Coward! Windows Movie Maker actually interprets(some) standard formats, and has an interface that feels like having a pro editing studio at your back compared to the horrors of Sony Movieshaker!(Even better, Movieshaker is exciting and mandatory if you were... questionably sensible... enough to purchase one of Sony's pricey 'MicroMV' cameras, which were vaguely DV-like, except totally incompatible.)

With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.

Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.

Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.

If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.

I do hope that none of your interests would be worth more to your insurer, potential employer, or other interested parties than they would be to doubleclick...

I'd argue that the behavior described can't (without doing serious violence to the details) be usefully dismissed as 'making bad decisions'.

Yes, unfortunately, Kids Today show no more signs of being Valiant Defenders of Privacy than did people yesterday. Outside of a principled-but-largely-ineffective minority, nobody ever has. Unshockingly enough, they've largely succumbed to the nigh-inevitable when it comes to advertisers and analytics creeps watching everything they do.

On the other hand, they do appear to be taking some degree of protective action against authority figures who are overt enough to be obviously worth evading(parents, principles, coaches, etc.) and dumb enough to be evadable(If you plan on using the internet in a remotely ordinary fashion without Google, Lexis-Nexis, your friendly local telco, and possibly a three-letter-agency or two, good luck with that. If you are trying to communicate with your friends without your parents catching on to what exactly you are drinking, that's still possible).

I'm sure that they'd love to(though TB is kind of a lousy disease as ROI potential goes. Virtually all the cases are in poor or marginal populations, so the customers tend to have only enough money to sporadically take drugs and develop resistant strains, and the first-world high rollers are negligible. Also, because the morbidity and mortality are so significant in poor countries, and the public health concern over drug resistance so great, a new TB drug would be an attractive target for generic production under the authorization of various uppity countries who don't understand that obeying American IP law is more important than their citizens' lives*shakes head*), I'm just not sure that they'd achieve much traction in a case like this. Unless therapeutic use does require some genuinely novel tweaks, the fact that synthesized vitamin C was big news in the early 1930s, and research on dietary sources was largely nailed down in the days when keeping the sailors on your man-o'-war from dying was important national security stuff, will probably mount a fairly stiff prior-art challenge.

Is there any reason to suspect that Intel is withholding any assistance that Apple is requesting?

Since they are actively working on an OSS driver, they clearly don't have some sort of 'zOMG Intellectual Secrets!!!' concern(and it's not as though Apple would be averse to signing the NDAs in any case), and Apple buys a lot of Intel chips(including a pretty good mix of the higher margin ones. They don't move Xeons for shit; but they also don't ship anything lower-end than an i5. That's not the sort of customer you play petty little games with when it comes to engineering support.

Unless the delivery transport makes a clinically relevant difference(in which case it would be as deserving of a patent as any medical innovation), how would patenting a transport help them?

Vitamin C is easily available in a number of flavors, some not by prescription, some of the more injectable ones possibly prescription only, and any doctor authorized to prescribe anything can 'off label' pretty much anything that won't either have the DEA on his ass or get his malpractice insurer to cancel his policy...

It sure is a good thing that we've been focusing our efforts on defense, rather than developing sophisticated attack toolkits and releasing them into the wild where they definitely won't get reverse engineered and re-deployed...

I'd assume that web devs(and their bean-counter overlords) are calibrating to user demands, not to the absolute objective of cutting down load times.

More bandwidth? Hey, we can replace all those 256-color .gifs and solid backgrounds with non-crunchy jpegs! More still? How about some Flash videos? Ooh, faster CPU? If we just load 20kb worth of javascript we can do all kinds of things without the old forms/refresh dance by doing xmlhttprequests and twiddling the DOM...

If you were content with the web page of 10 years ago, on today's hardware, it'd likely load like a bat, with a jetpack, on amphetamines, out of hell. It would also be comparatively spartan(though, given that much of what we have today is a nearly proper superset of ten years ago, there wouldn't be much stopping you from doing 10-year-old page styles on modern browsers.)

Is "'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,'" a codeword for 'not loading huge fucking flash objects from shitty overloaded ad servers'? Because that really helps with load times...

But I hear that Gmail is trusted by the CIA at the highest levels! Who should I trust now???

As with any DRM technology, it reduces the reliability and desirability of the device it cripples; but what's impossible about it? Biometrics more or less work, microcontrollers aren't news, and guns with electrical steps in the firing path go back a fair way(and guns with purely mechanical mechanisms are generally a solenoid and a locking pin away from being thus capable).

It wouldn't exactly improve the product; but it'd be perfectly possible.

I'm pretty sure that SAP is named after the weapon of the same name that has a very similar stunning effect on humans, rather than enterprises. Or possibly after what you'd call somebody who would buy it...

What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.

Adding a layer of 'software robotics' to second-guess the existing layer of dysfunctional software just seems like a nightmare of cascading complexity waiting to happen(especially since the software robot will need its own hooks into the system, or some impressive screen-scraping and OCR/natural language capabilities. I'm not saying that it's impossible; but it seems like money ill-spent compared to money dedicated to building more robust software that requires IT to come in and give it a shove a bit less frequently.

Please, do let me know about the part where I said it was 'okay'(or not okay, for that matter)...

My point was exclusively a hypothesis about strategies under different constraints:

When large corporations shop around projects(ie. siting a new plant, or even a new stadium, complete with six jobs selling hotdogs...) they usually try to get multiple states and municipalities competing to offer them sweeter 'incentives'. There are even consultancies, often associated with full-service corporate relocation outfits, who will assist in doing this, for a cut of the take. Under such circumstances, states generally end up paying out, often rather absurd amounts, and don't tend to fuck with the new partner. This is arguably a major market distortion for smaller competitors who don't have the same leverage; but it happens.

With a big federal 'defense' project, the siting is more likely to have been hashed out by some sort of congressional sausage-making process. This doesn't give the state unlimited leverage, moving a datacenter is expensive, but not infinitely so; but it does leave room for them to turn the screws a bit.