Qualcomm DMCA Notice Takes Down 100+ Git Repositories

[Luke]

Local better than cloud when privacy and security count

I still don't see how this is related to your original explanation.

Regardless, blaming Hollywood alone for the current state and direction of technology is too simplistic. I see more of a push to "Cloud" than to "appliances with vendor-controlled, locked down operating systems." The "Cloud" way of thinking is due to a complicated combination of piracy, advertising (Google), and user friendliness. I think piracy (Hollywood et al) and Google take the brunt of the blame for the push to Cloud.

If you wanted to throw black helicopters into the mix, then if all devices are thin clients (useless garbage, like tablets and phones) and all data is stored on "The Cloud," this is good for both government and corporations. You don't have to worry about the bad guys using computers and software against you anymore (since everything is done on "The Cloud") and you know what everyone is doing (and you could also tax people for computing like mentioned in that Multics essay!).

Hopefully computing in the future won't be treated purely as a utility service and that we have more of a hybrid of personal computing and "cloud" computing.

The future of networking needs to be a mesh, not a star. With the decline of net neutrality and the rise of things like paid prioritization and tracking, we are long overdue for some kind of shock that forces people to do things like fileshare directly computer to computer with the phone companies cut out of the loop.

Never rely on cloud storage when security counts, use the network only for things that require the network. Example: supposed I want to publish a video, using carefully selected clips from a protest that erupted into a street battle. The finished video requires a mesh network, a star network, or physical distribution. On the other hand, that video will be carefully cut so only my own side can make any use of it in a courtroom if anyone can. That means raw clips must not cross any network controlled by anyone who cannot be trusted to defy a subpeona, meaning they must stay on hardware I physically control and encrypt. The camera isn't trusted either, so I use only non-wifi cameras shooting onto camera cards that can be wiped with random numbers or physically destroyed after copying to encrypted storage.

The only thing thin clients are good for in this context is as a cheap source of lightweight, low powered computing equipment if and only if the original OS can be replaced. I've actually managed to force an Atom netbook to render out video from 1080p AVCHD clips in an emergency. It took an hour running wide-open to render, the timeline could only "play" as either slideshow video or audio-only, but the video got made and published on the road without the raw clips passing within reach of opposing security agencies.

This stuff I can be public with, as it discourages search warrants if the opposition has lots of information showing that I've only gotten even tougher on security since the encryption on a machine stolen in a 2008 raid defeated them. Yes, my needs may be totally different than those of Hulu's customers, I just hope that does not in the future require using carefully preserved older hardware. In case it does, I do not throw away hardware capable of playing even VGA video.

[curaga]

Wasn't the pirate bay planning on buying a ship and sticking it out in international waters permanently? Wonder whatever happened to that.

They wanted to buy Sealand, a ww2 sea fort, but the owner didn't want to sell IIRC.

BTW: The moon gets a 622 Mbps internet connection

[droidhacker]

Frankly, this takedown notice looks like some kind of automated crap, probably just some DMCA troll, likely not even Qualcomm behind it since it is so weak -- and for it being qualcomm.. you would think that they would just get their internal lawyers to send it out direct. Every single thing *in* this notice it is bogus/meaningless crap, most of which is actually distributed FREELY by Qualcomm themselves!

Not only that, but there is TONS, and I mean literally -- if you weight the electrons -- of ACTUAL proprietary Qualcomm stuff hosted on github, none of which received a notice.

I'm having a real hard time understanding where people are coming from on this whole "qualcomm is evil" thing. As far as mobile and wireless hardware vendors go, they are one of the most open and easiest to deal with. Frankly, I can't think of even ONE first class mobile hardware vendor that is even close to them. The "not open" problem comes from companies like samsung, who demand (and use) crippling drm, modify the hardware implementation in complete violation to reference designs, hack the hell out of the code (bad bad bad quality code...) to comply with their non-reference compliant hardware implementation, and ship source code in ugly zip files that do NOT come with the source revision history.

Avoid samsuck like the plague. They are first class horrible.
Yes, I have a samsuck phone. More hours than you want to know went into purifying it and making it run a relatively unmolested software stack.
My wife's phone is an LG Hammerhead (nexus 5). Code is clean and easy to work with, total pleasure.
Both are Qualcomm.

[Del_]

Frankly, this takedown notice looks like some kind of automated crap, probably just some DMCA troll, likely not even Qualcomm behind it since it is so weak -- and for it being qualcomm.. you would think that they would just get their internal lawyers to send it out direct. Every single thing *in* this notice it is bogus/meaningless crap, most of which is actually distributed FREELY by Qualcomm themselves!

Not only that, but there is TONS, and I mean literally -- if you weight the electrons -- of ACTUAL proprietary Qualcomm stuff hosted on github, none of which received a notice.

I'm having a real hard time understanding where people are coming from on this whole "qualcomm is evil" thing. As far as mobile and wireless hardware vendors go, they are one of the most open and easiest to deal with. Frankly, I can't think of even ONE first class mobile hardware vendor that is even close to them. The "not open" problem comes from companies like samsung, who demand (and use) crippling drm, modify the hardware implementation in complete violation to reference designs, hack the hell out of the code (bad bad bad quality code...) to comply with their non-reference compliant hardware implementation, and ship source code in ugly zip files that do NOT come with the source revision history.

Avoid samsuck like the plague. They are first class horrible.
Yes, I have a samsuck phone. More hours than you want to know went into purifying it and making it run a relatively unmolested software stack.
My wife's phone is an LG Hammerhead (nexus 5). Code is clean and easy to work with, total pleasure.
Both are Qualcomm.

Thanks for sharing the experience. It really is sad that open development has such an uphill struggle (while some seem to believe that the battle is already won, go figure). When it comes to Qualcomm's reputation, I am afraid there are strong reasons for distrust. Their most prominent open developer was Luis Rodriguez (behind the open Atheros drivers). He was brave enough to share a blog post about his former employer:

http://www.do-not-panic.com/2013/11/i-quit-qualcomm-today-whoohoo.html

Even after the unbelievable success he brought them with the Atheros drivers, that blew Broadcom almost out of the market.

[droidhacker]

Thanks for sharing the experience. It really is sad that open development has such an uphill struggle (while some seem to believe that the battle is already won, go figure). When it comes to Qualcomm's reputation, I am afraid there are strong reasons for distrust. Their most prominent open developer was Luis Rodriguez (behind the open Atheros drivers). He was brave enough to share a blog post about his former employer:

http://www.do-not-panic.com/2013/11/i-quit-qualcomm-today-whoohoo.html

Even after the unbelievable success he brought them with the Atheros drivers, that blew Broadcom almost out of the market.

That link doesn't actually say anything.

[Del_]

That link doesn't actually say anything.

The link says a lot, but you are of course free to ignore it.

[Ardje]

Avoid samsuck like the plague. They are first class horrible.

You cannot avoid samsuck. Unlike qualcomm, samfuck contributes a lot to open source. I bet all your qualcomm devices have samsung code running. Even when proprietary source code escapes samstuff, you do not see them sending cease-and-desist. No, they go around and try to make it open source.
Your next phone will have samsung written all over it. Your tv will be running samsung code. Probably your old video camera was already running the mmu less linux kernel, which is maintained by....
Heard about enlightenment yet (as a matter of opinion, it is the best window manager ever)? Oh yes, that's in tizen now. And who is committing changes to enlightenment, and not keeping it to tizen? I can assure you, it is not Qualcomm...
Qualcomm has been notorious for cease-and-desist, and fuck you around with licenses. Do you know how much work it was to get the nexus 5 released. It was waiting for Qualcomms approval for the release of the restore to factory default images which contained a qualcomm binary.
Do you know how many trillions of dollars went into patent litigation between qualcomm and nokia?
Qualcomm is the sole reason the US has cdma next to gsm. CDMA is Qualcomm proprietary.
So what open source efforts can we expect from Qualcomm?
I will list them:

So, that was it. The complete list.