This Month in Evil
Aug. 25th, 2010 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurI'm gradually catching up on my tech blogs from Pennsic. Remarkable the things one misses while away:
On the one hand, there's the Net Neutrality mess, as Google caves on a point they've been arguing as a matter of principle for ages, and the wireless providers using that as evidence that NN is a bad idea. They're saying it's a necessary compromise, not a business decision -- but really, this smells very much like inter-company horse-trading. It certainly fails the "appearance of impropriety" test to me.
Then, Google gets to be on the receiving side of (for my money) an even bigger evil: Oracle suing them for using Java in Android. The one silver lining here is that it might renew the well-deserved decline of Java. The language is old and creaky, and has long since been passed by better options, and now we're getting a great reminder that it is owned and patent-protected by a company that is happy to sue people using it. Time to move on to better things, and tell Oracle to f*** off.
On the good side, RIM (a company I usually pay little attention to) is coming down on the side of individual privacy, at least for their customers: they aren't giving backdoor access to countries that want to spy on their citizens. Surprisingly gutsy move, I have to say, and it's causing some middle-eastern countries to shut down Blackberry. But it makes a certain amount of business logic: corporate customers want that assurance of privacy, and it may be worth RIM losing some customers in more authoritarian states in order to reassure the ones elsewhere.
Still a week or two behind in my reading; it'll be interesting to see if there have been meaningful changes in any of these...
On the one hand, there's the Net Neutrality mess, as Google caves on a point they've been arguing as a matter of principle for ages, and the wireless providers using that as evidence that NN is a bad idea. They're saying it's a necessary compromise, not a business decision -- but really, this smells very much like inter-company horse-trading. It certainly fails the "appearance of impropriety" test to me.
Then, Google gets to be on the receiving side of (for my money) an even bigger evil: Oracle suing them for using Java in Android. The one silver lining here is that it might renew the well-deserved decline of Java. The language is old and creaky, and has long since been passed by better options, and now we're getting a great reminder that it is owned and patent-protected by a company that is happy to sue people using it. Time to move on to better things, and tell Oracle to f*** off.
On the good side, RIM (a company I usually pay little attention to) is coming down on the side of individual privacy, at least for their customers: they aren't giving backdoor access to countries that want to spy on their citizens. Surprisingly gutsy move, I have to say, and it's causing some middle-eastern countries to shut down Blackberry. But it makes a certain amount of business logic: corporate customers want that assurance of privacy, and it may be worth RIM losing some customers in more authoritarian states in order to reassure the ones elsewhere.
Still a week or two behind in my reading; it'll be interesting to see if there have been meaningful changes in any of these...