Apple was forced to get read of DRM by court order, not by competition.

But that's all you need. User have control over their own bandwidth, you can't ask to prioritize your traffic over someone else's traffic. ISPs should provide a pipe with a fixed bandwidth the user pays for. And user can decide what traffic to prioritize inside his own network. That's it.

Supermarkets have a much lower entry barrier, small need for infrastructure and are forced to adapt to buyers' habits, not vice versa. ISPs on the other hand, hold a monopoly in most places while providing critical infrastructure. Your comparison is totally invalid.

Because Net Neutrality is exactly this: not discriminating traffic based on its origin or type. Providing internet as a pipe, not a toll-road. But ISPs want to have control over what is being sent over that pipe and extort money from services not to throttle them. This "fast lane" is not a dedicated line provided straight to your home to show you youtube, nope, it's a reserved bandwidth (from the bandwidth you paid for) that will be used to deliver you content from services that agreed to pay the ISP for not throttling them.

Well, this.

"No, sir, this is the windows, that doesn't run windows apps. Well, I mean it does, but only the new, Metro, I meant Modern Interface (or whatever MS rebrands their interface to this time). To run old windows apps you'll need a different kind of windows."

I guess someone at MS thought that after using FUD on Linux and seeing it's success they should try go and FUD themselves in hopes of having the same effect.

The thing that shines most of all is lack of VPN support. We all know how corporate world hates to use secure connections for their employees. Oh, wait...

Because Google is not interesting in developing an offline OS. They are interesting in rushing everyone into " the cloud" (read: their services) so that they sift through your data, catalog you and sell you off by a dozen to advertisers, while still milking you for "extra storage" in the said cloud.

That's you answer. Don't worry about "web focus", MS is moving there as well. Hint: see how easy it is to skip registering with MS online account when installing Windows8 and, consequently, when updating it to Windows 8.1

>> Make everything into one big integrated binary instead of something that you can see into or hack on.

Last time I checked - source was available. And several distributions have written shims to replace parts of systemd. If you can't fiddle with anything but a shell script - tough luck, buddy.

Mailservers don't talk PGP. Even being encrypted it's armored in base64 encoding and transmitted as plaintext. And mail client either knows what to do with it, or not. So, nope, no fallback possible, because you can never know if particular person is going to read it through a client that supports encyption or not. But if you have his\her public key, you might as well assume, that client does know ho decrypt it and if you don't - you can't encrypt it anyway.

Unless the deveopment is done outside of US. Because in that case you can use the letter to wipe your, let's say tears of joy and carry on writing the project. Unless, ofcourse you are planning to visit US any time in the future.

Like it or not, but it's not a silver bullet. There is a lot of people who are disconent with Facebook as IM. Believe it or not, but around here people use Skype, WhatsApp and XMPP for IMs, facebook being the last place you'd think to reach a person.

As much as you (and Facebook execs) 'd like Facebook to be "one size fits all" - it's far from that.

Tell any decent IT security manager that you would like to use facebook as company IM and watch him laugh his behind off.

The encryption you are talking about is client-to-server, the encryption the article is talking about is server-to-server. If both are on, the only parties who know about the content of chats is:
1 You
2 Whoever you are messaging
3 Server

To drop the server from the list, you will need end-to-end encryption. Like OTR or GPG.

Well, google sued CM to stop them distributing GPlay. And you can't sell any device with GPlay on it, if Google doesn't give OK for that and you don't negotiate some secret terms and pass their "certification".

And yes - Google Play Store is NOT included in AOSP and doesn't ship with AOSP or any derivatives, unless manufacturer passed the certifications, details of which are discussed on a per-case basis with Google and are subject to NDA.

>> They currently are behind development of the most popular (And open source!) mobile OS out there,

And they are quietly dragging all the open source parts into closed source framework called Google Services, trying to create a vendor lock-in for the apps, so that it's impossible to run software on AOSP without Google Services Framework, which is closed source and completely controled by google. Messaging app is gone (hangouts to the rescue), so is Gallery (hello Google+ Photos, yuck) and a lot of other, smaller things are all being sucked into closed source with their open source variants being left behind and abandoned.

>> the most popular (and "mostly" open source) desktop browser out there

_mostly_ open source. Do you even listen to yourself? Chrome has a fair share of closed source code with important functionality. Chromium is impaired compared to Chrome in terms of functionality.

>> having given very solid reasons for why they dont do security theatre with their Chrome password store

You mean encrypting user passwords with user key and allowing to self-host open source synchronization servers, like firefox does is "theater" ?

>> Im not clear in what sense you could consider them to be "rotting".

In the sense that google stopped being on the forefront of open web and started trying to become the web. Because it's easier to earn money this way. And in the short run, you might even score a nice bonus. As for the long run - who cares for the long run, when there is a nice cash bonus?

Universities, a lot of businesses, non-profits, all use XMPP because it's pretty mush the only solution that doesn't make you give up your information and can host inhouse (without costing an arm and a leg and forcing you into a vendor lock-in).

Even if you give up and drop XMPP, you will still need to use Skype, Google, WhatsApp and whatnot (all of them, not just one), because my communication circle stretches across target audiences of all those messengers and there is no silver bullet (one ideal messenger that would satisfy all people) as sometimes people want completely different things and one messenger cannot satisfy all of them.