I think you're just twisting to avoid the obvious point. An adequate gaming PC costs more than a console and yet piracy is endemic. Because PCs are an open platform and lack any adequate form of copy protection or DRM. Thus piracy is higher as can be seen just by visiting any torrent site and observing the number of seeds for popular games.

The issue here (aside from the differences being more subtle) is how does this master bookz distributor obtain 5 copies of the same book without them being in the wild in the first place? Does he solicit people to send him books or upload them somewhere? Remember if the books are in the wild you are screwed.

So you have to upload your book to somewhere secret where you trust and hope Mr Bookz will will strip out your id. And if your uploaded book does leak into the wild (because Mr Bookz is an asshole or incompetent about stripping the id), you've just incriminated yourself for no reason. If there is a book in the wild already why risk uploading another copy at all? Why even buy a copy in the first place if you are uploading books and therefore not especially concerned about the ethics of piracy?

Of course I suppose 1000 people could crowd compile a book, each submitting a page each to produce a frankenbook from the pieces but it would still have to be canonicalized in case the markup, contents, style rule names embedding the id somehow. Perhaps the frankenbook would hash each canonicalized page and the pages that have the same hash are used when the book is stitched together.

But for all the effort maybe it's easier to scan the paper book in the first place, or hook up a cracked Kindle / Nook / tablet to a flat bed scanner or a screen capture device and make extensive use of analogue hole to strip out most of the watermark.

In summary, it would be a hard problem to crack.

Throw some extra spaces here or there where it doesn't matter, use similar characters like the different forms of apostrophe or hyphens, twiddle the underlying markup, add unused style rules or inconsequential differences in styling. You could easily find enough bits in there to to "watermark" a book without it being obvious. You'd practically have to canonicalize both books and do a comparison and keep working on the canonicalizer until the results were the same. Chances are by that point that the book would be mangled out of all recognition.

Someone would have to possess an another copy of the same book (more or less defeating the point of sharing the their own and incurring a personal risk) in the same published form in order to even know that the differences were intentional. Even then it doesn't make them easy to remove, if for example style names or other marks in the book were randomized.

Similar measures would have easily found the culprit of a mass leak of information like wikileaks. Every page could contain 1 bit of variation based on the user's id and the result page. Each bit you could glean from a page would cut the search space of culprits in half so you'd nail the perp in no time. Even if the document was canonicalized it cannot strip out all the ways that this bit of variation could be sent and wikileaks would be extremely unlikely to be in possession of two independent copies of the same document to even know what to look for.

The custom firmware scene for the PS3 is background noise. Practically non existent by comparison to other consoles. And of course it would have been vastly worse if Sony had sat by and done nothing whatsoever.

As for it being "expensive", most PCs are more expensive again. Guess which platform suffers worse piracy. Cost has nothing to do with it so much as lack of copy protection or circumvention controls.

The interesting exploitable hardware. As it turned out they didn't protect it well enough even with a hypervisor so the entire OtherOS had to go.

I played around with Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3. It provided a full GNOME desktop but it really wasn't very fast. The PS3 only has 256MB, an inline CPU and was sitting over a hypervisor which blocked access to the 3D GPU. I think in time someone might have been able to put those SPUs to work to accelerate the graphics to some degree (e.g. mesa over SPUs, video decoding). Maybe someone would have made a dist that booted into a front end for playing arcade / SNES / Sega / Atari / C64 / PS1 games or MythTV.

But OtherOS really never attracted a whole amount of interest before the threat of removal became a reality. Then people who never used it were whining to the high heavens about evil Sony. Of course Sony was just protecting their platform - removing an esoteric feature which was massively exploitable. I expect the PS3 would died a death if piracy had taken hold and one way to ensure that was to leave OtherOS in there.

That's the real world for you. Sony were faced with two choices:

1. Watch their multi billion investment and revenue model go to shit as a viable exploit allowed people install to custom firmware primarily to play warez. Even if the exploit were experimental to begin with but you can guarantee that it would be perfected to the point that burning and booting from an ISO would root a PS3. Even if Sony patched this exploit there would likely be another, and another, and another.
2. Take out OtherOS and thus the entire risk and endure some whining from people, most of whom never used it in the first place and probably never would have either.

It sucks it was taken out (and I had used it myself BTW). But what would have sucked a LOT more is seeing the console I spent a lot of money go into terminal decline as it became a wasteland of shovelware shit because piracy was endemic. Or if the multiplayer was taken over cheating bastards and griefers thanks to modded firmware.

Given that the PS3 was the least pirated console of this generation by a large margin I would suggest that Sony got something right even if they angered some people in the process.

I expect Sony's gameplan is to push really hard on PSN+ and digital downloads (which are non transferrable) with the expectation in the fullness of time that physical discs will simply die out. So no point kicking up shit about it especially when it's a chance to deliver a well aimed kick in the balls to Microsoft.

Of course on the flip side, Microsoft could potentially install the full disc onto the HDD and let you play it without the disc at all since it's unique (embedded serial somewhere) and bound to your account now. I could see that being a significant advantage.

The value in these devices might be if you could take your phone, plug it into a dock and suddenly it becomes a full blown Linux desktop. That's a useful thing to strive for. Otherwise not so much.

Exactly. iGoogle is a really useful homepage. Google have nothing to replace it (Google+ is not a replacement). So I'll just jump over to Yahoo. I'll probably do a large chunk of my searches through Yahoo too.

The up front permissions is better than nothing but it's not good enough.

Android really needs to ask the user to grant / deny a permission each time it is accessed, with a checkbox to remember the decision. Some apps can be incredibly annoying, such as Facebook which is constantly turning on GPS which saps battery power. I should be able to disable that permission and force it to use a less precise location system or none at all. Another app might have a genuine need to launch the dialler, to call someone in its contacts list, but I want to be asked each time just so it doesn't surreptitiously dial a premium number in Ghana during the night. Perhaps for numbers, it's the number which is added to a whitelist when I say remember the decision. And so on.

Apps might also have installed broadcast receivers / services which might hit permissions. They could be suspended until I grant / deny the permission they require. Perhaps I can completely disable these receivers / services from running at all except when their app is in the foreground.

Well if it was just his girlfriend he'd be even dumber since they court would probably go easy on him. They don't go so easy on people who attempt to subvert justice. If he went through with his grand plan he'd be stewing in jail long after anyone else gave a damn.

This is all distinctly underwhelming. Android and Windows Phone have been sporting a "flat" UI for some time and iOS late to that party. It's some change from the times when Apple were the trend setter and are now playing catchup. And other than the reskinned UI, the remaining stuff is basically fixes and tweaks.

And in doing so open himself up to charges of hacking, blackmail, extortion, wire fraud and anything else they can pin on him. It's a stupid plan.

Safe how? It sounds like he is being charged for possession of kiddy porn among other things. He'll be tried and convicted regardless of his "threat" (which in itself is a offence) and if he's fucking stupid enough to release the key he can expect to receive fresh charges on top since he has just incriminated himself. So he'll probably go from 3-5 years up to 10+ years. Doubtless all sentencing to be served consecutively. Great plan that.