On March 2nd, Apple turned further to the Dark Side and initiated patent litigation against HTC based on an array of sweeping patents (like recognizing phone numbers and unlocking things by visually sliding a graphic of a latch) that could potentially impact web site interfaces and operating systems, casting a dark pall over non-Apple phones, web tablets, and any number of innovative technologies. Given Apple’s own origins lifting the research of Xerox PARC, this is particularly troubling.

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 morning the web is awash with worry over the US Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to grant a patent on presenting news feeds about activities in social networks based on an application first filed by Facebook in 2006.

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.

Unlike most recent WordPress Upgrades, version 2.9.2 didn’t take at first.

Invoking the automatic upgrade link took us to the usual upgrade page, but nothing happened after the initial upgrade message was drawn on the page.

Disabling all of our active plugins did seem to free up the Automatic Upgrade process, although one data error was reported.

It also looks like some of our old plugins stopped working after the upgrade. We will wait to see if they get upgraded in a next few weeks before permanently deleting them.

Rarely does a company have the opportunity to remake an industry and create the Next Big Thing.

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.

As you may have noticed, we are entering a brief hiatus in blogging while we deal with a couple of time-sensitive maters that require our full attention, foremost of which is a book chapter that our Executive Director is writing.

Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!

For users of Unix and Linux, the most comprehensive free anti-virus solution is the venerable ClamAV.

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.

If you are a home user and your platform of choice is the Mac, you can find a rather elegant and free OS X anti-virus solution in PC Tools iAntiVirus.

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.

This series of posts will point you to the best free anti-virus software on the web.

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.

If you develop websites or would like to see what technologies go into them, Ajaxian is the site for you.

Here you can find up to the minute reports of all the major javascript based libraries and related tools that you can use to take a site to the next level. You’ll also find discussions of hot web accessibility topics like yesterday’s revelation that many screenreader users have javascript enabled — a situation not contemplated by most site designers.

You can also sign up for newsletters, grab podcasts, and find out about the latest conferences and job offers.

The site also features rich indexing by topic in the left sidebar, making it is easy to go back in time and bring yourself up to speed in any area of interest.

If you are really new to computing and enjoy Eastern Philosophy, then “Zen Computer” by Philip Toshio Sudo is a must read for you.

This lightweight paper back is a great Ski Lodge or Beach book that will gently introduce you to many computing concepts related to computer hardware, software, programming, and networking while relating them ideas drawn from Zen.

Each entry begins with a pithy quote and leads you on from there with a mix of exposition and the occasional koan to relieve the stress of your day.

Find it at your favorite bookseller from Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 0-684-85410-4).