Organized labor? Uh no, we're too smart for that. I can't speak for everywhere else but where I live there are plenty of well-paying development jobs and I've never seen the type of behavior you describe among my peers.

Yes, it is a field where you must keep your skills up to date and be willing to switch jobs if market or other conditions dictate. If you stay in one position too long and let your skills stagnate you do run the risk of becoming obsolete.

SHA1 as used in Git proves that a particular commit has the contents and the ancestors that the person with the repo says it does. It prevents two different people from saying, "this is what the source looked like at this point in time". So in practice, coming up with a collision attack in that scenario wouldn't be much use because whatever you come up with to generate the collision obviously isn't source code :)

That said, replacing it with something else would essentially involve rebasing the entire repo, which would certainly be inconvenient but not insurmountable. They could probably even have a backwards-compatibility mode where it recognizes both SHA1 and some other algorithm and clients could gradually switch to the next one.

I'm not sure which "employer" you're referring to; these are my own websites and yes I understand the security implications and take appropriate precautions.

The wait time of the demo really wasn't that unreasonable. Installing Putty isn't possible if I'm on a platform it doesn't support or on a device where I can't install or run additional software.

Did you try the demo? I was quite surprised at how snappy it was. Point taken that the definition of "hacky" is subjective :)

I'm talking about a device where installing additional software or plugging in a physical device that I probably don't have with me anyway is either not possible or not desirable.

There are many times when I need to do remote admin on a machine from a location where I don't have SSH available. Currently that usually involves some type of hacky browser-based terminal emulator. Actually running a Linux based OS in the browser would be perfect for such occasions, assuming I'm someplace where making outbound port 22 connections isn't a problem.

It's just part of an ongoing study.

I remember reading an interview with one of them several years ago (I believe it was Brin), where they talked about the original homepage. At a time when other search engines were cramming as much crap onto their homepage as possible, Google stood out for being very minimal and serving up "just results" very quickly.

He said they were amused when people gave them compliments for taking such a bold move and assumed it was an intentional departure, but in reality they just didn't know HTML and cobbling together a single form and crappy logo was pretty much all they could manage (or were interested in).

A thousand times this :( It's so sad that we don't have Groklaw to help sort this all out for us. Mr. Florian woke up with a massive hard-on this morning, spewing his usual hypocritical diatribe about how Google brought this all on themselves by not caving in the past. I can't stand the thought that he's the only "tech patent expert" who will be quoted in the news on all of this.

But that's a big "if". If the wording is too broad, it will be easy to find prior art. Hell, the old Archie-based internet could be seen as doing this.

However I think that Google will go the other way. What is a "search argument"? I would think it's words such as "and", "or", "like" that are used to narrow the results. At least as a computer scientist, that's what the term usually means. Even though Google has these arguments available, the vast majority of searches don't use them.

There are plenty of other terms in the patent that can be beaten to death and shown to not apply. The thing about patents is that each claim is taken in its entirety. If Google can show that any of those bullet points don't apply to them due to their specific wording, they don't infringe.

Luckily for us they were able to arrange their own extinction-level event before becoming a danger.

You should read the actual article! This guy really likes his exclamation points!!1

Ah, thanks for that. It really is a pity, even more so that they go to such great lengths to hide it. Digging around a bit more from your example I found this page which explains in detail which printers require the binary plug-in and what functions it's used for.

Do you have more info on this? Last time I was in the market (which was a couple years ago), HP had far and away the best free driver support. They contribute them upstream instead of making you download separate files and try to install them, and everything "just worked". My multi-function laserjet prints, scans, and duplexes, all over the network, with zero configuration or bother from me.

They have an entire website dedicated to their efforts to support open source, their list of supported printers has any recent printer I can find, and their most recent release notes indicate they're still adding features, printers, and supported distros (notably Ubuntu 13.10 Beta and OpenSuse 13.1 Beta).

They do have a list of printers which are are unsupported due to IP issues but those still seem to be far and away the exception, not the rule.