Since the Mac in 1984 brought us the mouse and bit map displays and folders and icons, there really hasn't been much except for the evolution of that in the last 23 years.
That would be either "The Xerox Star Office System" in "1981" or at least "Lisa" in "1982", Steve.
Not to mention Microsoft's recently disclosed "stealth fixes".
Microsoft has the ability to control the "official" counts in a way that no open-source project, with its public repository and patch database, can. Even Apple, with its tradition of secrecy and surprises, can't sneak in patches to the open-source components of their software... but Microsoft can.
Prohibited and Permissible Uses: Data Service sessions may be conducted only for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) corporate intranet access (including access to corporate email, customer relationship management, sales force automation, and field service automation applications). PROHIBITED USES INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, USING SERVICES: (I) WITH SERVER DEVICES OR WITH HOST COMPUTER APPLICATIONS, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WEB CAMERA POSTS OR BROADCASTS, CONTINUOUS JPEG FILE TRANSFERS, AUTOMATIC DATA FEEDS, TELEMETRY APPLICATIONS, PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) FILE SHARING, AUTOMATED FUNCTIONS OR ANY OTHER MACHINE-TO-MACHINE APPLICATIONS; (II) AS SUBSTITUTE OR BACKUP FOR PRIVATE LINES OR DEDICATED DATA CONNECTIONS; (III) FOR VOICE OVER IP; (IV) IN CONJUNCTION WITH WWAN OR OTHER APPLICATIONS OR DEVICES WHICH AGGREGATE USAGE FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES PRIOR TO TRANSMISSION; (V) USING THE SERVICES FOR ANY ACTIVITY THAT ADVERSELY AFFECTS THE ABILITY OF OTHER PEOPLE OR SYSTEMS TO USE EITHER THE SERVICES OR OTHER PARTIES' INTERNET-BASED RESOURCES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO EXCESSIVE CONSUMPTION OF NETWORK OR SYSTEM RESOURCES (WHETHER INTENTIONAL OR UNINTENTIONAL) AND "DENIAL OF SERVICE" (DOS) ATTACKS AGAINST ANOTHER NETWORK HOST OR INDIVIDUAL USER; OR (VI) INTERFERENCE WITH OR DISRUPTION OF OTHER NETWORK USERS, NETWORK SERVICES OR NETWORK EQUIPMENT. EXCEPT FOR CONTENT FORMATTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH AT&T'S CONTENT STANDARDS, UNLIMITED PLANS CANNOT BE USED FOR UPLOADING, DOWNLOADING OR STREAMING OF VIDEO CONTENT (E.G. MOVIES, TV), MUSIC OR GAMES. FURTHERMORE, UNLIMITED PLANS (EXCEPT FOR DATACONNECT AND BLACKBERRY TETHERED) CANNOT BE USED FOR ANY APPLICATIONS THAT TETHER THE DEVICE (THROUGH USE OF, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, CONNECTION KITS, OTHER PHONE/PDA-TO-COMPUTER ACCESSORIES, BLUETOOTH® OR ANY OTHER WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY) TO LAPTOPS, PCS, OR OTHER EQUIPMENT FOR ANY PURPOSE. Service is not intended to provide full-time connections, and the Service may be discontinued after a significant period of inactivity or after sessions of excessive usage. AT&T reserves the right to (i) limit throughput or amount of data transferred, deny Service and/or terminate Service, without notice, to anyone it believes is using the Service in any manner prohibited above or whose usage adversely impacts its network or service levels or hinders access to its network and (ii) protect its network from harm, which may impact legitimate data flows. You may not send solicitations to AT&T subscribers without their consent. You may not use the Services other than as intended by AT&T and applicable law. Plans are for individual, non-commercial use only and are not for resale. iPhone Terms and Conditions
That's a lot of limits on unlimited service.
No streaming data, no idle connections, no "uploads" (whatever that means, when you don't have any way to install software to upload anything with), no using your iPhone as a modem for your Macbook, no remote access to your home servers (unless you incorporate, I guess),...
Service is not intended to provide full-time connections, and the Service may be discontinued after a significant period of inactivity or after sessions of excessive usage.
So there you are reading an eBook on your iPhone over the net, and AT&T thinks you've been online too long without any activity, and *poof* goes your connection.
Hrm... iPhone reads PDF. If the ebooks are not delivered in some proprietary DRM format they should "just work".
No thanks, no PDF, no "Mobile Acrobat", no "Microsoft Reader".
There's several good formats with multiple published implementations that actually work *well* for eBooks. I personally prefer Mobipocket because it's widely available from DRM-free (note that) sources. They're all equivalent to subsets of HTML so HTML would work, too, but converting to HTML won't cut it because Safari doesn't have the bookmarking features an eBook reader needs... and I don't think that can be implemented on the iPhone except by storing the bookmarks on a remote webserver.
I've been an ADC member for some years now, and this is the first I've heard of "Radar". That's a bit of a twee name for "feature requests".
Misleading: I don't see any "applications" here.
on
All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
These are web applets with iPhone-style looks, not "applications" in any meaningful sense. You might as well call PQA's "palm applications", or call mobile-compatible web pages "Pocket PC applications".
(yes, I know The Steve is claiming that this is an "API" for the iPhone, but he's being misleading too)
How do you read eBooks on it? "Over the web" is not an option: in fact that'll probably make you hit their "limited unlimited" limit and get your account cancelled, either for excessively long connections or excessively idle connections.
VMs offer no advantage in breaking DRM over running an OS on regular hardware.
Not for the serious hacker, but for the "mostly law-abiding citizen", the ones who are stymied by Windows media 9 in XP. Run it in VMware or Parallels on a Mac, and all of a sudden things like Wiretap Pro "just work".
A few years back when I wanted to get T-Mobile service they wouldn't let me without a 2 year contract and $200 on the hook even if I didn't take a phone. Later I was able to get a pay-as-you-go service with the first month included for $60, so obviously their per-account costs are closer to the "50 cents worth of plastic" in the SIM card than the $200 they claimed was fair.
So...
1. I don't believe they've got $175 worth of costs on the hook. 2. Fat chance getting them to change it until there's a competing x-, y-, or zPhone.
So, to briefly recap, the prohibition is only a prohibition to "law obeying citizens," and the payoff for circumventing DRM in this manner is unimpressive.
All DRM, copy protection, "Genuine Windows", these are all directed at the "law abiding citizen". There's no way to keep an aggressive attacker from compromising any DRM scheme that's loose enough that the "law abiding citizens" will put up with it, so all DRM is for is to stop casual copying.
Virtual machines don't just let you clone the "keys" to the DRMed content... as you say, that's ludicrous. Not only would a copy of a movie wrapped up in a VM be huge, but it would also contain everything the copyright owner would need to track down the original pirate. What virtual machines do more than anything else is compromise the data path. The copy of Windows running in the VM will happily play a movie in its virtual screen, which your VM can then transcribe to a file with no copy protection on it. Virtual machines make casual copying through the "digital hole" trivial.
That's why VMs and DRM go together like a lit cigarette and a gas station.
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Yep, unfortunately, that *is* news.
Or rather, the news is that the UK isn't run by religious crackpots like the US is.
If this woman's case makes a difference, it's not the RIAA executives who'll pay the price. It'd be the people who'd be looking for a job who would be inconvenienced.
Not to mention the musicians whose copyrights may be voided. What specific artists are involved? Are they all willing partners to this case, or have the labels taken that out of their hands?
Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks?
The ones with a limited budget, old man.
I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.
Me too, that's why I make backups on audio CDs, and keep my decreasing pre-pressed CD budget for classical music where the compression matters... not popular music that's already been so overproduced that I can't tell if there's any additional distortion from the compression or not.
And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio.
Being able to try a track or two of artists I never would have paid attention to if I had to buy a whole CD to get, and who aren't big enough for airtime, has let me find orders of magnitude more than that. MP3blogs like 3hive have made this argument even sillier.
On Windows Mobile phones, running WM 5.0 AKU 2 or greater, one can set policy on the phone to have it auto-hard reset (wiping all data on the internal memory) if someone attempts too many passwords.
That kind of trapdoor, and your custom flash, are useful tools. They're not the same as a remote reset, though.
The silver lining to the iPhone application lockdown cloud for you, though, is that by making your applications web-based Apple's ensuring that the information those apps serve doesn't, in fact, reside on the iPhone. All an attacker could get would be the user's personal address book and calendar... your business data would be safe since it wouldn't be stored on the phone.
For me that's poor compensation at best, but for you it's actually an important feature.:)
Re:Why do Businesses hate this already? I'll tell
on
The Perfect Phone Storm?
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· Score: 2, Informative
If my CEO gets one and hooks it into our mail systems, and then it gets stolen (Remember when iPods were new and they were getting stolen all the time?), how am I going to remotely wipe all of the data from it?
Same way you remotely wipe all the data from a Treo. Or even a Blackberry.
You don't, unless they're stupid enough to hook it up to the network before they pull the data out.
You enforce remote security with an encrypted database that you don't keep the key to in the handheld, or simply not keeping data in the handheld. Anything else is no better than "you must be this tall to storm the castle".
Let me remind you that neither this site, nor Linux, would exist without RMS's principles.
Bullshit.
I was using and writing free software, open source software, whatever you call it, long before RMS had his hissy-cow about Emacs getting forked and wrote the GNU manifesto. RMS has been given credit for too much stuff that was happening anyway.
If it wasn't for RMS, we'd be running this stuff on BSD instead of Linux, that's all.
I'll go along with David Brin's speculations about the transparent society so far as to see it as the lesser evil, but I suspect the transparent society will be more like Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" than Brin's "Earth".
By the way, I would recommend reading those two books in order of publication. There are a number of parallels between them: Alex Lustig isn't Donald Hogan or Norman House, but I suspect if the three got together they'd discover he's got a lot in common with them.
In the videos it looked like a typical "two-and-a-half" dimension interface, where the third dimension is an effect applied to a two-dimensional interface, like the "3d" drop shadowed-windows in OS X, or the "3d" buttons that have become the norm for windowed GUIs over the past decade and a half: you would get the same functionality with a short vertical stack of objects in two dimensions.
This isn't intended to put it down, or anything... I don't think that full 3d makes a lot of sense here, actually, so I'm curious as to what you mean by "it actually is 3d".
(as an aside, what I want to see is the ability to run applets in the dock... it's one of the things I miss from the enhanced NeXT-style dock in Windowmaker/GNUstep)
If Apple's exposing multiple pointers and not providing some analog of the normal mouse actions through Safari on the iPhone, then they're going to cause problems for iPhone users for more than just the so-called "web 2.0" sites.
If there *is* a problem with these sites with the iPhone, then file bug reports with Apple. It's their job to fix them.
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Since the Mac in 1984 brought us the mouse and bit map displays and folders and icons, there really hasn't been much except for the evolution of that in the last 23 years.
That would be either "The Xerox Star Office System" in "1981" or at least "Lisa" in "1982", Steve.
I'd say it's too high by $100 or so... $525 isn't exactly a low-end price for a computer, even in the US.
Not to mention Microsoft's recently disclosed "stealth fixes".
Microsoft has the ability to control the "official" counts in a way that no open-source project, with its public repository and patch database, can. Even Apple, with its tradition of secrecy and surprises, can't sneak in patches to the open-source components of their software... but Microsoft can.
That's a lot of limits on unlimited service.
No streaming data, no idle connections, no "uploads" (whatever that means, when you don't have any way to install software to upload anything with), no using your iPhone as a modem for your Macbook, no remote access to your home servers (unless you incorporate, I guess),
Service is not intended to provide full-time connections, and the Service may be discontinued after a significant period of inactivity or after sessions of excessive usage.
So there you are reading an eBook on your iPhone over the net, and AT&T thinks you've been online too long without any activity, and *poof* goes your connection.
Hrm... iPhone reads PDF. If the ebooks are not delivered in some proprietary DRM format they should "just work".
No thanks, no PDF, no "Mobile Acrobat", no "Microsoft Reader".
There's several good formats with multiple published implementations that actually work *well* for eBooks. I personally prefer Mobipocket because it's widely available from DRM-free (note that) sources. They're all equivalent to subsets of HTML so HTML would work, too, but converting to HTML won't cut it because Safari doesn't have the bookmarking features an eBook reader needs... and I don't think that can be implemented on the iPhone except by storing the bookmarks on a remote webserver.
I've been an ADC member for some years now, and this is the first I've heard of "Radar". That's a bit of a twee name for "feature requests".
These are web applets with iPhone-style looks, not "applications" in any meaningful sense. You might as well call PQA's "palm applications", or call mobile-compatible web pages "Pocket PC applications".
(yes, I know The Steve is claiming that this is an "API" for the iPhone, but he's being misleading too)
How do you read eBooks on it? "Over the web" is not an option: in fact that'll probably make you hit their "limited unlimited" limit and get your account cancelled, either for excessively long connections or excessively idle connections.
VMs offer no advantage in breaking DRM over running an OS on regular hardware.
Not for the serious hacker, but for the "mostly law-abiding citizen", the ones who are stymied by Windows media 9 in XP. Run it in VMware or Parallels on a Mac, and all of a sudden things like Wiretap Pro "just work".
3 and 4 don't apply for the iPhone. :)
A few years back when I wanted to get T-Mobile service they wouldn't let me without a 2 year contract and $200 on the hook even if I didn't take a phone. Later I was able to get a pay-as-you-go service with the first month included for $60, so obviously their per-account costs are closer to the "50 cents worth of plastic" in the SIM card than the $200 they claimed was fair.
So...
1. I don't believe they've got $175 worth of costs on the hook.
2. Fat chance getting them to change it until there's a competing x-, y-, or zPhone.
So if you want to use your iPhone to access your home server you have to set up a Delaware corporation!? Sheesh.
So, to briefly recap, the prohibition is only a prohibition to "law obeying citizens," and the payoff for circumventing DRM in this manner is unimpressive.
All DRM, copy protection, "Genuine Windows", these are all directed at the "law abiding citizen". There's no way to keep an aggressive attacker from compromising any DRM scheme that's loose enough that the "law abiding citizens" will put up with it, so all DRM is for is to stop casual copying.
Virtual machines don't just let you clone the "keys" to the DRMed content... as you say, that's ludicrous. Not only would a copy of a movie wrapped up in a VM be huge, but it would also contain everything the copyright owner would need to track down the original pirate. What virtual machines do more than anything else is compromise the data path. The copy of Windows running in the VM will happily play a movie in its virtual screen, which your VM can then transcribe to a file with no copy protection on it. Virtual machines make casual copying through the "digital hole" trivial.
That's why VMs and DRM go together like a lit cigarette and a gas station.
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Yep, unfortunately, that *is* news.
Or rather, the news is that the UK isn't run by religious crackpots like the US is.
PS: "sustenance".
If this woman's case makes a difference, it's not the RIAA executives who'll pay the price. It'd be the people who'd be looking for a job who would be inconvenienced.
Not to mention the musicians whose copyrights may be voided. What specific artists are involved? Are they all willing partners to this case, or have the labels taken that out of their hands?
Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks?
The ones with a limited budget, old man.
I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.
Me too, that's why I make backups on audio CDs, and keep my decreasing pre-pressed CD budget for classical music where the compression matters... not popular music that's already been so overproduced that I can't tell if there's any additional distortion from the compression or not.
And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio.
Being able to try a track or two of artists I never would have paid attention to if I had to buy a whole CD to get, and who aren't big enough for airtime, has let me find orders of magnitude more than that. MP3blogs like 3hive have made this argument even sillier.
On Windows Mobile phones, running WM 5.0 AKU 2 or greater, one can set policy on the phone to have it auto-hard reset (wiping all data on the internal memory) if someone attempts too many passwords.
:)
That kind of trapdoor, and your custom flash, are useful tools. They're not the same as a remote reset, though.
The silver lining to the iPhone application lockdown cloud for you, though, is that by making your applications web-based Apple's ensuring that the information those apps serve doesn't, in fact, reside on the iPhone. All an attacker could get would be the user's personal address book and calendar... your business data would be safe since it wouldn't be stored on the phone.
For me that's poor compensation at best, but for you it's actually an important feature.
If my CEO gets one and hooks it into our mail systems, and then it gets stolen (Remember when iPods were new and they were getting stolen all the time?), how am I going to remotely wipe all of the data from it?
Same way you remotely wipe all the data from a Treo. Or even a Blackberry.
You don't, unless they're stupid enough to hook it up to the network before they pull the data out.
You enforce remote security with an encrypted database that you don't keep the key to in the handheld, or simply not keeping data in the handheld. Anything else is no better than "you must be this tall to storm the castle".
Let me remind you that neither this site, nor Linux, would exist without RMS's principles.
Bullshit.
I was using and writing free software, open source software, whatever you call it, long before RMS had his hissy-cow about Emacs getting forked and wrote the GNU manifesto. RMS has been given credit for too much stuff that was happening anyway.
If it wasn't for RMS, we'd be running this stuff on BSD instead of Linux, that's all.
I'm a fan of anarchist/libertarian ideas, what is the source of your amusement?
Too much experience with Linux fanboys.
Check with RMS - he'll tell you how uncool THAT is.
And RMS fanboys, for that matter.
Using a tool that isn't the best tool for the job doesn't make you principled, it just makes you less effective.
I gotta say, having someone self-identify as anarchist/libertarian *and* as a member of a fan group is amusing.
Me, I'm a fan of using the best available tool for each job.
What group does that put me in?
I'll go along with David Brin's speculations about the transparent society so far as to see it as the lesser evil, but I suspect the transparent society will be more like Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" than Brin's "Earth".
By the way, I would recommend reading those two books in order of publication. There are a number of parallels between them: Alex Lustig isn't Donald Hogan or Norman House, but I suspect if the three got together they'd discover he's got a lot in common with them.
Here's the referenced article, outside the PhysOrg tarpit. Abstract only without a paid subscription.
They were removed because (I guess) not a lot of people used them.
:p
Not a lot of people used early versions of OS X, for that matter. It wasn't stable enough for production until Jaguar.
It is not 3D eye candy, it actually is 3D.
Really?
In the videos it looked like a typical "two-and-a-half" dimension interface, where the third dimension is an effect applied to a two-dimensional interface, like the "3d" drop shadowed-windows in OS X, or the "3d" buttons that have become the norm for windowed GUIs over the past decade and a half: you would get the same functionality with a short vertical stack of objects in two dimensions.
This isn't intended to put it down, or anything... I don't think that full 3d makes a lot of sense here, actually, so I'm curious as to what you mean by "it actually is 3d".
(as an aside, what I want to see is the ability to run applets in the dock... it's one of the things I miss from the enhanced NeXT-style dock in Windowmaker/GNUstep)
If Apple's exposing multiple pointers and not providing some analog of the normal mouse actions through Safari on the iPhone, then they're going to cause problems for iPhone users for more than just the so-called "web 2.0" sites.
If there *is* a problem with these sites with the iPhone, then file bug reports with Apple. It's their job to fix them.