Maintaining a real computer can be a serious annoyance at times. Regardless of which operating system you call home, you will be buffeted by an endless stream of security patches and upgrades and it never ceases to amaze us that no vendors have yet to launch marketing campaigns touting their ability to write secure bug free code!

Of course, even if a vendor writes quality code in house, glitches keep popping up in software libraries that are shared by countless client programs, causing the need to fix a bug in a single library to ripple through the eco-system. Moreover, since vendors don’t disclose where they get third party code or the exact nature of most patches, End Users can’t identify the original sources of the bugs or use that knowledge to procure code from more reliable programming houses.

Sadly, rather than tackling the root causes of low quality software on the desktop, we have seen a move by some platform vendors to leverage this sorry state of affairs as a way to seduce End Users into migrating to arguably more convenient systems that use contractual and architectural measures to trap their users in Walled Gardens, where no problem can be solved without making yet another purchase.

In return for transparent updates and backups along with the promised convenience of a curated store that will ostensibly hold a turnkey solution to our every need, we give up the power and generality that makes personal computing so transformative. Instead, of providing powerful means of abstraction and combination, we are faced with a thousand roach motels for our data which is always kept just out of reach.

Instead of empowering End Users and teaching them the sense of personal mastery that came with the Personal Computing Revolution, these new platforms breed dependence and centralize a level of power in the hands of platform vendors who now enjoy the power to kill disruptive technologies, censor their application, and effectively prevent End Users from exercising traditional rights of ownership to tweak and modify their property and freely contract with third parties. This weakens the meaning of ownership to the point that it looses all meaning.

Such systems are the technologies of George Orwell’s 1984 and End Users would be well advised be wary of the slippery slope on which we now tread.

David O’Toole raised some very cogent points in his blog posting Apps Considered Harmful: Part 1 that inspired these remarks and parallel our thinking.

We are hammering away behind the scenes on a major retooling of our website’s design and source code to embrace HTML 5 and CSS 3. There has been a lot of innovation in the browser space and we are doing our best to take advantage of it. As a result, we won’t be able to maintain our current level of support for older versions of Internet Explorer, but we really aren’t doing anyone any favors by helping them delay an upgrade to a more capable browser. As always, even if a page doesn’t look particularly aesthetic in an old browser, you should still be able to read its content. But seriously, why make yourself suffer? Upgrade to a current browser release now, so you’ll be able to fully enjoy our new site when we roll it out later this Summer!

Remember, current versions of the major browsers are all free and fast downloads for anyone with internet connectivity. For Mac Users, the latest incarnations of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox will serve you well. On Windows you can look forward to an impressive Internet Explorer 9 as well as Chrome and Firefox. Firefox and/or Chrome should already be pre-installed on current Linux distributions. Modern cell phones and tablets generally have mechanisms in place to keep their browsers updated and any new device is apt to provide strong support for emerging web standards.

Keeping any of these programs updated couldn’t be more painless or important since they are all undergoing very rapid evolution at this time. Each new release is adding new features that will noticeably improve your browsing experience as more sites like this one roll out HTML 5 & CSS 3 based designs.

Of course if you are dealing with a school, library, or corporate setting where you can’t just install it yourself, remind the IT Powers That Be, that running older browsers exposes their organizations to countless security vulnerabilities and reduces your productivity and access to important websites!

If you are a Screen Reader User, the situation is slightly more volatile, since HTML 5 support may take some time to arrive. We are doing our best to use the new features in a manner that won’t compromise your experience, but it is vital that you contact the developers of your Screen Reader of choice to let them know that support for HTML 5 features like its outline model are important to you.

Remember, your Assistive Technology Vendor is the one in the best position to improve your web surfing experience. It makes no sense to force web developers to delay rolling out support for improved standards that benefit everyone’s usability when a software upgrade on your part can yield a superior web surfing experience to that produced by millions of ill informed attempts to tweak web sites for compatibility with obsolete assistive technologies.

In many respects, today’s Web Browsers have become just as important a computing platform as the operating systems they run under. Beyond surfing the web, you can now find plugins that extend their capabilities to everything from helping you follow Twitter and Tweak to your friends, to managing the sea of academic citations that go into a Ph.D. Dissertation, to taking some of the pain out of developing web content of your own, to helping you blow off steam with cleaver in-browser puzzle games.

By allocating a few minutes each week to making sure your web browsers are up to date, you’ll be doing your part to make the World Wide Web work smoothly and securely while unlocking countless new possibilities!

Upgrade now and surf safely, the Web awaits! ]]> http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/632/feed 0 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/625 http://weblog.ieuc.org/archives/625#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 01:16:17 +0000 The IEUC http://weblog.ieuc.org/?p=625 How Apple tracks your location without consent, and why it matters.

Anyone using an iPhone should carefully read this article and consider its ramification.

End Users need to reject Apple’s business model of taking a 30% cut of “in application” content sales and recognize the degree to which such hidden expenses are disguising the trust cost of iDevice ownership.

As competing tablets reach End Users we trust that market forces will bring about an end to such overreaching practices.

It is now being reported by the New York Times that Apple has blocked Sony from releasing a Sony Reader app for iDevices via Apple’s App Store : “Apple Moves to Tighten Control of App Store”

Businessinsider.com put this quite succinctly : “WAR: Apple Blocks Sony E-Reader App, Kindle Might Be Next”

End Users and Antitrust Regulators should be deeply concerned by Apple’s growing efforts to tie purchases of their current hardware to future purchases of software and media content through their exclusive distribution channels.

To allow this approach to stand as a mater of public policy and common sense would be the equivalent of letting the manufacturer of a refrigerator dictate where one could shop for frozen food or letting car manufactures restrict which brands of gasoline could be used to fuel your vehicle while permitting both to get a cut of your future purchases inflating the price of every purchase without adding any real value in return.

Consumer electronics manufacturers shouldn’t be able to condition the purchase of software and content by End Users of their “platforms” on their receiving a cut of all such sales by restricting third party vendors from directly meeting their customers needs without going through them as an intermediary. The Apple model of a single sanctioned App Store serves as little more than a content tax and anti-competitive barrier that prevents other firms from competing with the platform vendor and its preferred business partners to offer improved quality and value.

Naturally, proponents of the App Store model will argue that it benefits consumers by providing a vital quality control filter, but this end could be achieved through a Certification Mark without intruding into the Freedom of Contract between End Users and Third Party Vendors.

In all likelihood, most End Users would still choose to go the official App Store route, but only by forcing hardware vendors to permit alternate app stores and convenient side loading of content and unmediated purchases of such content can we insure an honest market.

In no other product category would we even contemplate the notion that manufacturing a product entitles its original vendor to exercise this level of control over its use and the aftermarkets for its compliments.

End Users stand at a crossroads between one future where we continue to enjoy the benefits of the free markets that have brought us to where we are today and and a much darker world of monopoly-priced platform-locked content and utter subservience to the whims of platform vendors restricting what programs and content you can see and use to only those apps and media that fit into their self-serving marketing plans.

The battle lines are being drawn and we can’t necessarily count on the courts and government regulators to protect our interests if we willingly embrace products that try to leverage of convenience of an App Store model to enslave us.

The Hacker News highlights a mix of stories ranging from hard core technology postings, patent wars on the legal front, the occasional spot to technology related political commentary, and a healthy sampling of topics related to launching high tech startups. Periodic pointers to postings with advice for students will be of particular interest to many of our readers.

We urge you to read this stunning analysis of Apple’s patent application for a technique to personally identify its users through covert activation of a device’s audio and video capture hardware to identify the location of your Apple device, photograph its surroundings, possibly monitor your heart beat, record your communications and online activity, and disable your system (by wiping your device after sequestering your data on its remote servers) if you engage in “unauthorized” uses of your device even if they are perfectly legal.

This takes Steve Jobs’ transformation into a Big Brother figure to a whole new level.

Of course, in all fairness to Apple, this capability is ostensibly contemplated to recover stolen iPhones. Moreover, since Patents are a Monopoly Right to Prevent Others from Using a Technology, Apple could put a positive spin on this PR disaster by promising to not exercise this patent themselves and to use it to prevent other manufacturers from spying on their End Users, further insuring that Users are not punished for legally customizing systems that they have purchased.

But if the patent is really driven by such beneficence, Apple needs to make its intentions clear, ideally by opening its devices to arbitrary user-installed software to obviate the need for jail-breaking in the first place.

Given the level of deep reaching control that Mr. Jobs exerts over the company it is hard to believe that a patent of this scope covering such sensitive subject matter would be filed without his personal knowledge and approval.

The application also raises some interesting questions for owners of current Apple devices. Does current Apple hardware support the Spyware functionality contemplated by the patent applications, and if so, is such functionality present in any shipping Apple System Software?

Sadly, we may not longer control that which we own, making the only trustworthy devices non-networked ones.

So until definitive answers are had, End Users must assume that their Apple devices are subject to remote monitoring by corporate spymasters in Cupertino, that their microphones are always recording, and that the indicator lights on their built-in webcams cannot be trusted.

And make no mistake, if such hooks are in place for Apple’s use, it is only a matter of time before black hat hackers discover how to exploit them to look in on your bedroom or office.

We urge the Board of Directors of Apple to do some serious soul searching about what kind of a future they want to live in. No matter how desirable absolute control may seem in the short run, such power is fleeting.

In a matter of months, Android and Windows 7 Tablets will arrive to challenge the iPad. The iPhone is no longer the only game in town, and the Windows 7 and Linux operating systems offer a viable alternative to OS X.

It is not too late for Apple to step back from the precipice, but if it continues to display ever increasing levels of arrogance towards its End Users and Developers alike, a tipping point will be reached that will send the value of Apple stock plunging as its customer base evaporates.

But there is another path. The path taken by programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and by internally extensible software applications like Spreadsheets (host to the most common form of End User Programming) and recent Hypertext environments. Such systems, offer a range of powerful primitives that can be combined in an infinite number of ways to meet any given End User’s personal needs. They empower End Users to craft their own solutions or to mix and match components from other sources. They don’t discriminate between commercial and non-commercial solutions, since no one economic model is best at meeting real world needs, nor can any one vendor know which tools are best.

An optimal workflow will often draw on both free and proprietary software and when found, it should be possible to encapsulate such a solution so it can be shared. Indeed, it is this sort of compositional freedom that holds the greatest potential to empower End Users and simplify life.

Apple already enjoys a tremendous marketing lead with its iPhone and has a strong reputation for creating new functionality. But it also has developed an unquenchable thirst for control that leads it to consistently refuse to meet standing consumer needs in an attempt to insure that its customers are never quite satisfied by always leaving something important out. To sell more phones, it leaves out a built-in microphone and camera from its Touch devices that would let their WiFi capabilities moot the need for a cell contract. To boost App store sales, it denies users the ability to directly install third party software. To insure that developers commit to its native API’s so they can’t port their Apps to other platforms, it prohibits the installation of interpreters for programming languages on its phones.

All of these things you can’t do as a matter of business policy on the Apple platform led to Droid’s successful Droid Does marketing campaign. This is one thing the new Apple can’t bear, real consumer choice.

So rather than relax its strangle hold on its customers so they will freely choose its products and services, Apple has turned to the very dark side tactics of sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to attack the Android platform. It isn’t the copying of some specific technology that truly scares Apple, it is the fact that Google’s Android Platform is more Open than its own and has enough technical appeal and interface sophistication to hold its own in the market.

In the glory days of Apple Computer, the company embraced competition through technological superiority as it strove to empower its End Users. When the company dropped “Computer” from its corporate name it renounced the promise of End User Computing and sough to transform its once independent customers into mindless drones dependent on Apple for their next entertainment fix.

This new Apple fears competition and evidences utter contempt for consumers as it now turns to the courts in an effort to stave off the loss of customer defections of its own making.

If you hold Apple Stock, now would be a good time to make it known to management that trying to stifle innovation and consumer choice with IP litigation hurts the entire industry, could lead to a flurry of patent litigation by making it socially acceptable for other companies to go after Apple, and threatens to destroy the long term value of your investment. If you were thinking of buying Apple products, hold off and let Apple know that you don’t appreciate its strong handed attempt to gain a monopoly over mobiles devices.

[Obligatory FTC Disclaimer: The Institute and some of its officers, directors, staff & volunteers have made use of free Google Services which might in theory bias us in favor of positions that would advance Google's interests, which in this case run in concert with those of HTC which is being sued by Apple. Some of us also use Apple products and services. We have not canvased everyone to determine whether any of us directly or indirectly own stock in any of these companies, but that possibility no doubt exists. So the reader should assume that potential relationships exist and consider this to be a notice thereof.

That said, our writing is solely motivated by our desire to advocate for the interests of End Users like you and we only include this notice because it is required by the FTC to avoid the risk of running afoul of their regulations and becoming subject to substantial fines. If you are a blogger and have ever received anything of value or have any kind of theoretical relationship with an entity you are blogging about, you should consult with a lawyer to determine your disclaimer obligations under these new rules.]

This is another case of taking a very generic idea with utterly no novel engineering behind it and turning it into a patentable innovation by attaching it to a subject domain. This is almost the same recipe that cooks up most business method patents.

Take a generic idea like reporting something of interest, qualify it slightly, throw in some generic computing steps like turning references to resources into hypertext links to them, sorting items, or displaying some content, and be the first to the patent office with a permutation that hasn’t been patented yet.

In this case, “generate a news feed”, “attach informational links”, “attach links that let you perform some actions with the current item”, “limit who sees what (i.e. don’t display info about people the user doesn’t know)”, “sort the news items”, and finally “display them”. This sort of “innovation” is totally generic and obvious in that each step could apply to any kind of information stored on a computer and nowhere in such a patent does anyone learn anything they wouldn’t have thought of doing themselves if tasked with solving the same problem. In short, all that is being rewarded is paying the patent application fees to enrich the government.

Indeed, the innovation here is so trivial that no real programmer with an ounce of integrity would consider it worthy of patent protection or worth the time and expense of pursuing the same. Solo programmers and early stage startups simply don’t have the money to play the patent game. Moreover, a patent concept as broad as this would seem so unlikely to be granted before the fact that a developer would be highly unlikely to be able to raise the funds from outside investors to seek it.

Granting Software Patents on sweeping concepts only empowers big companies with deep pockets who can fire this sort of low quality buckshot at the PTO in high volume knowing that a few of their applications will slip through giving them the power to extract royalties from big competitors and to stifle the formation of smaller ones. Every time a patent like this is granted it becomes much harder for true innovators to get backing and bring real innovation to the market. The cost and threat of litigation forces them to sell out to a big player, to shutter their doors if challenged, or more likely to not even bother trying in the first place.

Unfortunately, we will never know how many jobs have been lost or never created because our legal culture falsely assumes that software innovation would not take place but for the existence of patent monopolies. Sadly, since small scale innovators can’t afford to lobby congress as effectively as the mega-corporations that benefit from the current system, patent reform is unlikely in the short run.

That leaves the onus on End Users like you to use your market power en-mass to punish companies that use sweeping software patents unethically. While you can’t do anything to influence Patent Trolls, you can bring pressure to bear on real companies that depend on your patronage as part of their business models.

Facebook is such a company and we trust that it will most likely do the right thing and commit this patent to the Public Domain or promise to only use it defensively if confronted by similar claims. Indeed, it was most likely fear of just his sort of patent being granted to someone else that drove Facebook’s business decision to pursue it in the first place.

However, if Facebook were to try to employ it offensively against innovative competitors, it would then fall on its customers to take action by abandoning its platform in large enough numbers to force it to rethink its course of action. Since the management team at Facebook is not stupid, it is highly probable that they will do the right thing!

Remember, the best defense against the abuse of Software and Business Method Patents is a vigilant global community of End Users willing to put up with a little inconvenience should the need arise to insure that sleazy business behavior is punished in the marketplace since that is the only way to make ethical business behavior the only profitable way to do business.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.

Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.

With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.

We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.

What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.

The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.

How ironic that the face on the giant video wall dictating to the unwashed masses should be none other than that of Steve Jobs himself. Welcome to 1984.

Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.

At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.

The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.

Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.

Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.

While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.

The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.

In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.

If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.

We should all be quite sympathetic to Microsoft’s concerns about software theft, but it is unconscionable to employ an authentication system that causes legitimate End Users so much anguish.

Particularly irksome is the Vista Help System’s Activation FAQ which omits the all too common question of:

“What do I do if a previously activated copy of Vista has deactivated itself and online activation fails with an erroneous report that one’s license code is already in use on a different machine and can’t be reused?”

Over the Summer Microsoft Research in Cambridge presented some extremely impressive demos of the Windows 7 user interface, but if their new OS employs a similar activation scheme to that used in Vista, one would have to very seriously think twice before investing in the upgrade.

That means that it is in both Microsoft’s and its End Users’ best interest to find a more workable alternative. One that protects Microsoft’s IP Rights but recognizes the reality that today’s End Users frequently upgrade their hardware and move legacy operating systems into Virtualized environments possibly under other host operating systems.

This strongly suggests that Microsoft shouldn’t try to tie Windows licenses to particular hardware configurations.

The next Windows should instead be licensed for the use of a single copy at a time by a single individual on any current or future hardware or emulation software he or she may currently or subsequently own. If one needs to run multiple copies on different machines at the same time, that would call for multiple licenses.

This model corresponds to the real world notion of using a physical Key and its computing equivalent, the Dongle!

A dongle is a small plug that goes into a communications port on a computer like a USB jump drive that contains custom hardware to authenticate a user.

Granted that some early dongles were usability nightmares (e.g. they lacked the now common pass-through port allowing other devices to be connected through them). But much has been improved over the years and this technology has much to recommend it.

Indeed, today, a dongle could be designed as a cryptographic co-processor to improve user security, handle licensing management for 3rd party software, and automatically store and retrieve passwords to access secure web sites.

Such functionality would be seen as a major feature that would drive up system sales, particularly if any given copy of the OS would accept any licensed dongle.

Then if one had 3 family members, each could purchase a license dongle, which would unlock his or her personal file space and identity, or perhaps even temporarily and securely access a cloud-based home folder from a total stranger’s PC.

One could even imagine the development of families of dongles, where one could purchase one or two master dongles and several subordinate ones allowing parents to access their children’s accounts.

If the dongles also incorporated a fair amount of nonvolatile memory, additional OS version and 3rd party licenses could be burnt into them to avoid having a proliferation of dongles chained together. In effect, each user would have one master keychain to pop into a USB port in lieu of a traditional easily guessed password login.

Of course, a conventionally encrypted copy of such licensing and configuration data, protected with a really long and truly random password, could be stored by the system provider on a remote server which would also facilitate sharing protected files with friends, transferring licenses between individuals, and invalidating any stolen dongles’ encryption codes.

This would entail sharing keys or deleting license keys and passwords from one dongle while adding them to another as part of a single secure transaction as well as changing the password used to encrypt any online authentication credentials. This would also permit the True Owner of local content to use the online backup of a lost dongle’s codes to access his or her encrypted files long enough to re-encrypt them with a replacement dongle.

In effect, such an approach would limit any data loss/exposure or unauthorized software access to local content/credentials stored on devices that fell into the wrong hands along with one of the matching dongles with which such data was encrypted.

To eliminate this final risk, some dongles or devices could readily be augmented with fingerprint readers or some other form of biometric authentication control to offer industrial grade security at a premium price point.

Such scenarios would offer countless benefits for platform vendors and their loyal customers including new revenue streams from dongle sales & cloud based security services for the vendors and improved security & ease of use for their customers.

Of course in a world of new hardware devices of every imaginable form factor, with OS X and Linux steadily on the move, Windows 7 in final development, and Google’s own OS just around the corner it is just a matter of time before such innovations reach End Users!