Part of it is - Was this violation due to him recording something without permission, or due to him recording something with permission of the musician that fell afoul of very complicated ASCAP/BMI rules on "public" performances because one of the songs turned out to be a cover?

A lot of it boils down to the rise of heavily asymmetric connectivity combined with "no servers" clauses in many ISP contracts.

That kind of killed the whole distributed nature of things...

Oh yeah, guess who are involved heavily in the last-mile service market? Cable companies.

Also, don't forget that the majority of the security "upgrades" that were standardized after 9/11 (such as only ticketed passengers past security) were proven ineffective by 9/11 - the measures were already in place at the particular departure airports!

I read the summary of this, and my thought was - "I'm shocked it took this long to happen" - That said, I am surprised they just went for the entrance hall and not the security lines.

$40 out the door sounds like you had a subsidized phone - this $399 price is the unsubsidized price.

That said, "budget friendly" is a Moto G, $179 for 8GB or $219 for 16GB but with the ability to stick in a 32GB MicroSD for $20 more. Those are the unsubsidized prices.

oh wait... only $11 more now - http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-...

It appears based on maestroX's post above (which lists Silverpush-using apps) that nearly all of the offending apps on the market are clearly targeted at foreign users - primarily it seems Southeast Asian markets.

Which is consistent with the FTC's letter saying that no USA programming features the broadcast component of this technology.

Seems like this is a preemptive "US advertisers had better not use this" warning.

Also - most of the developers will likely just ignore the FTC due to lack of jurisdiction, as the worst case the FTC could do is have these apps blocked for US users which the developer probably doesn't care about.

Not sure why you got marked as flamebait here.

For Insignal and Hardkernel's Exynos-based Android projects, their poor software support (vastly outdated software baselines - no excuse for development reference boards to have older software than carrier-approved Android handset releases for the same SoC, software baselines which were vasty different from any shipped product containing SoC, and Hardkernel's distribution of their Android source as a 2GB megatarball with no commit history - I hear they might have finally fixed this but back in 2012 their source was a 2.2GB megatarball) was the reason that nearly all maintainers of AOSP-derivative projects (such as CyanogenMod) for Samsung Exynos-based hardware decided to stop working with Samsung devices in late 2012. They were, simply, a bugridden nightmare.

Yeah, that one (Pripyat) became for all purposes a case study in "Reactor operator HOWTO: Making your plant explode intentionally."...

Even if you regard that third horse as barely in the race (which it is, it's already more of a two-horse race as you point out):

Regarding the question, "is WhatsApp finally reducing the mobile landscape to a three-horse race ?" - No, they aren't. Because that would require it to be more than a three-horse race currently. It isn't. It's barely even more than a two-horse race.

"Even as they released their premium Cyanogen OS ROM for devices with proprietary extensions, the CyanogenMod ROM still stayed 100% open source."

That wasn't their original plan - but they realized after the Focal mess that trying to leverage your CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to a GPL application that was written by an opensource contributor was a bad idea PR-wise. (Fortunately, their CLA didn't actually legally allow them to do what they wanted, and even if they did, that application was forked into CM directly from github without going through Gerrit and hence the CLA.)

I wouldn't say that until now the Cyngn team are really cool. The core team (who founded Cyngn) at one point went by the name "Team Douche" - and since the founding of Cyngn they've been pretty regularly living up to that name. Cyngn will always tell you that CyanogenMod is separate, but the reality is - All but 1-2 of those who have global +2 rights on the opensource project are employees of Cyngn. This is a fundamental conflict of interest, and it's clear that when it comes to corporate vs. community interests, corporate always takes precedence (see Launchergate)

Pretty much par for the course for Cyngn these days.

Also - gotta love how they decided to create a deliberately confusing name in order to steal search results for CyanogenMod.

They intentionally wired it so the key memory output only goes into the key input of a crypto engine - it can't be read back without decapping the CPU and microprobing it, and they may have put in countermeasures against that.

A lab operating on an image will have to directly brute-force AES, as the PBKDF2 result is encrypted with a device-specific key before it is used.

e.g. entering pin 0000 will result in a different AES key on every individual device in existence.

The key is a derivative of the PIN that has been encrypted by a device-unique AES key that can be set and erased but NOT read back. The only thing that is wired to that memory cell's outputs is an AES engine's "key" input.

So it's not quite a PUF but it's pretty close.

Best route of attack other than decapping the chip and microprobing it is likely DPA.

Forgot about this, but CRI might have some tricks up their sleeve. They MIGHT have the ability to DPA the AES engine if Apple didn't license their countermeasures - http://www.rambus.com/security...