Tag: technology

It’s still a bad idea:

Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the wireless-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.

It doesn’t stop there. According to the data we were given by the web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network, we believe 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it’s possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed.

Yes, yes, this is certainly amusing. Of course, all Apple has to do to settle down the Macintossers is run a few hipster commercials featuring indy music about how very cool and awesome and not-at-all lame it is to get your device hacked.

A last call to the modemakers. If you have any mode layouts in mind, you need to get them in now if you want them to go out in the initial release. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet template. Send them in tomorrow, please.
I’d particularly like layouts for AutoCAD, 3D Studio Max, the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, and the latest version of Opera since I don’t use any of those applications.

Engadget still doesn’t quite grok the fullness of the mouse, but they don’t actually hate it any longer. In fact, they even went so far to describe it as “the most advanced mouse we’ve ever seen.” Despite the caveats and minor misconceptions, I’m quite pleased with the review. And the review unit is a prototype, btw, so the plastic on the production units is completely different.

If you’re interested in creating a mode for our little technology project, now is the time to fill out the spreadsheet and send it in to us. That will let us put it in the box for everyone. We’re up to 72 modes now and we want to have well over 100, so if you are an aficionado of a game or application that is not on the list, don’t hesitate to dive in.

Also, a reader would like everyone to know that if they are in need of “the services of a good Access/SQL database geek”, he is available. Shoot me an email if you’re in the market for one. It’s not my purpose to establish a classified section here – although that’s not the worst idea – but one must reward initiative. Although I suppose Beau is already engaged with human trafficking matchmaking, so I suppose anything is possible.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you about Apple’s ideological evil. Adobe’s Flash Blogger goes off:

By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms. Obviously Adobe is looking into this wording carefully so I will not comment any further until there is an official conclusion.

[Sentence regarding Apple’s intentions redacted at request from Adobe]. This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe….

Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.

Now, I disdain Apple products anyhow, since I despise their attempt to exert control over the way their users are permitted to use their hardware. I don’t develop for them except as an afterthought since it’s neither my business nor my concern what hardware and software any of our users happen to use; that’s why we will soon have hundreds of custom modes available for download that are designed specifically for whatever bizarre purpose our users have in mind. But if I was an Apple software developer, I would have to be very inexperienced indeed not to see the writing on the wall. Apple is now a console system, not a PC, so it won’t be long before they are imitating Nintendo and charging the developer a larger share per unit for the right to sell something developed for their platform than the developer makes himself.

NB: Before you leap to the wrong conclusion, I am most certainly NOT a fan of Flash. I think it is a very effective way to ruin the utility of a useful website and have it turned off in Firefox by default. But that doesn’t excuse Apple’s actions here.

It’s sexier than the iPad. Or rather, it’s much more useful than the iPad. It’s the first pass at the default Adobe Photoshop CS4 mode. Of course, we don’t use Photoshop to any great extent, so any suggestions from experienced Photoshop users for material improvements to the present commands assigned to the default Photoshop CS4 mode would be very much appreciated.

Steve Jobs has lost the techno-hipsters:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Needless to say, I won’t be acquiring an iPad myself. I wouldn’t mind a tablet-sized ebook reader, but I want something that runs open source software, isn’t tied into a DRM machine, and permits me full control over its operations. I don’t care about the way in which Apple prevents the tinkering that Doctorow so values, but I am utterly hostile to Apple’s transparent attempt to exert control over practically everything its users attempt to do. I have very fond memories of my Apple //e and appreciate their industrial design and their marketing skills, but I could not possibly despise their technofascistic, DRM-centric philosophy more.

Those who happen to be interested in the little technology project on which Markku and I have been working may wish to take a look at the very first independent review of the mouse.

Cracked underlines the point I have been making for over decade now. It is Apple that are the techno-fascists; the famous 1984 ad was nothing but pure psychological projection:

When you buy Apple products, you don’t just buy computers or gadgets. Apple sells iPods and iPhones that play music purchased in their iTunes store. It’s all part of Jobs’s sales pitch to people who pride themselves on individuality. Even before there were ads featuring the kid from Die Hard 4 bickering with John Hodgeman in heaven, the message was been the same: PCs are for those people who follow the herd, but you choose Mac because you think differently….

[M]anufacturers of other cell phones and gadgets generally don’t care what customers do once they’ve paid for their products with good, honest credit card debt. But Apple goes beyond complaining. They will actively break your shit for disobeying their arbitrary rules. Yes, Apple has sent out updates specifically designed to disable phones that have been modified to work with carriers other than AT&T, or to run Microsoft Office. Seriously now, we’d be inventing new, fluorescent shades of berserk if, say, a PC manufacturer broke your computer for installing Linux.

Now, I have no objection to people using Apple products, even if I don’t deign to use them myself. And I understand the brilliance of Steve Jobs’s philosophy of limiting utility in order to reduce potential problems; every game designer knows that at least one-third of his time will be spent figuring out how to prevent idiots from purposefully ruining their own user experience. I was speaking with a technology reviewer a few days ago and I mentioned that if we created a function called ERASE HARD DRIVE, at least 10 percent of the users would assign it to a button and click it to see what happened. The reviewer laughed and commented that 100 percent of that clueless 10 percent would be furious upon discovering that the function had done precisely what it said it would do. And, of course, they would blame us for giving them the power to destroy their data so easily.

So, there is a solid rationale for simply not letting people do basic things like load their own software onto their own hardware at will. There is a sound logical reason for treating users like cretinous children and refusing to let them make their own decisions. And one can clearly make a great deal of money if that technofascistic attitude is combined with keen vision and great design talent. And yet, that doesn’t make it right.