As the Sun sets, Apple keeps growing

On a day when Apple fan boys are falling over themselves in salivating expectation of the tablet launch announcement from Apple today, I am a bit cautious and waiting on another announcement. That of Oracle’s plans for Sun after its purchase of the legendary server maker. So much of the open source community depended on Sun over the years, not to mention the Java community, that this is a more important announcement to the ICT community than the Apple announcement.

A lot rides on how Oracle plans to merge the many products presented in the Sun stable, and one of those for me that leaves an uneasy feeling in my stomach, is their handling of mySQL for example. Another must be their future support of OpenOffice, and just what they intend to do with the licensing.  Another and more important one is how they intend to drive the technology behind Sun’s hardware ranges, and what they plan to do with the OS.

I can go on and on here, but the impact of the takeover of Sun is immense to me, more I think than the competition boards in various regions could really have understood. I don’t want to be a wet blanket here, but I think we are in for many changes after the honeymoon period is over. What with Scott McNealy resigning today, the future for Sun and its wonderful range of products cannot be very bright. So I look towards the ‘oracle’ and it’s webcast about the setting Sun and what to do about it…

The difficulty of policing the Internet – Part 2 Security

Knowing that ‘fighting terrorism’ has now become the politician’s main attacking tool and overhanging justification for everything these days, makes reading the proposed changes to Internet laws around the world so much more worrisome. Many contain very grey or nebulous statements that can be interpreted in so many different ways, it scares the heck out of me! Yet we soldier on since our taxpayers demand action (not sure who ever has) and our industry friends demand justice (too many to count by now).  Hence we forget about the technical hardships and impossibilities our new laws will place on content channels, service providers, retailers and the customer, knowing at least that it all ’sounded good’ when originally written, everyone around the table nodded, and we have our next round of election funding nicely secured. This so angers me because there is no proper thought put into IMPLEMENTATION!!! Sorry, lost it there for a moment. By implementation I mean a law should be practical, its implementation such that policing it would be a simple and not a complex matter, its use exposing true criminals and not innocent bystanders.

Unfortunately we see the opposite happening. No one within the rooms of justice or those ‘elected’ to ‘represent’ us, the People, seem to have an inkling about the Internet and how most of it is managed, leading to individuals losing more freedoms by the day in return for a very limited success in nabbing the ‘bad guys’.  New Zealand has just followed the UK and Australia on my list of shame in this regard, with a stupidly open approach to policing all communications done by any individual in that country on the back of a very easily generated and issued ‘interception warrant’. Worse to me is the rumour that some pressure from the US caused this change to happen within the New Zealand communications infrastructure, which if true is a crime against the people of New Zealand in my opinion.  New Zealand is such a hotspot for terrorism that one may appreciate why millions of tax payer funds would be spent ‘protecting’ the nation against nefarious communications amongst the ‘large’ population of al-Qaeda operatives hiding amongst the sheep, one may appreciate that ISP’s had to be forced to implement the monitoring equipment as a matter of such haste because the threat level is so ‘high’!

Folks in the US are already living in a police state though many will try to deny that.  For the sake of ‘protection’ they have given up just about every right they had under the constitution, and have seen ‘we, the People’ become nothing more that a flock of sheep in the hands of unscrupulous political and commercial operators who had very little interest in ’saving democracy’ and every interest in making money when writing and implementing the Patriot Act and the many laws that followed 9/11.  That event was pivotal in how we saw terrorism and the amazing goodwill it garnered from the whole world for the US and the hatred we shared towards those who perpetrating the evil act, but it’s memory and the price the victims paid, has been shamed by what the US government was allowed to do to its own people since.  The monitoring of private communications has become so easy to implement there that even corporates are trying their hand (remember the whole HP board fiasco?), and the government has so many layers of ‘protection’ agencies that no one can truly say what they are doing at any one time.

In Australia it seems to me the people have simply handed over governing their country to their politicians, who may have forgotten that they are meant to represent their constituents in governing the land.  Several may have had very good intentions when they started out, but mainly I think due to a lack of understanding, have capitulated to individuals with alternative motives and masters.  Writing the new Internet monitoring laws the way they did and then presenting the bill for ratification, can only be because they have little understanding of the technology and the impact the proposed changes are going to make DOWN THE LINE!  Terrorism will be a very small part of the reasons authorities may use in the future to monitor and censure, and protecting children even less of a reason.  I have a great disdain for pornography and what it does to people, but I am not so naive has to present an all-encompassing law that censures the Internet on the back of that disdain.  I know as a technologist that this is simply not the answer to the problem.

Security is not a difficult thing to define and manage when discussed around a boardroom table, but the resulting technical measures may have the very opposite effect on the people it set out to protect, and becomes very hard to police fairly.  Losing liberties for the sake of… should never be a question asked of a country’s people.  That’s like changing the soil after a good crop to prevent the few weeds amongst them from growing in the future. Invariably the crop is damaged and the weeds continue to prosper, albeit it across the field.  Right now to me it seems the US has successfully pursued countries around the world to implement similar controlling measures on their people as it has over its own, but so many of those countries do not have a constitution that the People can turn to when pressed, so they become little more than nanny states with populations living under carefully designed perceptions of freedom, liberty and justice when in fact they have very little of any left.

These are in both parts my own opinions of what I see happening around the world, and specifically the effects such laws and changes in law will have on my industry.  Sledgehammers do work from time to time, and in this lies our problem, as those who are skilled at hammering proudly point to these few successes and hold their instruments up as the tools of freedom for all such problems.  Trying to convince them that sledgehammers won’t work for everything is trying to tell Paris Hilton that there are alternatives to the word ‘like’…  The problem is that the majority of time hammering away on every occasion has the opposite effect, and more often than not the surrounding damage after they are applied may never be fixed.  Changes to laws and especially were they affect the Internet and its historic independence, need to be made with much greater circumspection than they are currently being done, with more direct involvement and interest from us, the People, and quickly so, or we will simply end up with no civil liberties or freedom at all.

The difficulty of policing the Internet – Part 1 Content

We are fast approaching a massive change in how information on the Web may be published, distributed and downloaded. Mainly driven by the media giants who were mostly late to the Internet Party in the 1990’s, but thanks to deep pockets and political pressure can disown all who came before them to claim their ‘trademarks’, ‘copyrights’ and ‘brands’ for themselves again, not to mention their IP, the change will come and faster than you think.

Let me make something very clear from the start, I am all for protecting someone’s IPR. I think that this should be an inherent part of every country’s legal framework to regulate abuse of such rights by their citizens. Even as I say that my thoughts immediately go to the issue of who determined the IP in the first place. For digital media it seems an easier case to make, as the songwriter can show their authorship of a song, the composer the same for their melodies, and the artist similarly for their work, accompanied by a bevy of ‘recording industry’ lawyers to back up any such claims with all sorts of legal writs.

What I find really difficult to understand is how those designing and constructing these laws have focused very much on the tools of the Internet to copy data, regardless its nature, instead of on the individual who steals the content in the end. The Internet is pretty nebulous in terms of technology changes and where it will go from day-to-day. Trying to apply a law to what is legal and what is not where technology is concerned, for example peer-to-peer networks, makes for a very difficult policing job!  It comes down to trying to control what things are good to put over these networks and what things are not, also an expensive exercise.

But then the ‘law’ realizes for its next amendment that peer-to-peer networks are pretty much like mushrooms, and self policing simply does not work, so it goes after the ISP. It’s completely irrelevant that asking these ISP’s to police their customer’s data may completely erode the privacy of these citizens (thanks to terrorism politicians can sleep easy about this fact these days). Rather the deep pockets of industry simply glitters to greatly with promises of support the next time we’re up for election, so the law is changed, the amendment made, and the legal eagles of these industries are let loose to use the amendments to ‘take down’ more innocent bystanders in their eager attempt to stop the content thieves from stealing what may be their customer’s information or content.

ISP’s very quickly offset this to 3rd party vendors who ‘wholesale’ or ‘retail’ the data on their behalf, quite often non-tech savvy individuals sold some Wireless (WiFi) solution for their restaurant, pub or bar, or the parent at home, many of whom are absolutely not qualified to understand, let alone monitor their children’s online activities. These people are suddenly saddled with a huge burden of legal responsibility, the pub owner expected to watch their customers at all times and monitor what they are doing on their notebooks and mobile phones whilst sitting within the pub’s wireless network range; the parent expected to learn very quickly what the Internet is about, how to protect themselves in terms of illegal content and then start that process all over again with the mobile phone or the PSP because they are ALL Internet capable devices. Inevitably they fail and we see fine after fine being issued with jail time often thrown in too, as the content owners race to find anyone in the data stream to sue or bring criminal charges against.

I’m not against prosecuting people who steal, in fact I will encourage it, but I am opposed to the manner in which it is currently done, as the thinking behind the legal processes and definitions or lack of thinking, simply makes no sense at all. This is like trying to stop a hailstorm, a process that will simply go on and on and on. Somewhere amidst all this, sanity needs to set in and someone needs to redirect the thinking into a smarter direction. There needs to be a better understanding of how information flows, a ‘eureka’ moment in terms of how information technology works, and how it will continue to beat the system through innovation evolution because the demand for content will always outgrow legal supply as it is currently provided. There is very little benefit to the content owners if they continue on the current punitive path, and all they are doing quite successfully is losing Internet savvy generations one after the other.

Mark Shuttleworth steps down as CEO of Ubuntu’s Canonical

Wow, what a day yesterday for the open source and linux community, waking up to the news that Mark Shuttleworth’s stepping down as CEO of Canonical.   Having read his reasons for doing so after recovering from shock, I found them very compelling and potentially much more beneficial to the Ubuntu and Linux community than if he remained where he was.  Mark’s a pioneer to me, has always been, someone who rolls up their sleeves and does the job that needs doing.  Having him tied up in corporate affairs to the point where this distracts him from innovating, cannot be a good thing, and with Jane Silber, a very capable executive, there to take over the reigns at this time, I applaud him for making the change now.  He is quite right that Canonical has reached a transition point and that a different kind of leadership may be needed to drive the revenues for the company and set the strategy into motion.  Having Mark in the background where he can influence when needed is the cherry on top in my view!

Mark, you’ve always liked sailing off the ‘edge’ of the known world, so this should not have been a surprise to us I guess!  Godspeed to you, Jane and Canonical, and we look forward to Ubuntu’s ongoing maturity!

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/295

The ultimate future for the mobile phone

Today I was asked my view on what I think the future holds for the mobile industry. To be frank, I suddenly realized I did not really know, a scary yet exciting place to be I guess. O, I spoke of the consumer reach the phone has that no other channel can ever match. I mentioned how the content owners are launching commendable efforts to expand their markets, by using the mobile channel. Nokia comes to mind here. I thought of mentioning the iPhone, the Blackberry and the Android powered phones that all have fantastically smart operating systems with some nice applications, but then remembered that those phones reach less than 2% of the total mobile market globally, and that the same market is dominated by prepaid services not contract. So it became tough to think of what the future holds for the mobile channel and therefore the mobile phone!

I think automated localized application results (think a hybrid of google search, google maps and google checkout for the mobile, and you have something of what I’m talking about) may be one of the many good futures for a mobile platform.

Maybe you have a better idea of what that future will look like?

Nokia Calling All Innovators Africa 2009 Awards – Cape Town winners

Cobi Interactive should be warmly congratulated for their fantastic achievement this month when they placed first for the 20fourlabs’s Afridoctor mobile application they developed at the CAIA 2009 awards.  They also placed 9th for Turn Left at the Barrel by Turn Left at the Giraffe.

This is a fantastic achievement because Cobi are still in their first year of operation!  As is my habit, congratulations to this wonderful team of technologists who managed to achieve so much in so little a time, and especially as they are fellow Capetonians!!!

Facebook security changes good, but misleading…

Facebook released their long expected security changes yesterday (9 Dec 2009) with the expected barrage of comments on sites around the world.
The changes are good, more comprehensive than before, but the initial wizard is highly misleading and can open up previously secure profiles without the user fully understanding what he or she has done.

Here is how Facebook informed me of the potential changes that I could make to ‘enable’ their new settings:

Initial Security Screen

The problem with this screen is that it represents two sides only, the first being the OPEN settings for everything as one choice, and the second the ‘Old Settings’.  Who can remember what their old settings were for one, other than nerds like me of course?  Who won’t think to select the ‘new’ options since the preceding message from Facebook talked about how ‘new security’ options were so good for me and so much better than the ‘old’ options?

Worse of all is that Facebook defaults ALL your security settings to the OPEN setting option as can be clearly seen in the screen print above.  Surely this is a grossly incompetent way to represent ‘new security features’ to users who more often than not are non-technical and lost amongst the standard Facebook options anyway?  Who in the world authorized this public relations time bomb???

To get past this offending screen you need to select each option offered on the screen as ‘OLD SETTINGS’ or you will be badly surprised at who can find you, see you and connect with you. Dont make the mistake of simply agreeing with these default settings, EVER!  Once past go directly to your Settings option on the top right hand menu in your profile and select Privacy Options first, for some more hidden surprises, as the screenshot from my profile shows:

Facebook Privacy Problem

TO FIX THIS – Go straight to ‘Website’ and ‘Add me as a Friend’ and change the ‘default’ NEW option back to your previous setting as it will be ‘EVERYONE’ after the new changes were announced. Not sure why this is done when ALL my other options clearly show I want ‘Friends Only’ for all the sensitive stuff and at worst ‘Friends of Friends’ for the not-so-important stuff…

Now for a little hidden surprise I never thought would be so open – go again to Privacy Settings under Settings, and then to ‘Applications and websites’.  Select ‘What your friends can share about you’ – O JOY! – finally some spam control…  As you can see from the Facebook default options your ‘trusting’ friends can give away just about everything there is to know about you to 3rd party applications, even if your own privacy settings under ‘What you share’ is completely set to the opposite. A very unfortunate default setting from Facebook as ‘What your friends can share about you’ should closely follow your choices under ‘What you share’ in my opinion!

Once done, go through each of the other three security options under Settings and ensure you have everything set to what you want it to be and NEVER trust Facebook’s default suggestions! EVER!

As for Facebook’s security team, EISH!  Your rollout sucks! With all the options you now offer your users, the rollout should have been applauded! Instead the rollout methodology used created the opposite effect because you chose to offer the non secure settings as defaults to users when they are asked to accept the changes, not to mention the default hidden changes were set to ‘EVERYONE’ as well.  Again, EISH!

My final word – check your settings repeatedly!  The changes can give you more control over your information, hence the title of this post suggesting that the changes are actually ‘good’, but the way the rollout has happened turns this all on its head and leaves you very exposed if you do not check and recheck your settings.

UPDATE 1: According to PC World’s David Coursey Facebook have made further changes to the security and privacy settings now, making this update a sort of rolling change I guess.  The most important part to check out since this amendment is the privacy setting of your Friend’s List’s public setting, in other words apparently the new amendments will allow you to make your Friend’s List invisible now to the outside world and 3rd party applications.  My advice? Check and recheck your privacy settings in every part of the Settings options list Facebook gives you in your profile.

Applications and websites

Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, reveals his latest venture, a mobile phone enabled payment system called Squirrel, now Square!

The system is nothing new, it must be said upfront. The fact that Jack Dorsey has been working in the payments industry since only May 09, explains his naivety about the viability of this venture in its current form.  Jack’s own words – “The financial world is amazing right now because there’s a clean slate. A lot of these industries are looking for something very small and innovative,” – shows to me just how little the man really understands of the payments industry. A clean slate??? Innovative???

Two things come right to mind that in my opinion will cost any new EFT or card device credibility if they cannot change.  Firstly swiping cards through card readers is no longer acceptable, as the PCI wish to move to PIN and card verified transactions, such as Chip & PIN in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. The first major problem with this device is simply this, it has no ability to verify the card, as it reads the magnetic stripe only. The second major problem is the fact that the device cannot take a PIN securely, a demand PCI PED would place on such a device should it be redesigned to accept Chip cards in the future.  Secondly biometric verification through a non-standard process, such as the limited fingerprint reader the Square software enables on the iPhone, also makes for a very hard sell to the banks who acquire transactions (acquirers) or who issue cards (issuers), and the interchange networks behind them, including of course the major PCI brands.

There have in fact been many mobile phone based solutions out before Square and will be after Square. I am reminded of one that used to be called Funge, a fantastic concept product patented many years ago and launched in 2000/2001. What could it do?  Swipe cards for payment on a mobile phone…  But hey, this is Twitter’s founder and therefore he MUST be lauded and slapped on the back, we must report as much as we can about our wonder-child that is Twitter, and Jack, it’s ‘brilliant’ founder, because he is now an inner circle man, funded and loved by the same group of backers who brought us the crash of 2000/2001! I bet he will have funders in no time and a listing around the corner! Not that I am blaming Jack at all, but rather the YES-men one so often find grouped around the Jack’s, Mark’s and Sergey’s of the world.

Jack, what you need is a group of people who know this industry and can walk the walk with you PRIOR to announcing any further news about Square! What you need is some solid advice that covers all the issues and requirements of a very mature global industry that has a very messed-up ’slate’ in fact.

Do you want 3D Games on your notebook?

ASUS Notebook (Model G51J 3D)

If you know what the ASUS G51J 3D is, then you’re aware of what must be one of the BIG milestones for personal computing this decade. The ASUS G51J 3D notebook is the first notebook on the market to offer you full 3D screening ability, glasses included. Movies will be nice, but that’s not what this notebook will be great at. No, its going to be HUGE for gaming, with 3D gaming titles now a reality right in your home on this puppy! I cannot wait to get my hands on it!

Pub fined GBP8,000 for copyright abuse

A user on the open or ‘free’ WiFi hotspot of a local pub in the UK downloaded content that was copyright protected and therefore illegally copied. The pub hotspot was supplied by The Cloud, a UK and European based wireless broadband provider, in a similar manner as those you find in coffee shops and pubs, retail outlets, many hotel lobbies, the City of London’s own hotspots, and so on.

There are many misunderstandings on the Web today about why the pub was fined. It was not fined because the WiFi hotspot was ‘insecure’, the ‘openess’ of the hotspot did not mean it was ‘insecure’, it was ‘free to use’ or ‘open’. It was not fined because it had no firewall or some filtering system in place. It was not fined because it sanctioned illegal behaviour intentionally. It’s a pub for goodness sake, it sells alcohol and food and that is its core business.

The Cloud provided the pub with the hotspot technology and broadband connectivity to enable the pub’s customers to use their notebooks to link up to the Internet from anywhere within the hotspot’s range. A customer, or customers, sometime during the period of use, downloaded copyrighted material to a pc over this hotspot. These downloads were traced to the pub and as the law now stands they were prosecuted for the infringement.

Was it fair? In my view there is very little that a pub can do to prevent such actions by its customers. In such an arrangement, managed WiFi hotspots, the client, in this case the pub, has no expertise as to the technical integrity or technical setup of the hotspot. That is the whole purpose of the hotspot provider, in this case The Cloud. For a general ISP the tracking down of the actual culprit is somewhat easier as the ISP contract is with a single individual or business, and in the generic ISP contract such actions are clearly deemed illegal and contrary to the ISP’s T&C’s.

For a hotspot provider and its clients, like the pub, the user base is somewhat more fluid and this makes it tougher with current equipment to trace and lockdown one specific user in the same way. Public WiFi systems (hardware and software), normally custom developed solutions or built around Radius servers, will only track a customer on the hotspot network for the time they are logged on for and the amount of data they are using. Very little else is tracked or logged, and therefore this makes for a tough legal exercise when the actual user infringing on copyright on such a hotspot needs prosecuted.

I am of the opinion the pressure to prosecute in this case took precedent over a more logical approach where the copyright owner and police could have worked with technology partners and the hotspot providers in creating more secure ways for users to log into the network and then have them trace who the true culprits are, instead of suing anyone in such a broad shotgun approach as happened here. Software can be used to track what customers are downloading, but we cannot implement that sort of Big Brother solution without trampling on a citizen’s privacy. So the service provider can be requested to implement screening software or technology that limits access to known sources of stolen or compromised software, media and content.

This would mean companies like The Cloud would have to be held accountable when things go wrong, and not the poor non-technical licensee like the pub. Setting this into a correct cycle of responsibility would also mean that the growth of the Internet across multiple channels like wireless hotspots would also not be stymied the way it could be. It won’t take much to counter the marketing done by ISP’s and wireless broadband service providers, and this case specifically will be one that many businesses will reference when they decline to have hotspots on their premises in the future.

If we don’t approach problems like the one that led to this outrageous case constructively, then with changes in the laws governing Internet usage pandering only to the legal might of content owners and their deep pockets, as has already been tabled in the UK, the inevitable will happen. No, not a stop in the downloading of compromised content or media, but instead the death of open Internet provision as we experience it today.