Apple are far from the enemy of the free web. Apple offers convenience at a price (your freedom) if you choose to become a member of their cult, but they don't take away the freedoms of others, in fact, they play nicely with others and share their low-level technologies so they can "give back to the geeks". They hoard all the marketable front-end and share all the back-end.

As an avid Linux fanboy, even I can admit that Apple's lock-in is limited to their own customers and not to the world at large. They support freedom of choice, to either lose one's own free speech in the name of convenience (Apple way) or to use a Free Software competing technology which leverages their contributions....

In my case I opt for GNU/Linux, with Desura as a gaming platform and Wine for all my old stuff I still like to use....

and India will lose millions of modern-day services, which the people will demand and the government will be forced to provide....

With physical access a hardware keylogger can be installed, so no, it doesn't improve security.

"Failing that, why not run Caolan's callcatcher over your project to see which nooks and crannies are surplus to requirements. "

From the original blogpost ;)

You have been able to do this for decades through the BIOS... MS could have and should have rallied for OEMs to use this valuable *user-configurable* feature by default on PCs they ship. Why didn't they? Because it hindered upgrading from one MS OS to the next ;-)

Incorrect. Look at measures on products like the Chromebook for example. I'd love to see how you bypass a user-configurable HARDWARE jumper/switch.

Lies, lies, lies. MS are always full of lies.

Oh gee, like the BIOS option that has been available for DECADES?

Seriously, do you really think that real IT professionals will buy into the whole BS about allegedly "improving security" when in many cases remote security on Microsoft's platforms has actually decreased over the years?

It's an issue of consumer freedom to do with their devices as they see fit.

It's a problem. Period.

This option was available for decades as a feature of BIOSes only editable from the CMOS Setup menu. It is not a security feature, it does nothing to really protect against malware.

Also, if you reinstall your OS, the boot sector is overwritten, as the partitioning/formatting stage overwrites all the data there....

How is this a security feature? Boot sector locking has been an option on x86 devices for decades, with the option of override from CMOS Setup Utility. None of those protections actually worked back then and they still won't today....

Microsoft's NTFS technology relies on cleanups to take place in the background, it appears to be a nightmare waiting to happen... :|

Ext3 has COW patches: http://www.ext3cow.com/ext3cow/Welcome.html (available now! PATCH YO KERNEL DAMNIT!)

NILFS2 is a filesystem that supports infinite snapshots, provides partial dedup and will work towards providing more (no patches needed!)

BTRFS is working on dedup support... (best bet!)

NILFS2 anyone?

Only #1 would work as Copyright for the Corporations would automatically terminate, resulting in no way to transfer Copyright to an agent. In addition, Copyright can't be passed around, only licenses can, so things would change.

It's "identity cloning" if one was to apply words accurately ;)