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.

Apparently, for some fonts and column widths, Safari will crop the bottoms off of these letter forms and display them at the top of the next column as if they were projecting down from an otherwise invisible line of text sitting above the actual column in your layout.

This effect can be suppressed by increasing the line height of your text to trigger this “rendered text image wrapping” bug with transparent pixels, which when shuffled to the top of the next column will remain blissfully invisible to your reader.

We have found that a simple css declaration of line-height:2em; did the trick for us. Depending on your choice of fonts and other typographical variable you may need to fiddle with this value to eliminate Safari’s display glitch, which will no doubt be corrected in a future release. Until then, slightly exaggerated vertical line spacing is a small price to pay for the convenience of multiple CSS3 columns.

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.

This open source project licensed under the GPL will thoroughly scrub your system of known threats to any platform. Its database of malware signatures is frequently updated and the system has a number of graphical front ends.

A new native port for Windows is still in the works, but there is already an older unsupported ClamAV for Windows and a ClamWin as well as a ClamXav 2.0 Public Beta that runs under the latest release of OS X for Mac Users.

While the various ClamAV GUI’s tend to produce too much low level feedback on what the tool is doing, the system gets the job done which is what really matters most in this space.

Also see Part 1 & Part 2 of this series.

Note however that iAntiVirus won’t catch any non-mac threats, so if someone sends you a file with a windows virus you are still at risk of passing it on to friends. Nevertheless, it will catch known Mac viruses and trojans and since there are fewer of these on the Mac side, the scan will generally run at a good clip.

The company also has a subscription version of the tool with technical support for business users.

Alternatively, all Mac users can look at ClamXav (see tomorrow’s post).

Also see Part 1 & Part 3 of this series.

Anti-Virus software is a must have of modern computing. Regrettably, the commercial subscription service fees to provide this protection can really mount up in the long term.

Fortunately, if Windows is your platform of choice and your Windows variant has already been “activated” or supports installing the Genuine Microsoft Software validation tools (i.e. Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7), you will be able to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials for free.

Security Essentials will then provide you with up to date anti-virus and malware protection tightly integrated into the Windows update mechanism under an elegant user interface that rivals those of third party vendors.

Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of this series.