Unquiet Desperation

Mark Pilgrim’s “Tinkerer’s Sunset” is an excellent article discussing the chilling effect that so-called “appliances” portend for the generation of computer enthusiasts. It’s a thoughtful reflection on both trends in the law regarding the freedom to tinker:

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.

And on the roadblocks which new “appliance” devices impose on would-be tinkerers:

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity…

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people — perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free…

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents.

Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today. Anyone can develop! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a cryptographic key that (temporarily) allows you (slightly) elevated access to… your own computer. And that’s fine — or at least workable — for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will.

If you’re like him or like me…one of the guys who got his start tinkering around with a computer in your basement, finding your way by intuition and discovery, please read his full post and pass it on.

The only value I see to the iPad is that it will force other companies to innovate and improve on the concept. Perhaps we can even hope for openness.

I cannot deny that it’s pretty. It’s very pretty. Shiny, too. Maybe I’m just getting old, but pretty doesn’t impress me much anymore.  From what I can see, it’s not terribly useful and at the price point of $500…ahem…$499 for a measly 16G of space, it’s just not worth the money.

I also object to the inability use the device in any manner I choose. Apple’s need to control MY hardware and software is intrusive and offensive.

From Thomas Gideon’s iPad is Yet Another DRM Crippled Device:

I have vastly different expectations of a tablet, even one as stripped down as the iPad appears to be. How does Apple justify hobbling the device? Wireless carriers have begun offering comparably stripped down computers, netbooks, that are still open to the end user installing whatever they like. I might concede that a single distribution channel makes the experience better. And Apple is clearly more about experience these days than substance.

But why does the experience of some have to preclude the ability to exercise owner override? Would the App Store be any less used if power users could still install their own bundles? If the arguments Apple makes about their captive channel really hold water, why not open the device to both and see if the market agrees? Allowing users to install simple application bundles like on a regular old Mac would be the shortest way to turn around much of the negative PR the approval process for the App Store has generated almost since day one.

I have no doubt that people will buy it. There’s a market out there for it, and people will line up for the New Shiny. It’s sad that people will give up freedom and hard-earned cash for something so…vapid.

I found the following article interesting and, frankly, accurate.

Protestors: iPad is nothing more than a golden calf of DRM

Steve Jobs may have descended from the mountaintop today with Moses Tablet in hand, but a group of protesters were waiting in the foothills with a simple message: the iPad isn’t a divine revelation, but a golden calf.

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today’s Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple’s use of DRM. The group’s four-foot signs were headed with the message “Entering Apple Restriction Zone” and laid out the tablet’s detriments:

As I’ve explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they’re making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.

– Neal Stephenson, In The Beginnging Was The Command Line (written in 1999)

If you tried to come to this site in the past few days, and you got a notice that my humble little blog was an attack site, I apologize. Google, you see, blackballed me from the Internets.

Early last Saturday, my sites were hacked. I cleaned them all up, changed the passwords, did the usual things that you do when this sort of thing happens. But by the time I was done, Google had already reported me to StopBadWare.org,
and then it was all over.

If you tried to get to this site via Google, you were out of luck. They put up a page completely blocking access to my site. You could, of course, go around it by entering the full url in the address bar of your browser, but at that
point, the special nanny-like features of the browser took over. In Firefox and Safari, you would get a red screen screaming that, OH NOES, you were going to an attack site! Don’t go there! Don’t stray from the path!

You could disable the warning if you knew where in the preference panels to do so. But really…how many average users look at the security settings on their browser? (Not enough, which is exactly why this sort of hand-holding exists.)

On top of this, sites like Twitter and Facebook, deleted my URL from my profile, based on the report from Google.

I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me thinks it’s good that companies are trying to block malicious site for average users. Part of me thinks that average users might need to learn a little bit about the medium they are using, so they can protect themselves. I think it’s a slippery slope, having block lists that work on such a broad level. It seems dangerous to me in a Big Brother sort of way.

It took five days to clear the mess up, but I’m back, and I have some content for you. Have a seat, and I’ll give you a helping.

Update: I just tried to tweet this entry using my domain, and I was told that Twitter still thinks that my site is a Known Malware Site. How many places do I need to clear my name?

Ray Slakinski, one of podcasting’s earliest innovators¹, has released a new content syndication specification into the wild. Called oSync, it’s goals are as follows:

• Easy/fast to parse and implement
• Make it so feeds and items are location aware
• a proper tagging system for feeds/items/attachments
• multiple attachments
• Able to be used cross-site/domain
  • Uses JSONP
• Incorporate some of the RSS extension elements that were used in common implementations

It is currently in an alpha state, but I see a lot of potential in this format. RSS is badly in need of an update — it has served us well, but the needs of developers and content providers are changing. A lightweight JSON-based information format will allow for a lot of flexibility in implementation as well as allow for ease of adoption – jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks can readily handle this format. I can see how working in this sort of format into Podiobooks 2.0 could aid in the creation of sharable widgets for displaying user data, title listings, and other data people want to include on their blogs or iPhone apps.

I’m curious to see how it develops. I’ve joined the Google Group for discussing the specification.

1. Ray created the base code for what would later become iPodderX, one of the first podcatching clients and certainly the one with the most features. I still miss it, and would give an awful lot to replace my iTunes with it.[back]