Unfortunately, it's not really Microsoft pushing us down this slippery slope. If anything it's the NSA.

The problem is boot sector or BIOS malware is now a real thing that needs real defences. It's not some obscure academic attack any more. Securing the boot chain is the only known way to fix this.

The real issues start once malware begins using Linux to install itself. That is, "I cannot infect or modify Windows because of the secure boot check. But I can install Linux and then load a special kernel module and then make the kernel chain into the Windows boot process after modifying it". So then you start needing signed kernels to check for signed kernel modules, etc. Eventually you end up with hardware that only runs signed code, and it's not because of some evil DRM conspiracy but because the openness of the PC platform has caused it to be so thoroughly bum-fucked by malware developers. I mean what are the manufacturers meant to do? Leave their 99% Windows userbase vulnerable to spying and horrible un-removable viruses because Team Linux has never managed to get OEMs on board to make Linux laptops? Doesn't make any sense, regardless of where your software sympathies may lie.

I guess you'd be able to boot from a recovery USB stick/CD/etc.

Presumably the idea is malware will not be designed to infect such systems. After all being rendered unbootable is a sure way to get your victim PC taken into a repair shop, which then might submit the malware sample they find to AV vendors ...

Microsoft was only fined in Europe. In America nothing much happened. Also: the fines were iirc not for bundling of the web browser but rather, the things they did to stop PC makers also including Netscape. Like threatening to punish them financially if they supported a competitor. That's a lot more cut and dried. You're right that bundling web browsers with operating systems was clearly the right move in hindsight and in practice Netscape might have been toast anyway. But maybe not: alternative browsers are doing better than IE is today, despite IE's bundling advantage. But being forcibly bankrupted by Microsoft if you included one of them crosses the line.

I care about getting good search results. Google choosing to put the better results lower in the ranking conflicts with that.

But Google doesn't do that, nor does the WSJ article imply it. Google chooses to add features to its search engine and sometimes those features, like embedded maps, rank higher than say MapQuest does. That's not putting "better results lower in the ranking", that's Google believing that an inline map works better than a link to another search engine where you get to re-enter your query. And I think it's right.

When a customer has no real way of distinguishing certain types of sellers based on quality, some minimum standards are required

But they do. Uber drivers have star ratings and drivers that get bad enough ratings are fired.

A lot of people are making a false conclusion that Uber drivers are unregulated. They aren't - they're regulated by the company instead of by the government. And it seems like Uber may often do a better job of this.

Yes they can walk

So we're suppose to have machines driving vehicles some 80 years before they're smart? What idiot thought THAT was a good idea?

Your realise machines are routinely put in charge of vehicles that travel at 600 mph and in which mistakes can cause disintegration of the machine, killing everyone on board? Yet they're much safer than the human pilots we keep around as psychological placebos.

I think this list sums up the core of the Uber debate. It's a massive pile of accumulated odds and ends that have built up over the years, some of which are clearly useful and others which are clearly irrelevant. Unfortunately taxi regulation is about as exciting as dish water and so there's nothing that can blow away the cobwebs and rationalise things, short of a full blown Uber style takedown.

Examples of crap in the list above: taxi drivers must know the area they operate in. Really? What does it even mean to know the area? London black cab drivers have to pass an exam called The Knowledge that requires them to memorise street maps of the city, so at least it's well defined there, but this is nonsense from the pre-GPS era. There's no need for cab drivers to do it all in their heads these days, and I'd much rather they rely on the computer which will always pick the fastest route and can't decide to take a detour because the passengers looks like a tourist.

Another example: drivers must know the radio protocols. Why?! Uber drivers receive instructions via an intuitive smartphone app. Controlling cabs via radio is an obsolete technology yet the requirement to use it lives on.

Yet another example: cars must be painted a particular colour. Why? Uber cars are located using modern technology, not by watching the roads for vehicles painted in a deliberately ugly colour. This is another obsolete convention progress has made irrelevant - yet it's mandated.

Then we get to the more questionable things that aren't obsolete exactly, just arguable. Why is it possible to have enough driving violations to be struck off as a cab driver, but still be allowed to drive friends and family around? Surely you're either safe enough to use the public roads, or you're not, and the commercial relationships you have with the people inside make no difference?

People with a criminal record are banned from working as drivers? ALL crimes? What about crimes that don't involve being actually dangerous, like white collar crimes? Why can't hiring decisions like this be left to the cab companies?

Taxi drivers must know first aid? Presumably someone injured themselves in a cab once and some regulator thought this was a good response. What if that person injures themselves on the street? Why not require everyone to be trained in first aid? This kind of arbitrary distinction doesn't make much sense until you remember that we have these regulators sitting around with nothing better to do all day than craft rules for their tiny piece of jurisdiction.

And so on and so on. It's easy to take a reflexive "COMPANIES BAD GOVERNMENTS GOOD" position in these situations, but my experience of regulators have been that they never reform themselves .... all they ever do is add more and more requirements. Short of a company like Uber showing people how differently things can work, how would progress ever be made?

Comodo aren't trying misspellings of "root@live.com" - do you think domain validation requests are reviewed by humans? They are not and that's why they are cheap or free. They have a fixed list of hard coded addresses they are willing to try.

EV certs are reviewed by humans and that's why obtaining a fraudulent one is much harder, actually I never heard of it ever happening. But they cost more. It seems that live.fi redirects to live.com which has an EV cert for "Microsoft Corporation", so even if the fake cert had been used in a MITM attack, if you knew to check the address bar for the name of the company instead of just a padlock you would have been protected.

This is the second time this has happened to Microsoft. You'd think after the first time someone was able to register an administrator address @live.com they would have brainstormed all the names that might possibly be considered special, or hell, just checked which ones are being used this way, and then reserved them. How many can there possibly be? 10?

We can argue about whether sending an email is a good way to verify ownership of a domain or not, but really, someone who could register hostmaster@live.fi could play all sorts of social engineering games quite outside of the CA system.

Oh for goodness sake, this is economic illiteracy.

Again, as I said, Mr. Rich CEO will, most likely, invest his money. The bulk of that money just goes into the ridiculous "full circle" financial system that allows DEBT to be considered an ASSET.

Sure, if you don't believe investment is actually a thing or that it helps build the economy, I can see why you think Mr Rich is useless and Joe Sixpack is the rock on which all success is built. Then it's just a small step towards thinking that as Mr Rich isn't using that money for anything it might as well be taxed into oblivion and spent on Joe instead.

But that whole economic theory was tried out, not so long ago, and it turned out it didn't work so well ...

Alright, if you're so keen on mob justice then go for it. Just don't go crying when someone plucks an arbitrary unfair number from the air and makes you pay it, on the grounds that they just don't like you. What goes around comes around.

If it was only for six months, they probably fell afoul of the tax residency test. Normally countries tax on a yearly basis and re-evaluate tax residency based on how many days out of a year you spent in that country. Yeah it sucks for people who work in another place for six months: it'd be better if tax were calculated on a per day basis. But most tax systems are not efficient or digitised enough to do a good job of that.

It would be much better if they can establish actual calculations rather than arbitrary distinctions.

Their problem is they can't do that, because they don't have any coherent theory of how they want the tax system to work. Or rather, they do/did, but they're tearing it all up because they smell the opportunity to win votes at the next election. As they have no particular system in mind, what we get are so-called "laws" that merely assert the government can take whatever they decide is reasonable, for more or less any reason. It's sort of like how civil forfeiture in the USA works.

If they sat down and tried to craft a well thought out, precise specification of how things should work, they would probably end up with a system that vaguely resembles the one we have today. The "problem" is that today's system allows individual countries independence to decide how to set their own tax rates, and those countries compete aggressively to win employers. The UK does this too - it cut corporation taxes explicitly to attract businesses to London from other countries. So their position is inherently hypocritical: when the UK lowers taxes and attracts business, that's just companies relocating to dynamic and pro-business jurisdiction, and when Ireland does it, that's companies diverting profits and being terrible and immoral.

The Tories could point out the basic hypocrisy of this argument to the British people, but they prefer not to. It's easier to tell voters they can get a free lunch by making the evil foreigners pay for it. Of course, every government is making the same argument to their citizens simultaneously .....

They provide a country in which Google can make over 10 billion pounds a year. That's something Google should pay towards helping, surely.

"Google" is ultimately just a collection of people and assets. The assets are inert objects, they just exist and don't owe anyone anything. The services the UK provides only apply to people living in the UK, and their employees who live there already pay for those services via their own income taxes, VAT, council taxes and many more.

If you accept the bogus logic that the British government "provides" Britain to multinational companies and thus those companies should "help" then basically any country could apply the same logic to any company and demand any amount of money. It's entirely arbitrary. Google already helps the UK tremendously by providing its services, it doesn't also need to subsidise whatever random vote buying gimmick Osborne has come up with this time.

I really can't believe how foolish so many Brits are being about this. What happens when America turns around and observes that ARM makes a killing from phones sold to Americans that contain its microchips. As the US Government so nicely "provides" the American people who indirectly buy its products, it's only fair that ARM pays towards helping for it. Perhaps the tax can be 30%. That leaves plenty for when China, France, Germany, Greece and Russia come along and propose the same deal.

The tax system the world has settled on works the way it does for a reason. It's not something to just be torn up to try and buy a few quick votes in the runup to an election.

Instead, we are actually getting something done about the rules under which companies should be paying tax. As a lot of people have said all along, fuck the spirit of the law, apply the actual law.

I totally agree with you and you are absolutely wrong.

The "Google tax" law that Osbourne wants to enact appears to be little more than saying "any money stream we would like a piece of, we're gonna take". As far as I've been able to find out there really isn't much more to it than that. That's not a law, that's bringing back the reign of kings. It's been obvious for a long time now that the Tories have no coherent theory of how they want the global tax system to work. They just want more money.

It's not even clear why they need one. They already passed the General Anti Avoidance Rule (GAAR) which basically says "anything a reasonable person would find unreasonable is illegal", i.e. it suspends tax law entirely in the UK and replaces it with the whim of whoever is running the Revenue at the time. Given that they did the GAAR a few years ago already it seems they're implicitly agreeing that the arrangements of these companies is reasonable and legal but they want to undo it all the same.

The big problems this tax is going to run into are both legal and fundamental. The legal issues are that simply grabbing money in violation of the existing systems violates tax treaties. The UK is potentially setting itself up for a world of hurt if other countries decide it's now open season on British companies. Bear in mind the Tories have lowered corporation tax to attract companies from other countries to London. If, say, France, decides that a company is "diverting profits" out of France to the UK and pulls the same shit then the country could find itself ending up with less money than before, not more.

The second problem is that what it means to "divert profits" is left undefined. How do you carve up a company like Google across national borders? When someone clicks an ad in the UK, is that profit made in the UK because that's where the user is? Or California because that's where the ad system was developed? Or Germany because that's where the datacenter is? Or Ireland because that's where the sale was made and where the advertiser sent the money to and had the contract? Or all of them? Currently the system is it's Ireland because that's where the company with which the contract was signed is.

It gets even more convoluted. What if a British user never clicks ads and so is a net loss for the company. Do you then offset all those users against the revenue generating ones? How much does it even cost to serve the search result to a British user? They're using global, shared resources, so do you divide up the global costs by population? By usage? How do you even calculate profit by product when it's all integrated, let alone by country? And how do you stop the red tape required to calculate whatever arbitrary metrics are used from becoming overwhelming?

How will they even collect that tax? What if Google and Facebook shut down their UK offices?

The Tories have answers to none of these questions. They have no thinking behind this deeper than "let's grab some foreigners money and use it to buy off pensioners". The Treasury admitted they are assuming zero businesses will pull out of the UK because of these changes. How this will impact the global tax system, the costs of it, the chances of blowback? Unstudied.

The whole thing is an astonishing abandonment of a system of rules and laws.