“If you give me a 640x480 JPEG of the most honest of men, I will find something in it which will hang him”

I just checked my most recent Yfrog upload (of something completely innocuous) which I shot and tweeted directly from my iPhone and it looks like every last bit of metadata has been stripped. It doesn't even say what it was shot with.

Don't know how Twitpic and others work, but so far so good.

Bruce Schneier had a pretty good takedown of this kind of argument just the other day.

Accept that you'll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that's secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks. We can do far better at these things than we're doing, and they'll do more to improve security than trying to fix insoluble problems.

I would say "wooosh," but these are good points regardless of TFA's status as satire.

It's a display. And it's a port.

Not to drag this dry videophile discussion out too long, but I presume you're not using cheap factory-raised unicorn horn, notorious for its poor standing wave sync-sweetening and shallow inter-bitstream raster resonance?

Only unicorns raised in the Swiss Alps have the protein content in their horns that allows a digital signal to hit such crisp, sparkling 1s and deep, thick 0s.

Could this happen?

I mean, not just vanilla NAT but the development of an alternative flavor of IP to be deployed on state-owned routers with standard IP gateways on the outside ends.

Imagine some exotic fork of IPv6 with a few strange omissions and other surprising features, geared toward efficient DPI, content filtering, and social network analysis, designed by some of China's most brilliant network architects, theorists, and engineers.

we should get a sane version on Wii as well

Yes, putting discs in drives is madness!

Nah, someone would have to actually try bringing GMO seeds aboard a plane and shouting in Arabic while attempting to throw them out the bulkhead hatch.

Then the TSA would not only ban bringing seeds on planes, but also issue guidelines stating that passengers may not look out the window while flying over farmland, may not read books about farming during the middle two hours of a trip, and may not think about corn at any time while the plane is in the air.

As long as you have a decently accurate clock, you can get a lot closer than that without any externally-dependent navigational system.

Ouch, man. Ouch.

But warranted.

If you're a web site developer, it's probably best to host both, and have your pages detect what the browser supports.

And right there is why the HTML5 video tag will never defeat Flash video in its current form. With Flash, you need only one encoding.

That's actually really interesting to consider -- You could think of Netflix popularity as a band pass of the full spectrum of movie popularity. Imagine a few graphs for other channels that signify different levels of investment: theatrical viewing and DVD purchase above rental, cable viewing below it, and torrenting at the bottom. Now imagine these distributions overlaid on top of each other. I wonder what that graph would look like...

I knew this girl who had a USB one that synced with this interactive video player for Windows.

She got Conficker.

I think this could have happened earlier in the Internet revolution, but today it may very well be too late for such a crackdown. It's as if we went from the Model T to 1970s levels of car ownership in a decade. Legislation was able to kill a few freedoms here and there (particularly the DMCA in the US and sister legislation elsewhere) but overall, expansion of state powers couldn't keep up with the pace of technological progress. The inertia of the installed base is too great to make a sweeping change now.

Actually, going back to the car analogy, perhaps this is kind of what happened in India, and look at the wild west that is their motorways. Try regulating that explosion! The good thing is that you can't hit pedestrians with the Internet. You can do a lot of damage if someone's unprotected, but unlike navigating a crowded Delhi highway, anyone can take a few steps to greatly reduce their risks.