There was one major feature, and two "features" added to XP:

1: The zone/firewalling support. This is actually useful just to keep dodgy apps from opening up a port or ensuring nothing can connect directly. Third parties like Zone Alarm had this functionality, but would keep prompting the user for every single connection, so eventually users would just click "allow all and don't bug me", and be done with it.

2: Secure Audio Path, where anything protected with WMA's DRM could only play on a stack of signed audio drivers.

3: Activation.

Of course, there were some other minor tweaks here and there, but the leap from W2K to XP wasn't groundbreaking. Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 was a major leap in virtually everything. The second greatest leap was with the server side -- Windows 2000 Server from NT Server was a nice leap for servers because the whole model of NT domains was changed to be a lot more scalable.

The reason why XP was considered decent is because it was out for a long time and people got used to it. On the server side of the house, Windows Server 2003 is still supported until July 14 of next year... but most places have moved to at least Windows Server 2008 if not newer just because of the better security in more recent versions.

If they are serious, they should buy Symantec Encryption Desktop (formerly PGP Desktop) from Symantec and open source the full version of that. It has a decent UI, works well with Outlook and Thunderbird, and does well on Windows, OS X, and Linux. That would give decent security on the hard disk level, file container, and individual file level. Even directories can be encrypted, CFS/EncFS like.

Possible but unlikely. The main reason why SOPA and PIPA were not passed wasn't the protests and website shutdowns, but the fact that Russia and China made it firm that cutting their websites from the Internet would be viewed as the same thing as a naval blockade... an act of war. With Congress afraid of their own shadow, it is no wonder why they backed down, saying it was the will of the people.

No way the entire Internet will be shut down by the US. First thing that will happen is that the UN would get handed ICANN's responsibilities, and the Internet would be up... but under new management.

Second thing is that no US Congressperson would allow it to happen. They get too much money directly from foreign donors, or indirectly companies made rich by foreign trade, which would be shut down in a trade war almost immediately.

I can see SIPRNet or NIPRNet having a master switch that shuts all core nodes of those down, but the Internet? Extremely unlikely. There is just too much big money that relies on the Internet, and if they can afford billions of dollars of computers for HFT, they can afford to get a President impeached who might even think of harming their business model.

I'm around the same. The attacks come from where there are unsecured IPs, not where the bad guys live. For a while, IP ranges which consisted of DSL or cable modem clients were on the top of the attack source list. On average, nations coming up to speed tend to have average people who are not up to speed on security. This is why in China, malware from pirated app stores is a major problem while it is relatively rare in the US and Western Europe.

Of course, it can't hurt to block by IP ranges in the first place (and do the blocks on multiple layers [1] on public facing boxes like Web servers), just to narrow the scope of what is hitting the machine.

[1]: The firewall, the application, and the OS. That way, if something glitched and the firewall got opened to the world, the servers will still be protected by their own innate IP stack filters.

The closest analog to that would be the SCOTUS here across the pond. The problem comes in when they are appointed because they have the extreme view of whomever is appointing. That is why most decisions made by the Supremes are almost always split 5-4.

If the US Senate was styled that way where the Senate positions were appointed (perhaps by the state governor), it might help with mitigating radical parties that get into power, but on the other hand, it might only result in extremists having that chunk of the governing machine to themselves.

It depends on the technology. Cars, iPhones, and computers tend to change often.

Maybe a better item would be an example of something that really doesn't change much. For example, generators. Take a 3000 watt generator that is used for RV-ing. One can buy a no-name Chinese variant. However, if something breaks, parts are extremely hard to find since the generators have different generations as they change fairly often. A carb that fit well on this month's batch of models would be useless 6-12 months from now. The other option is to pay significantly more for a name brand like Honda or Yamaha, where 10-15 years from now, if one needs a belt, carb, or even an inverter board, there will be a dealer with one in stock, or at worst, it would have to be shipped.

Other than a move to inverter logic and better voltage regulation, generators have not changed much other than minor advances. Here is a case where paying a bit more will pay off in a longer service life. Yes, one can get "disposable" generators, but it is better for the economy and the environment to have something that can be serviced and rebuilt. Plus, parts are a definitely a profit center.

Devil's advocate:

Things are different from the 2000s when everyone and his brother, sister, grandmother, and father in law was coming out with an "unhackable" DRM scheme. For one, the market has shifted from PCs/Macs to consoles for gaming. The PS4, Xbox One, and others have not been cracked yet, so piracy and hacking is at 0% on those platforms.

We also didn't depend on user accounts. A background process like VAC or Blizzard's Warden didn't exist that would completely cut off access to services. All it would take is Apple running a similar process that sits in the background and looks for cracking tools, then locks any AppleIDs suspected of doing so. The days of running "unfuck.exe" are long gone, since it would get detected, and all access lost.

Of course, there is video. Yes, there are SD copies and screeners, maybe even someone ballsy enough to cam and slip that on BitTorrent, but 1080i (true, not upsampled) movies are rare. Satellites have not have any real hacks in a decade. Even Apple's movie format has no working cracks with no deprotection utilities out, unless one wants to capture video and re-encode it with the generational quality loss.

Yes, we will see some "cracks", such as saying World of Warcraft is cracked because someone is running a server emulator, but I will be surprised to see available, unprotected works that were protected in this format.

Yes, DRM has been cracked in the past, but it gets harder and harder each cycle. Even Blu-Ray hasn't been fully cracked yet (it is still a race with each individual movie.)

It is starting to appear in the US as well. I'm seeing "fix your iPhone" places pop up in the small corner stores that the old pager shops, title loans, and other dodgy places tend to inhabit.

Of course, one thing that gets discussed is how many stolen smartphones get taken apart and wind up at places like that. Of course, the motherboard of the phone isn't usable because of activation and IMEI blacklists, but screens, batteries, speakers, and other small parts are always in demand, especially for newer phones that may not have parts available yet.

They are still using, AFIAK, with the latest gen iPhones, as they mentioned "ion strengthened" glass, which is what Corning's product is.

I think the iWatch will be the first product with the sapphire glass research, since it is better with smaller screens. Plus, there is a difference between scratch resistance and shatter resistance. A watch can use a lot more scratch resistance than shatter resistance, so a harder, more brittle glass like sapphire glass would be more useful as opposed to something a bit less hard, but more resilient (less shatter prone) that would be needed on phones and tablets.

AFIAK, it is more like "tribute", like an Elvis tribute band.

The ironic thing is that tinkerers are the people that started the computer industry. If it were not for MIT's model railroad club and hobbyists from the two Jobs to Linus and Jolitz making basic operating systems, the world would look completely different. (Most likely we would be using Compuserve like forums with TV set top boxes for "internet" access, paying by the kilobyte, more if we actually stepped up to a 2400 bps modem.)

Because of this disposable mentality, the aspect of tinkering has all but vanished from the American psyche. The "cool" teenager who manages to modify the carb to shave a few milliseconds from his 0-60 score has been replaced by someone using Instagram to take a photo of their food before uploading to FB. Maybe the tinkering mentality might come back.

All and all, the tinkering mentality is what made the US what it was. If/when China gets the free-thinking, inventive mentality that has been a hallmark of the West, there is no stopping them, whatsoever. It also is a shame that it is lost, because the questioning, tinkering mentality separates people from drones.

I don't like having to re-buy goods due to planned obsolesce. Take TVs, for example. I have a Sears TV in storage from the '80s. The manual has circuit schematics, where to get replacements for the channel buttons, how to replace switches, what pots are used where. It was made so someone with basic soldering skills could at least maintain it. A new LED TV just gets chucked and you buy a new one, even though the problem could be a membrane contact that costs a penny.

The economy is getting shittier in general. In the past, we could afford to replace things when something small broke. I had a collegue who bought a new car every 2-3 years, once when the relay controlling the heated seat failed. These days, it is commonplace to see people nursing their old Saturns and Honda Civics to keep them on the roads. That is why headlight polishing kits are so common. In the past, vehicles got replaced before the glass or Lexan dulled (or used sealed beam headlights.)

One reason why companies have chosen to go with products that cannot be repaired is simple -- it gets rid of the used market. In the past, if someone had a broken lawn mower, someone else could give it a carb rebuild and get it perfectly functional. A lot of goods, once broken, can't be recycled, much less salvaged for anything whatsoever, which means no real secondhand market.

This is going to backfire. Will a company make more money in the long run if they sell parts to fix their gizmos, or more gizmos in a good economy, and almost none when the economy goes bad and stays bad? For long term thinking, having repairable items brings in a long tail due to the parts sales.

We already have this tech already. Pixelmags does exactly this with magazines in their DRM-ed format. Adobe Flash can do this as well, and has been doing so since the VideoWorks days.

So, I'm guessing Apple is going to be making something similar to a password-protected HyperCard stack I made in 1989 that had the menubar hidden, with a special extension to tell what tracks/sectors the file takes up and automatically exit if the file resides somewhere different?

Encryption transforms are computationally cheap. A MC68000 could do DES-48 with FDE [1] without a noticeable slowdown, so an ARM chip which is several decades ahead would have zero problems with the array shifting of AES.

[1]: As per a program called Access Managed Environment by Casady & Greene, which would DES encrypt the entire hard disk. It was arguably the most thorough encryption program I've seen, offering encryption for removable media, folders, files, even tape, with various methods of recovery (master password, floppy disk, etc.)

On Android, you can use dm-crypt to encrypt your /data partition with a passphrase of a real length, which is separate from your screen unlock PIN/password.

You do need to root it, and type in a command similar to this:

vdc cryptfs changepw newpass

or to enable encryption via the command line:

vdc cryptfs enablecrypto inplace

With /data encrypted, it will prompt for the long passphrase at boot, then from there on, just need the short screen locker password.

I like this part of Android -- you can easily pack your own parachute when it comes to encryption.

One can easily set a longer passcode. Just tell it to do longer than four digits, use numbers only in the password, and once set, the iDevice will prompt you with a numeric keypad and an OK button. If you use letters in your password, it will use the usual full alphanumeric setup.

This way, one can have a longer PIN (I prefer at least 12-16 characters.) Not one in 10,000 anymore, but far higher.

Of course, the attacks will then go to the rubber hose decryption (xkcd.com/538), but it does raise the bar.