You'd be surprised. Very often, two companies that you'd think compete are actually aiming at subtly different customers and can achieve more by working together.

Doesn't need to be a back door - forensics products to crack phones already exist:

http://www.msab.com/app-data/downloads/Release_Notes_(English)/XRY_release_notes_6.5_EN.pdf

Depends on your definition of "effectively control reproduction".

If you mean "effectively control reproduction forever" - you're absolutely right.

However, it has never been intended to achieve that. What it's intended to achieve is twofold:

  - Control reproduction sufficiently that a significant proportion of the market will say "Meh - too difficult. I'll just buy it".
  - Control reproduction for long enough that anyone who wants the product badly enough to get hold of a copy in the first couple of weeks post-release will have no choice but to buy a legitimate copy.

BT provide routers to their customers; I imagine the great majority are still on the BT-provided router.

AFAIK, BT have yet to provide an IPv6-capable router.

What makes you say that?

Virtually every country in the civilised world already has a requirement for telcos to support lawful intercept.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes, you are.

I'm generalising hugely here, but as a profession, most IT people (whether it's in software engineering, systems administration or management) can be extremely dismissive of sales and marketing.

This is a huge mistake.

If you're selling a commodity (a commodity is something where the product from one company is much the same as the same product from another company - gold, copper, coal and bananas would be examples of commodity items) - you've got to persuade people that it's somehow worth buying from you rather than any of the other people selling essentially the same damn thing. And commodities tend to have very slim profit margins because as soon as you find a way to knock £0.02 off your costs and pass that saving onto your customers, your competitors do the same thing. There is a damn good reason that every major supermarket has an enormous advertising budget, and it ain't because they like throwing money at newspapers and television stations.

If you're selling something that isn't a commodity and never will be - there's lots of business mentor-type folk who wouldn't get out of bed for less than £1000 per day, even out in the sticks - you need to persuade customers that you really are worth £1000 per day. If your customers get the remotest inkling of an idea that you're not worth that sort of money, you'll be out of a job very quickly indeed.

Then you have things that aren't really a commodity, but your customers think they are. A hell of a lot of technology falls into this category. You're trying to persuade your customer they should be buying software that lets them do X, Y and Z - but they've seen a boxed product in their local branch of PC World that claims to do the exact same thing for a tenth the price. If you can come up with a quick, easy way to resolve this that doesn't involve learning an awful lot of sales theory that doesn't always work - there is an entire industry that will happily write out 6-figure cheques to you.

It's even worse than that. Cakes are VAT free.

Biscuits (cookies in US parlance) are VAT free unless they are covered in chocolate. If they're covered in chocolate, they're a luxury item and therefore VAT'able.

Jaffa Cakes are small cakes. So small, in fact, that they are the shape and size of a biscuit. They're covered in chocolate and sold in packs of about 20-odd in the same aisle as the biscuits for about the same price. They're not VAT-able because they are classed as a cake.

Only if your private key was stored on their servers could Google do this.

It's a relatively recent innovation, but ISTR reading of a few JavaScript implementations of public-key cryptography, which would open the door to GPG-encrypted webmail without having to put your private key on a third-party provider's server.

He said "get in", not "hack in".

There is a process known as "lawful interception", and it's existed for the telephone network for decades - it's a term that covers the legal and technical framework that allows government to intercept phone calls. Something similar exists in most countries worldwide.

In short, in most countries the government can demand that local telcos assist in tapping telephone conversations. There may be various bits of legal paperwork that need to be filled in first, but the upshot's the same - the telephone company cannot say "No" to a properly submitted demand.

I know nothing about Israeli law, but I would not be surprised if Israel had extended something similar to email communications.

Google have an office in Tel Aviv, so Google can't turn around and say "We're an American company; you can stuff your lawful intercept request".

You're absolutely right, but unfortunately the world where everyone upgrades their systems so as to remain in support doesn't really exist. There's still plenty of Windows XP systems out there and I don't doubt there will be this time next year.

Hell, only a few months ago I was asked to quote on replacing a Windows 2000 SBS server with something brand new. The business owner was practically slapping himself on the back for being so fantastically clever at getting 9 years life out of a server which he'd bought second-hand. Of course there isn't a direct upgrade path from SBS 2000 to anything remotely modern, so all the money he'd saved would go on consultancy fees to deal with that problem...

Really? So Unix platforms never force you to upgrade?

I could have sworn that back in 2002-2004, I was working on AIX 4 and my employer was thinking about upgrading to AIX 5L - because IBM were about to cut support for 4. This was not particularly straightforward, as not all their old hardware was supported under AIX 5L. They could continue to get support for the hardware - it's amazing what a £multi-million support contract will buy you - but even then it wouldn't buy an extension to support for AIX 4.

Today, AIX 5L 5.2 - the version they'd have upgraded to - has been EOL'd. So has 5.3. They'd have to be on AIX 6 or 7 for support.

I guess they could have moved to Linux - they already had most of the business software running quite happily on Linux. (Not enormously difficult, as the business application was a Pick D3 database). Were they still going today, however - well, the version of Pick they used has been retired, which would suggest that support would be limited. They'd have to upgrade. An upgrade is available, but they don't support the same version of RedHat. So that would require upgrading too.

Outlook is not (and never has been) a POP/IMAP client. It is an Exchange client, and as such offers a hell of a lot more than plain POP or IMAP can.

The reason it supports POP and IMAP is, IMV, a sales decision. Small business owners buy Office, get Outlook, use all the extra features like shared calendars, notes and centralised contacts - none of which seem to work properly, remember that it used to work just fine back when they were working for a larger company and call up their computer literate friend to ask why.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the email aspect of Office 365 (and for that matter Windows SBS not so long ago) is sold. Outlook has already done the hard work of persuading the business owner they need it, and to top the lot, the customer has paid Microsoft (by buying a copy of Office) to sell it.

It's a wonderful sales technique if you can figure it out. The customer pays you and at the same time gives you a free opportunity to subtly persuade them to buy something else from you.

They don't, unfortunately.

Oh, sure, the "real" business apps aimed at huge businesses - the banks and insurance companies of this world - they might run on Unix (or even OS/400, or whatever IBM are calling it these days). But there aren't very many of those companies - even walking down your high street, you'd be astonished how many well-known huge corporations with a presence in every town are mostly franchises.

And a franchised operation is not, in technology terms, a huge business. It's lots of small, nominally-independent businesses that while they might run the same software (in cases where the franchisor tells them what to run), it consists of lots of small instances that each serve maybe 1-6 branches, not thousands of branches across the whole country. They seldom report back management information in enormous detail; detailed management information is down to the franchisee to figure out for their own benefit. As long as the franchise fees keep coming in, the franchisor seldom cares how the franchisee does it. (This, by the way, is one of the main differentiating factors between franchises. The more well-known ones are very expensive and tell the franchisee precisely what they have to do right down to the shade of tiles used in the lavatories. Mess up, and the franchisor will send someone down to either sort you out or take away your right to the franchise. The less well-known franchises are cheaper and don't go into this level of detail. Mess up, and the franchisor will simply let your business collapse then find someone else to sell the franchise to).

This means there are a lot more small companies than you might think. And many of those small companies historically have got by with a couple of standalone PCs - their "upgrade path" would have been a Windows server running SBS and the next level up version of their accounts package. Which is exactly the same product only the backend database driver has been swapped out from, say, Jet to SQL Server.

Never mind MSE - which is only on a subset of Windows computers.

Microsoft have recommended uninstalling a core Windows 7 patch in the last week or so: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2839011

Face it, anything that involves changing how a computer operates - regardless of whether the process for making those changes is automated or manual - introduces risk. You just have to decide how big the risk is, weighed against the alternative.

Actually... yes.

You'd be amazed how often glitches such as "router at the hotel the boss is staying at is not working properly" becomes "bloody useless IT department, should have outsourced the lot to somewhere with cheaper labour years ago, at least that way I'd be paying for what I'm getting" when the boss can't get at internally-hosted email while on the road.

This doesn't seem to happen anything like as often when the email is outsourced.

Meaning that even if you are regularly providing five-9's - hell, even if you can prove it - nobody believes you.