from an unfamiliar system.

It's actually easier to hide evil stuff in disk proms, as your only access to them is via routines *in* the disk prom, as one of the other commentators pointed out,

I was commenting on Google's actions being incongrous in the US, where free speech is a social norm. That it was even part of the constitution of the country, unlike many other countries of the day, was an example of the importance it had in the minds of the Colonists.

--dave
[ I'm eminently aware of the narrowness of US constitutional law! Apologies for going off-topic, but ...

It's widely cited in the popular press to excuse unconscionable actions by non-government actors. The assumption seems to be that if the government is prohibited from doing something, everyone else is therefor perfectly free to do it, whether or not it's a good idea. To use a frivolous example from India, it does not follow that if a government is prohibited from strangling random passers-by, that individual devotees of Kali can then take it up as a hobby.]

The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.