there are two free market solutions. One is the loudly proclaimed "don't buy an Apple iPhone!" which I have no problem with. The other is for cable manufacturers to negotiate a license that allows them to manufacture authorized cables with the correct chips built in to allow them to work with these devices.

Of course the latter relies on Apple allowing the companies to negotiate a price per cable that allows the manufacturers to still earn a profit, and still undercut Apple's product prices. My own suggestion is that for some time the production runs have a higher per unit cost that covers any liability related to expected failure rates, and that after some period the license fees go down if the manufacturer demonstrates high quality production. The understanding being that if at some point the failure rate exceeds a certain value, Apple will voide that license, and devices that get software updates from Apple will recognize the cable as no longer valid, pop up a message advising the customer to take the cable to an Apple Store for a replacement, and the cost of replacement will be bour by the licensee of the cables.

And if no-one wants to agree to those negotiated fees, then the market can always revert to the former suggestion.

Back in the late 1990's I stopped by my ISP and the frontdesk person was using his windows computer as a phone. This was a trivial solution using a voice capable modem, and off the shelf software. Capabilities included sending and receiving faxes, a voice mail system, and the early possibilities of setting up voice response system at the desktop.

There was nothing at all at the time, or even in the early 90s when I was working with similar hardware and software, that would have prevented microsoft from adding voice capabilities to windows server systems, as well as building connectivity between those servers and standard telco systems to build a platform that would extend to the business network (what there was of one at the time) and could be integrated into systems they were developing like Exchange and user software like Outlook (though other solutions may have been workable.)

If they had developed something like that, then it is far mroe likely that we would have seen workable solutions, for corporate users initially, to turn various PDA platforms into corporate managed mobile phones. I don't know if they would have gone with a VoIP solution for moving the voice over the network, though I don't recall there being a NetBUI opton for moving something like voice, so it may have ended up being VoIP.

At some level they can get onto this path now with Skype, and I think they have tried, but they have the problem now that they completely missed the integration with the POTS variety phone system that is now almost completely monopolized by Astrisk and Cisco.

I ask for a citation, not because I don't believe you, but because I want to quote it a few places without having to say 'Someone named Lendrick on Slashdot says...' :-)

A couple of problems here. Firstly a lot of those stories refer to an event in 2008, and Der Spiegel claims GCHQ only got access to Belgacom in 2010. So their spying cannot have been relevant there.

Secondly, the evidence in those cases was the sort of thing that can be obtained using ordinary court orders or ordinary, limited and carefully controlled wiretaps. The people targeted went to the Afghan-Pakistani border for months and according to one article, some of them were already known criminals in Belgium even before then. Getting a tight, time limited court order for surveillance of these people within Belgium is easily possible - at no point would Britain hacking Belgium have been helpful in such a prosecution and indeed, would have been dangerous - if the evidence was obtained without a warrant and defence counsel found out, the case might have collapsed.

I strongly dislike this notion that the acts Snowden uncovered are all OK because occasionally, the authorities do manage to catch terrorists. Guess what? They also catch random serial killers, fraudsters, drunk drivers who do hit and runs, all kinds of other criminals .... just using the ordinary tools and strict supervision they are supposed to operate under. Where's the evidence that tightly specified, time limited court orders issued by open courts are insufficient? Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request? I've not heard of such a thing, even though occasional mistakes would be expected and not by itself sufficient to conclude what the NSA/GCHQ does is necessary.

I suppose the way it can work is this - after a reasonable if not rich life style, they lose a job and lose the apartment. They now get food stamps, but it's not quite enough to live off each months, so they end up living on the street. Due to the lack of rent payments, they now have enough money from social security to buy OK food and drinks. They still have laptop and phone from before things went south, even though they might not be able to afford a new one.

It's worse than that. Yes, you need some kind of an address to get a bank account thanks to stricter AML laws passed in the PATRIOT Act.

However, if you spend a while in the cash economy, when you do get back on your feet many banks will refuse to take your cash as a deposit. Because they don't know how you got that cash, they are afraid of being considered money launderers by allowing you to deposit it. So once people fall out of the banking system it can be hard to get back in, which then in turn keeps these people down (and more likely to be criminals). All in the name of fighting the terrorists.

By the way, the US government knows the power of being evicted from the financial system full well. That's why they're starting to enforce US law internationally even though they can't jail people outside their borders. Instead of jail the punishment they use is being blacklisted from the financial system and having all your bank accounts closed. If you're a middle class guy with a home, a mortgage, kids etc and one day banks stop wanting to deal with you because you pissed off the US, then you could find yourself on the street faster than you might think. After all, what are you going to do when your bank accounts get closed - take out your life savings and pension as cash?

I think you over-estimate how difficult it is to use Bitcoin. Here's what they have to do:

1) Install app on phone (perhaps a charity case, or perhaps one they had before they lost their home)

2) Retype Bitcoin address from screen to laptop when receiving money for "microwork tasks" like spamming YouTube

3) There is no step 3.

Alternatively, step 2 can be "show someone the qrcode on your screen to receive money in person". Anyone can do it.

Can you give a cite for that? It's hard to imagine any country deliberately banning all charity, especially one as enlightened as Finland.

Fortunately, despite the name, it seems BountySource also supports fundraisers aka Kickstarter-style schemes aka "assurance contracts". We know from Kickstarter that this model can scale to very large investments, when the project leaders are credible and there are lots of people who want something done. Unfortunately Kickstarter has a very narrow focus, so it's really great to see someone step up and create a competitor focused on the open source world. If I didn't already have a job I'd definitely consider experimenting with funding myself this way.

I think there are two technologies coming up that could help this situation somewhat. Although they're both a bit exotic currently.

The first one is Bitcoin proofs of sacrifice. The basic idea here is that you can obtain some Bitcoin via whatever means, and then sacrifice it (to miner fees) in such a way that you can create a data structure containing a public key which also proves that you threw that money away. Poof - you just created an anonymous "identity" that had a specific cost and that you therefore do not wish to lose. By adding this proof (or hash of the proof) to shared blacklists, you can then be banned from various sites. If you really really want to get back in, you can of course make a new sacrifice - but it could get expensive fast. People who behave can re-use their non banned proof at lots of websites and may never need to make a new one.

The second technology is called SCIP/TinyRAM and it allows you to generate a proof that some arbitrary computation was done correctly, where some of the inputs to that computation can be private. For example, you can take some rare and difficult to obtain object - like your NFC enabled passport - and then run a provable computation that verifies the signed cert chain stored inside the chip. The passport data is a private input. The output of the program is a hash of the passport and the fact that it was valid (signature chains were correct). This "proof" is then used as above - you can send it to websites who can then ban you if they wish, but they never learn your real identity. The bans stick because you can't easily obtain a new identity from the passport office.

I prefer the Bitcoin approach because it sets a market for abuse ... if you screw up and get banned in a lot of places, you can get a second chance by spending money. With the passport approach it can theoretically be done using any NFC enabled Android smartphone, so it's more accessible, but you only get once chance unless bans expire after a time period.

Has anyone ever discovered that feature without someone else telling them about it? I'm guessing the answer is no.

in a society where people always do whatever the hell they want with no regard for responsibility, you get absolute authoritarianism, because somebody has to make the assholes pay

in a society where people always acts responsibly, you have the utopian libertarian ideal society of 100% freedom

of course, neither extreme actually happens, but the point is, the more people behave responsibly, the more true freedom everyone has, and the less people beahve responsibly, the more people have to depend upon the state to make society function

that's a very interesting example

it sounds like a premise for a book or movie or tv show

i bet it would be quite successful

when the consequence hurts me as well, i have a right to have a say in that behavior

because i love freedom crushing authority?

no, because i love MY freedom

and i don't want my freedom oppressed by that from which a lot of freedom oppression in this world actually comes from: not the stereotypical government goon, but from my fellow citizen who is an irresponsible moron