Fraud is a criminal offence, requiring the person be making a false statement to obtain money, and the false statement not to opinions like "my product is better than his".

In the US, the tradition is to sue folks. In Canada we tend to call the cops. I'm mildly surprised no-one has said they done so already.

Similar in principle to the confidentiality problems that lead to the orange book, and at least as hard as the byzantine generals problem.

I suspect one needs a trusted system to make sure only the owner issues commands with the right key, and an independent intelligent system to figure out what happens when you add a device and give it a command. Plus lots of hard work figuring out what basic set of rules you need to preserve...

In the short run, expect to "introduce" things to one another, and select what they can do from a restricted and pretty unintelligible menu. Probably using Windows, and probably hacked soon after release.

It's because the studios sold all possible forms of distribution rights to a "Canadian distributor" who is only physically capable of distributing to movie theatres. They sometimes retained TV rights, sometimes sold them too.

Net result? The studio doesn't get the money you'd like to pay them, and neither does the distributor.

It's easy to cooperate with people who are awake and working at the same time as you. Managing projects up and down the US east coast was easy from Toronto.

If you have people in San Francisco that start 3 hours later, you have to intentionally organize for that time difference. Some people here worked late hours (including at least one night-owl friend who liked to come in at noon), while others cursed the absence of their colleagues. Still other gloried in the absence, and said things like "I get three uninterrupted hours of work!"

If QA was in Ireland (or India, or both) then people learned to hand off discrete chunks, and get the results in the morning. With people across either the Atlantic or Pacific, you get one meeting a day, so make the best of it!

One group did time-critical diagnoses, and had three shifts running: Singapore, Grenoble and San Francisco. They passed the same bug around the world, working continually on it until they got done.

Working in multiple timezones can work well, but only if you plan for it.
If you don't plan for it, you'd better keep your business in the zone you're in.