Eh... I've seen a lot of misinformation on this subject. Not saying that the core message (no back-compat for XB360 games) is wrong, but there's a lot of details out there which are.

For example, the usual reason given - the switch from PPC to x86 - is invalid on the face of it; the 360 runs original Xbox games, which were written for x86 (it uses emulation to do this). Relatedly, the XB1 should be able (by that logic) to run OXB games (same architecture). There's also no legitimacy to the claim that indie arcade games won't run because of the architecture; those games are written using XNA (a variant of the .NET framework aimed at gaming) and compile to CIL, which will run on any architecture with the requisite JIT compiler (r interpreter, if you didn't mind it being very slow). For example, WP7 and ZuneHD games are also XNA games, but both devices run on the ARM architecture (although the WP7 "emulator" is actually an x86 VM and can load the same package files as the phone, so you can be damn sure that the code produced by the XNA compiler is architecture-agnostic). Ignore any idiots who claim that the ORX used the same architecture as the 360; that is flat-out wrong, and the difficulties in getting the emulator just right are why many OXB games didn't initially work quite right on the 360.

Of course, the 360's CPU is not nearly as much less powerful than the XB1's CPU than the OXB's CPU is than the 360's. There may just not be room for emulation overhead in the difference between the 360 and the ONE. XNA and OSB games should still work, though...

How is the Surface *Pro* a disaster? Microsoft appears to be selling them about as fast as they can manufacture them. The Surface RT (uses ARM chips and runs the crippled-desktop Windows RT) has had disappointing sales, not the Pro.

I don't usually say this, but mod this AC up! I don't know what the hell Larry is smoking, but it's like he's trapped inside a reversed RDF that completely hides the real world from him. Well, either that or he's the most two-faced liar I've seen outside of a career politician in years...

Um, what? Unless it's for WiFi or NFC or something, I really doubt it does.

Typical cellular bands are at frequencies like 800, 850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz. 2100 to 2400 may not sound like a big jump, but in radio it's quite significant.

The first three are valid responses. The fourth, although I despise it, is actually illegal under the DMCA (circumvention of DRM). Microsoft doesn't have to circumvent anything to display ad-free YouTube videos; they're just playing the files as Google serves them (currently freely, unrestrictedly, and without ads in them).

Microsoft also used to develop and distribute IE for the popular Unix systems of the day. That didn't mean people wouldn't (rightly) rag on them for failing to follow web standards.

Not that the situation is actually as analogous as JustNiz implied, but your response isn't really a meaningful counterpoint either. I can block ads on YouTube.com all I want (it's easier on not-phone platforms than on phones, but it can be done on either).

The whole point of "you bought it" is a total red herring here. Is region locking OK by you and free DVDs that are handed out to anybody who asks? Because that is exactly how YouTube serves video files!

Also, no, they don't need to generate revenue. They want to generate revenue, but they aren't entitled to it. It's not a good business model to spend money (hosting/serving video files) giving stuff away for free. However, that's what Google is doing here; it's not the responsibility of any other entity (not the government, and certainly not a competing company) to ensure that they manage to earn revenue despite giving the content away for free. If Google doesn't like what Microsoft's app does, they can either (try to) refuse to serve it any video content (good luck with that), or they can stop giving away the content for free.

Well, or they can go complain to somebody in government, I guess. The courts have been braindead enough to uphold TOS as though they're actual contracts on occasion, though not often. The usual argument is copyright law, and that's completely off the table here; Microsoft is displaying the videos exactly as Google is serving them!

DVRs with "skip forward 30 seconds" button are also evil in your book, I take it?

You're letting your hatred of MS blind you to the likely, and perfectly reasonable, response they would take. You're then using it to justify condemning them here. If Google started blocking Microsoft's ads, I'm sure that Microsoft would just use something like IE's Tracking Protection feature - essentially a built-in ad-blocker - to ignore all requests for AdWords/AdSense, DoubleClick, and all other Google ad revenue streams they could find. Microsoft has a traditional business model based on selling things to customers; the revenue they derive from ads hosted on their sites is trivial compared to what Google stands to lose.

I doubt they'll throw the first punch in that war, but if Google were to block Microsoft ads, the perfectly logical response for Microsoft to take in response would hurt Google far more than it would hurt MS!

No actually, legally speaking they do not have that right. You may feel that the deserve to be compensated, but they are distributing the video files. Legally, I have a right to *not* watch the ads they would like to serve along with the videos, and they have a right to not serve me the videos if they don't want to, but they have no right to force me to watch ads as compensation for receiving the video files that they provide freely in response to an HTTP GET request.

It's exactly the same as the reason why ad-blockers are completely legal, but sites are also legally allowed to not display their web page if they detect you using an ad blocker. Nothing, however, gives them a right to require that I view their ads. There is no right to make an auxiliary income stream (advertising) off of something that you give away for free (stuff hosted publicly on the web).

Incorrect; that's not how copyright works. Microsoft isn't [re]distributing anything except an app they wrote themselves. The actual video content is still being distributed by YouTube; it's just being rendered through a client that Microsoft wrote. They cannot (legally, under copyright law) dictate what you do with the content once it is distributed to you, so long as you aren't making copies. Things like "copied into RAM for purposes of being rendered to a display" already have special exemptions, so there's really no legitimacy to the claim that by default MS has no right to use the content.

To adapt your own analogy to the real world, despite what the Windows installer for Pidgin will display to you, the GPL is not a EULA. Open source (which is copyright thing) licenses do not, and can not, regulate what you use the software for so long as you aren't sending it to anybody else. To use a different analogy, provided I'm not plagiarizing it (claiming that it's my own content), I can legally deep link any publicly hosted content that I want to, at least as far as copyright law goes; if the provider of the content doesn't like that, the onus is on them to not distribute it in that manner.

Microsoft's app is just grabbing the video stream - same as, for example, what you would get if you used the HTML5 mode - and displaying it. Displaying it requires downloading it to *somewhere*, saving that to a temp file is logical (allows the user to seek back, for example), and saving that temp file to a persistent file is trivial.

On the website, YouTube overlays ads on the video window or plays an ad video before the requested one or whatever they're doing these days. Those aren't in the raw video streams that MS is using. To do that in an app either requires screen scraping the actual site to find the ad layers, which is a labor-intensive, error-prone, non-future-proof, and inefficient way to go about it... or they can just display that video files that YouTube happily serves to anybody who asks.

"URL to an encrypted site" (https://slashdot.org) != "encrypted URL". Don't confuse them. There is absolutely nothing at all wrong with going to a random HTTPS site.

I rather strongly suspect that it's the Skype client, rather than the Microsoft-run servers, that is extracting those URLs from messages and sending them to MS for testing. In other words, MS isn't decrypting your traffic at all (except for the obvious necessary decryption by the Skype client when you receive a message). This might be incorrect, though. In any case, it's definitely a concern - whatever the source of the URLs, URLs in your messages are being sent somewhere without you knowing - but it's relatively mild compared to full-text scanning.

Taste, texture, and have the nutritional charactersitics of beef? Not without engineering them well past anything you could properly call a soybean anymore...

Yep. "0-day" is just security talk for "newly discovered" and tends to get a bit overused. Nonetheless, it's a useful and sometimes very interesting categorization. A lot of the famous worms of the past were not 0-days, but actually exploited vulnerabilites which had been known (and mitigated) weeks or month prior to the worm's release into the wild. People don't always patch in a manner that can even vaguely be called timely. I wish I could say they'd learned their lesson already, but I still see outdated web servers, SSH servers, database servers, etc. all the time.