Linked List: February 22, 2014

Saturday, 22 February 2014

Bloomberg: ‘Microsoft Said to Cut Windows Price 70 Percent to Counter Rivals’ 

Tim Culpan and Dina Bass, reporting for Bloomberg:

Microsoft Corp. is cutting the price of Windows 8.1 by 70 percent for makers of low-cost computers and tablets as they try to fend off cheaper rivals like Google Inc.’s Chromebooks, people familiar with the program said.

Manufacturers will be charged $15 to license Windows 8.1 and preinstall it on devices that retail for less than $250, instead of the usual fee of $50, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The discount will apply to any products that meet the price limit, with no restrictions on the size or type of device, the people said.

And so begins the post-Ballmer, Satya Nadella era.

The Price Is Right 

Horace Dediu:

The result is plain to see: Caring about the product means that it can be priced at a point which consumers care to pay.

Trouble is, judging by how Apple is valued, nobody believes that this is sustainable. Regardless of the evidence within Apple’s own history, it’s the exception, not the rule and the bet continues to be that they cannot continue to remain an exception.

Is Apple going to continue to repeal the laws that govern its industry, as it has for decades, or will it, as the market expects, abide by them?

Three possibilities:

  1. Apple is exceptional.
  2. Apple was exceptional, but no longer is.
  3. Apple was simply exceptionally lucky, and luck always runs out.
Apple’s SSL/TLS Bug 

Adam Langley explains, largely in layman’s terms. You don’t need to understand cryptography at all, it’s a simple C bug. He’s also set up a simple test site to show if you’re affected — iOS 7.0.6 indeed is not, but Mac OS X 10.9.1 is. I expect a similarly focused Mac OS X security update imminently.

I’ve seen speculation that this may well be a bug that has been exploited by the NSA, and that it was uncovered by an internal Apple code review after seeing certain of the Snowden slides suggesting the NSA’s ability to intercept encrypted traffic. The tell-tale sign that it was uncovered internally: there’s no credit for reporting the issue on Apple’s security notice.

(I don’t want to start a coding-style war, but I think this bug would not have happened if the code had been written using curly braces after the if statements.)

Update: Landon Fuller (remember him?) argues that this bug should have been caught through unit testing.