That is a very good question. The quest for an UNCOL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL) goes back to the mid 1950s.

A terse, but readable history/background upto and including early ANDF (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/michael.harley/uncol.html) This paper seems to argue that a change in relative costs betwixt machines and programmers changed the landscape to where the complexity was not worth doing a true UNCOL.

Things changed from complexity to business politics, much like we see now with cell carriers (and lockin), customers wanted to be able to move work from one vendor to another, and up sprang another organization to guide that - the OSF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation)

A changing playing field (enter MS and Apple) and business politics seemed to doom OSF and most of its work - as it turned to 'every man for himself' until Linux came into being and pretty much changed everything... How many vendors still have their own Unix ?

I've been playing in this industry since the mid 1970s, professionally since the early 1980s - most all with a bent towards compilers and operating systems.

My reading of the tea leaves entails a re-birth of the UNCOL idea - and again, due to changing relative man/machine costs, and the prevalence of the IoT.

I believe we actually wind up with the ANDF variant of UNCOL
* You compile language du-jour (with whatever optimization, say to SSA, you can do at a high level), and generate a distribution package (apk, deb, rpm) that includes the UNCOL instead of binaries.
* At install time, the UNCOL is compiled to native (for some definition of native) code... This too, should be optimized

This is where Android is already moving - ART vs Davlik. On smaller devices, you don't want the interpretation overhead unless you have a scheme to handle JiT and building up a native application as the various codepaths are exercised.

Today, we have fewer architectures to contend with (x64, arm, ppc), a better battering ram (open source/crowd source & funding) - ie, driving from the correct side.

This still requires effort by the hardware business to create the UNCOL->Native binary

Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... (one of the earlier UNCOL)

I'll go back to my cave now

Bouvier's Law Dictionary, of course, only has the 1st definition, in somewhat more detail

You seem to only recall on of the possible definitions (granted the most common, and the one the government would like to use against whistleblowers):

From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:

    treason
            n 1: a crime that undermines the offender's government [syn:
                      {treason}, {high treason}, {lese majesty}]
            2: disloyalty by virtue of subversive behavior [syn: {treason},
                  {subversiveness}, {traitorousness}]
            3: an act of deliberate betrayal [syn: {treachery}, {betrayal},
                  {treason}, {perfidy}]

The other two do, in some ways, describe the NSA & FISA

This is just one amongst the plethora of reasons I install openWRT on linksys and (some) belkin devices.

I'll grant iMessage, and the current Google Hangouts -- neither have an option for 'otr' type functionality (yet, in the latter case).

gtalk did have 'otr' (not sure if it was as secure as BBM), and I routinely ran 'otr' plugins on XMPP (including gtalk), and even SameTime

the otr plugins likely matches BBM - with symmetric encryption

The problem with setting up a secure IM is the setup effort can reduce the number of folks using it. otr was actually pretty simple, but things like pgp require users to setup and distribute keys... Something a lot of non-tech people just wont do

If not, it should at least limit the number of users to those who *must* communicate to a Blackberry device.

Otherwise, 'tis just another small player in the plethora of contenders for IM tools