I'd recommend using e-mail. It's open to everyone to use, and they probably already have registered one. They can provide any and all metadata in the free-form text field known as "body", and it even supports multiple file attachments!

But it also means getting the metadata as free-form-text, which is likely to need interpreting before processing. A HTML form on the other hand will provide, by comparison, quite standardised data format. It also provides an easy file upload facility.

Writing something in PHP/Python that accepts uploads and stores metadata in a database is not very much work to hack together. The main work will be deciding the fields and so on. A form can require an entry in the field for antenna type, whilst in e-mail it's easy to forget a field.

The main challenge I guess is to get people to submit information...

If they cared even remotely enough to do that, then they would have already hardwired the indicator light to the same power source as the camera so that one couldn't be run without the other regardless of the firmware.

This is essentially what apple did, according to the report. They connected the LED to the standby signal, which normally has to be disabled to read data from the camera chip. So far, so good.

But the camera chip also has a configuration register - and one of the register options are to disable listening to the standby signal, and go ahead without caring about this signal. So it looks like the designers overlooked that option, or didn't think about it as a serious scenario.

So my impression is that apple has gone further than I've imagined to make a good design, but sadly not a bugfree design. Remember that all designs, hardware or software, may have bugs.

This is wrong at two levels. First, when technology was new, a monopoly was sensible, to ensure access to telephone for most people, because building lines was expensive. Building lines in a city may be profitable, but not in rural areas. A monopoly can force a entity to provide coverage both places, in exchange for a (limited) monopoly. So yes, the community can indeed be better of by granting a monopoly in some situations. Second, even if it's a free market, the first actor will always have the upper hand, as they have more potential customers to pick from, and it is more unlikely that a customer will switch once they have a provider. Building a copper/fiber network to the curb is damn expensive, so not many players are able to this. So if we'd not have monopolies, we probably woudn't have as good coverage, and if we didn't have monopolies, the first player would still be favoured. Norway also had telco monopoly, building the network up to ca. 1995. But the government owned telco has been regulated into providing the copper for other DSL telcos, for a fixed price (~10$ month per customer), and the other DSL telcos can rent rack space in Telenor's facilities for installing DSLAMs and so on.

The problem is that they still track you. For me, this is a show stopper; I do not want Google to track me in this fashion.

Doubleclick was marginally better in this regard, because they could only track me anonymously, but Google has my name and address already, so they can easily track me from a gmail session to surfing habits, if they want. By making anonymous ads commonplace, I'd stop blocking text ads

Another concern is that advertising has a cost. We spend huge resources on advertising, and what is the gain? If sites started enforcing more rigorous rules for advertising content, like no flash, not tracking me across sites and so on, maybe I'd not be so inclined to block ads? In short; keep the ads as a business model, but adapt it to those who don't like tracking. A static image with a link in the html of the page? I would probably not bother to block it. A text paragraph, statically in the HTML, and not loaded via JS like google ads? I'd do nothing about it.

Ad blocking came about as a reaction on the huge multimegabyte flash ads with sound and moving images - at least for my part. They were slow to download on 56k modem, and waste of space. Then, google started tracking me across sites using google ads, and I don't particularly want them to track my browsing habits. So I blocked that too. But how much is lost to blocked ads? Did the people blocking ads click ads before blocking was common? I did certainly not. Also, a lot of the ads on the web is quite US-centric, and of less interest to me as a european. Is this really a loss? I'm not so sure. Maybe a clean advertising standard, with text ads and as little tracking as possible would be a better way to go?

I totally agree with the particulars. The point is that both is correct - in its own sense. Using Einsteins motion laws for calculating the time you need to reach work is a total waste of time. Using it to calculate GPS signals however...

Wrong. Evolution is a fact. The particular details of evolution is still discussed, and refined from time to time. In the same manner, Albert Einstein refined the laws of Newton, with regards to high speeds. Newton was not wrong in any way, he was just not as right as Einstein.

It is a bit like saying that Newton claimed 2+2 equals 2.999, whilst Einstein said it's 4. However, creationists basically say zeebra + 2 = god - which does not even make sense.