Yes, you can boil it down to that, but in doing so you ignore the meaning of "security through obscurity" and replace it with a definition so broad that it loses any meaning. Name a system you consider secure that does not rely on "security through obscurity" by your definition.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_by_design

That's exactly what they DON'T do. These programs buy and sell on their own, without any help from a human trader. It would hardly be high frequency trading if every trade had to be vetted by a human first.

That would be your reality distortion field blocking it.

In that case, Apple is still acting to protect itself from its competitors. Its purpose is not to protect its customers from spyware as you suggest.

Being a spy is illegal. Apple isn't saying it's "illegal" to install spyware; they're saying it's "illegal" to be a competitor and install spyware.

Furthermore, Apple can easily prevent any risk of industrial espionage by using a firewall when necessary. The risk of espionage is a bullshit excuse Apple hides behind. Apple must understand security this basic if they're selling operating systems (or one would hope).

People who are not competing with Apple can still make spyware. To say their purpose is to ban spyware is absurd. If they wanted to ban spyware, they would ban all spyware.

The reality distortion field is strong with this one. You think Google has a monopoly on spyware?

If this were about spyware then no one would be allowed to collect analytics. This isn't the case, however, so it isn't about spyware. It's about limiting Apple's competitors.

What would "tightly integrating" it into the system do that a bot can't?

If you want any certainty, every free project is in need of auditing by the end user.

Nowhere did I argue that open source software is just as likely to have backdoors. It is, however, possible and ultimately your security still comes down to some 3rd party (my original point). Your argument seems to boil down to "software not audited by a trusted party is dangerous," but what you're saying is "proprietary software is dangerous." The two are not equivalent: there exist free projects which haven't been audited properly and proprietary projects that have. Calling lack of backdoors an inherent advantage of OSS creates a false sense of security and simply isn't true. At best being well-audited is an advantage of large and popular OSS projects, but even then it doesn't universally apply (e.g. OpenOffice) and there's no easy way to tell where it does.

(There is also the issue of accidentally introducing vulnerabilities, which your "many eyes" and "shame" factors don't necessarily preclude as evidenced by the Debian OpenSSL bug. Your original "proprietary software is dangerous" argument ignored this possibility.)

This is absurd. Unless you have personally audited the source* for every open source binary on your system and compiled it from that source yourself to verify that your binary came from it, adding a proprietary binary into the mix isn't going to change anything. * Or trust someone that has, which is still implausible.

That's a bit extreme. Plenty of MMOs handle theft the same way. Customers tend to not resubscribe when their stuff is stolen and never returned.

Of course, they could avoid the problem entirely by charging for paper submission rather than publication.

It's nothing new though. The Kindle has had free cellular internet (and a barely usable web browser) since it was launched. If B&N let you install additional Android apps, I'm sure the cellular internet will be restricted to their store.

Yes, but if you were actually in Times Square you'd see the ads.

This sounds like data mining, since essays are used to train their system. If so, their classifier can guess what a human would give a paper based on pre-defined textual features, but this classifier wouldn't necessarily be good at finding specific areas that need to be changed.

Amazon only guarantees that the Kindle can be used to access a few websites (Wikipedia, Amazon, maybe one or two more), but they currently allow you to access all of the internet for free over Sprint's cellular network. Amazon pays for it.

If people were to start tethering their Kindles and using them as a means of getting free internet anywhere, it would become too expensive for Amazon to continue. This is probably why the author said not to use the data connection; he doesn't want Amazon to discontinue the free internet service.