Last time I looked, you could enable playback of opus audio by starting chrom(e|ium) with a special command-line switch, but they were refusing to enable it by default until there was opus-in-webm support (a format that as far as I know still doesn't even exist).

Meanwhile, Firefox has played .opus for about a year now...

Couldn't a case be made that false accusations of copyright infringement are forms of "slander of title"?

(Followup: the quote from Brendan Eich is in the comments here: "[...]downloadable codecs do not need to be freely licensed. IPR even if only defensive patents may be in play. But none of this taints the browser.")

Apparently this is another proprietary codec. Brendan Eich considers this unimportant because "consumers" won't get sued for using the browser, but it leaves people who want to participate (by encoding their own material) my have the same limitations that h.264 users do - no participating unless you pay the Intellectual Property Poll-Tax.

It sounds like they're still in "discussions" about the licensing of the codec itself. Unfortunately I'm not too confident that Mozilla is concerned much about that these days - they seem to be starting to fall into the same "consume-only" mindset that Microsoft, Apple, and Google seem to these days...

"Perfect enforcement of laws"?

No.

What I think most people are worried about are false-positives. I don't want my front door destroyed, my friendly dog shot to death, and my reputation smeared because some doofus with a drone mistakenly ended up identifying the infrared signature of my heated fish tank as a "growing operation" inside the house, for example.

"They will have access to search and activity data combined with a feed that shows people's whereabouts and habits. This marketing data will be worth way more than any direct advertising."

Bingo. Hence the "no resale, renting, lending, letting other people touch, etc." provisions in their "agreement" - this device appears to be intended to "train" users to be happy sending all of their information to Google, but this requires Google to be able to always "know" who is using which device at all times in order for the data to be fully useful to them (for "personalization", of course.)

In other words, this is like Facebook(tm), but even more so (and you have to pay $1500 for the honor of feeding Google's files on your behavior, which helps the illusion that THEY are giving YOU something, and not vice-versa.)

I've not had any real trouble with Firefox on my Linux systems since somewhere around FF5 or so.

Do people just plain never actually type URLs anymore? Where do I line up to get my "meinweltanshauungistganzherabgesetzt.vermögensberater" domain?

If I'm interpreting the beginning of the dissent correctly (starting on page 42...) the excuse for dissenting is more or less "Congress is copyright-maximalist, so we should be, too." (They quote a portion of copyright law that apparently DOES seem to explicitly say that importation of foreign-made copies is a special case).

I'm not going to wade through the entire 74 pages of opinion right now, but at a glance this does sort of look like "judicial activism" - nice to see such a thing happening in a "pro-human" manner more than "pro-corporate" for once, but it suggests we really need to be hitting Congress a lot harder to try to get this mess corrected.

Came here to complain about lack of GPS and see I was beaten to it.

Does it REALLY cost so much to design the tablets with GPS? Nexus tablets don't seem to have a problem doing it without being expensive...

Am I mistaken, or does REJECT give the same response as you'd get trying to connect to a TCP port with nothing listening to it (making it appear as though sshd wasn't even running, without alerting the connecting side that the port is "filtered")? I always assumed that the problem with DROP was that packets just disappear from the sender's side's point of view, which seems to not deter most of these scripts from continuing to try. (On the other hand, DROP has the benefit of cutting down on outgoing traffic a bit, but I'm under the impression this is mainly a benefit in Denial-Of-Service situations or extremely constrained bandwidth rather than annoying but not overwhelming brute-force password-guessing attempts.)

I recall chatting with some of the Opus developers on IRC about the time this came out. Evidently the story is quite overblown: as I recall this is more a dispute over how "deep" the specification goes (MS [if I'm remembering this correctly] wanted the specifications to specify deeper hooks to the OS or something of the sort) than an outright incompatible difference of opinion.

The context of the conversation at the time was more to do with .opus files in the tag (something Google hasn't even bothered to implement yet, annoyingly, though it ought to happen Real Soon Now) and the possibility that it'll happen in IE at some point, rather than WebRTC, but overall I get the impression that the differences of opinion aren't quite as incompatible or maliciously anticompetetive as, say MS's "OOXML" vs. "ODF".

Teach me to blindly click "post" - that's "Opus in <audio> support", for "plain old <audio>" (html5) tags.

They've got opus audio for their remote desktop feature and WebRTC last I heard, but they STILL haven't added support for it in plain old tags...

"A free (as in freedom) software app store for Android would be awesome." Check out F-Droid. "I'd love to see a free software Android fork with a modern package manager and native development tools." Not quite a complete project for what you want, but BotBrew is a start... Also, if it's ever possible to install FirefoxOS on more than a handful of devices, it sounds like a possible contender for the niche, too.