For example, in the camera app, there would be no need to have music playing, if you want to change the volume of your phone you could just use the silent/loud switch included.
There are two issues here. First, Apple requires that apps use the published APIs according to their guidelines so things don't break as hardware changes. Apps that won't work on the new version because the switches have changed are a no-no. Second, if I'm playing music through my phone and also doing something else, no I don't want the second app to prevent me from adjusting the device volume when a louder song comes on, that's just freaking annoying. I'm not a big iPhone fan (don't own one, probably never will) but complaining about Apple requiring developers to use the APIs as published is just dumb.
I think it would be more apt to say that those without altered genes would be physically disadvantaged.
Among men, height is the single most important characteristic for attractiveness, more so than intelligence, wealth, and physical fitness combined (both heterosexual and homosexuals attracted to men). For every inch of height, you can see a correlative increase in the average income of men. Since it is not likely not be required that people advertise that they have been genetically altered, those people who have been engineered to be taller will be at a significant advantage already. And from there it is only a matter of affordability until short people are a disadvantaged minority with all the current disadvantages combined and the stigma attached to characteristics mentally associated with being poor. In 20 years don't be surprised if short people are considered likely to be criminals by much of our society.
I don't see the GATTACA connection here, other than a knee-jerk response to any DNA discoveries.
If we know what genes encode desirable traits, that is the first step towards genetically altering offspring to have those traits... ala Gattaca. This isn't about knowing who has the genes for tallness, but about the potential of altering those genes so that people who do not have altered genes are societally disadvantaged.
Learning what genes do what isn't Gattaca-ish, it's scientific progress.
The previous poster never said that Gattaca type things were happening now, but wrote that they should be concerned about such things, as in this makes the potential more likely. I strongly suspect they were talking about genetically engineering our offspring and the potential negative consequences; one of the movie's main themes.
You don't need to read the code for a "flashlight" app if you look at the ACL and see it wants to access location and internet and the phone number list. After that you can look at the code a little and test it to see what it actually tries to do, much of which can be automated. We have enough experience automagically detecting the existence of malware these days that we can weed out a good percentage that way.
But that's a really obvious suspicious case, and is a case where the existing system works perfectly
How does the existing system work perfectly? Right now Android users download apps from anywhere and if the ACL says it needs access to the internet or some other resource, they have to see that and understand what it means. While this may be obvious to me and you and security experts, it certainly is not obvious to everyone, which is why the OS should outright refuse to run such apps or Google and other parties should be investigating the people who paid to sign the app or at the very least the user should be given some very, very strongly worded warnings with a default of not running the app.
...you'll get a bunch of negative comments from users about your weird permissions, be complained about, and be removed.
Removed from where if you're not selling it through the Android Market? Even if you are, that's after some of the damage is done, as opposed to this happening before the user installs the app or before the app is even offered by a more robust marketplace.
Remember that you fundamentally can't use a permission you're not notifying the user of.
Too bad many users don't have any idea what those notifications mean.
I'm talking about what you'd do if you actually wanted to get away with it, which is build an app that already has some legitimate use for the permissions you're requesting.
This is certainly a route for malware, but it's a lot harder to make something that appears to have a legitimate purpose and the user actually wants. And even then, you'll have to be sneaky to get the app to do something malicious when it is being vetted in even an automated fashion.
In those cases you'd need to do code review, and you'd have no idea you should be looking in the first place.
Code review is the last step, after you've already inspected the ACLs and done both automated and manual blackbox testing for suspicious network and disk activity.
This means you'd need to code review everything with any special permissions, and doing a passably thorough job of that is basically impossible.
Not really, since you can build in a review process for those apps that makes legitimate developers unwilling to use them unless they actually need to. You provide a few nice services for developers to do things like updates, registration, serve ads to users, and connect to gaming servers VMs, and the remaining cases are fairly manageable for testing. You certainly won't catch everything, but enough to make malware a lot harder to write and the number of people doing it few enough that you can go after all of them through legal channels.
...is there an iPhone equivalent to the "uses internet access", "uses coarse location services" page that the Android Market displays to you?
Yes. Both systems use similar schemes for jailing apps, with user permissions for access to various services.
There's a ton of iPhone, Blackberry, Parlm, etc apps using advertising support, which is what the vast majority of this article is finger-pointing.
True, but most are transitioning to iAd, which divorces the advertiser and location services from one another such that it is not so much of privacy concern.. at least if you trust Apple to do what they say (as opposes to every app developer).
Nobody, at any marketplace service, is going to have time to do a code review of everything that gets submitted.
Well, they could if they put the resources into it. It might even be important enough to end users if malware becomes a real issue on mobile platforms. That said, while they can't review all the code for every app they certainly can review the ACLs for every app, which spell out what an app is and is not allowed to access to see if the app makes sense. You don't need to read the code for a "flashlight" app if you look at the ACL and see it wants to access location and internet and the phone number list. After that you can look at the code a little and test it to see what it actually tries to do, much of which can be automated. We have enough experience automagically detecting the existence of malware these days that we can weed out a good percentage that way.
You're going to have to trust your developers folks, and make use of the user-ratings tools if you don't.
I don't want to have to trust developers. Thats what access control is all about, letting me safely run software from people I don't trust and trusting as little as possible to get what I want.
Android's model of showing you what special access the software uses is about as good as I think you can get in the real world without learning to use a packet sniffer.
Sadly, that's still pretty useless to the average user. What users really want are vetted apps tied to real developers so that they know someone looked to see if it is malware and they have two someones to sue if it is discovered to be malware.
Ideally, the system could be more open than Apple's model where they weakly vet apps and if their efforts are poor, the user has no recourse. Better yet would be a system where various organizations (Google, phone makers, security companies, security organizations, government agencies, etc.) all vet apps based upon the ACLs included with those apps and the result is weighted baed upon the security feeds and how the end user has weighted them. Some could even be pay services like anti-malware software is now.
RIM's ability to disable individual types of access is cool as well, but if the software needs it to function (or says it does) I'm not sure how the user is supposed to be in a position to use it intelligently.
I might note, if software requires you to tell it your location to function at all, there's no reason the OS can't hand it dummy data when the user says "No" to the permission dialogue. It's harder for internet access, since the app can test that easily.
Since when are rights deserved?... Rights exist or don't exist.
You're misreading the phrase, badly. It doesn't ask if rights deserve to exist, but if corporations have rights and thus deserve to have them protected by law.
When someone writes, "does a tree deserve the rights to life liberty and happiness", they aren't asking if rights are deserved, but if the tree has rights deserving of protection.
Microsoft also produces some Free Software. That does not necessarily make them part of the Free Software community.
Well, it sort of does, just not a very important part. Oracle, on the other hand, has contributed a lot of code to Linux over the years, important bits too.
This particular announcement only shows that the Free Software community has basically given up on working with Oracle to push changes upstream.
I thought the free software community had given up long ago, which is why things like go-oo.org exist in the first place. The only difference is before Sun was sinking significant resources into it and no one was willing to fork in a way that would make getting the resulting improvements cumbersome. This announcement is more like a vote that things have gone one step further and most don't expect much useful from Oracle to be added.
Combine this new schism with the fact that Oracle is suing Google over a Free Software Java-alike (Dalvik, and Harmony), and the recent closure of OpenSolaris, and Oracle is not looking particularly friendly right at this moment.
You seem to be misinterpreting my comments. I never said Oracle was a model OSS contributor. I simply said they are a major one and that claiming Oracle being problematic is not a conflict within the ranks of OSS developers is not really accurate. Oracle is an OOS contributor on a significant scale.
This might seem like the sort of thing that only "long-haired, bearded hippies" care about...
It has nothing to do with who cares about it, you just have to realize different part of the community have different priorities, some of which are simply to minimize their costs and maximize their profits... and that's okay so long as they contribute.
I tend to think you haven't followed much of the whole story of Open Source software or it's timeline.
Then you'd be wrong. I've professionally developed open source software for a decade or more.
Oracle has never been much of an advocate of Open Source and the recent buyout of Sun has not been a good thing for Open Source advocates.
You don't have to be vocal to be part of a community. Oracle is a huge user of Linux and for many years they've had full time, paid employees coding on Linux where they found it lacking for their needs. That right there makes them part of the OSS community, as in they are both users and developers of OSS software. As for Oracle buying out Sun being a good thing for the community, when did I say it was? I think it has been almost entirely negative, but then I think a lot of members of the OSS community do more harm than good. Some would argue that about Stallman. That doesn't mean they aren't part of the community.
I'd almost have to say you're just trolling...
Why would I care if an AC claims I'm trolling? It doesn't make it true and you don't really support that opinion with anything useful.
...statements referring to 'revising' our views is totally irrelevant in this particular matter.
When people claim users and developers aren't part of the OSS community, I find that very relevant. It's trying to cherry pick based upon purely subjective criteria.
Yes companies, big and small, contribute a lot to the Open Source community. Oracle's history is steeped in corporate IT and very little of it was focused towards Open Source.
Their contribution to the Linux kernel alone are significant, more than you've done I'd wager. Yast, IPv6 support for NFS, etc. But hey don't take my word for it:
"Oracle's development work for the Linux kernel represents vital contributions to the open source community, which benefit anyone using Linux." – Andrew Morton, Linux Kernel Maintainer, Google
If Oracle is not a a member of the OSS community by virtue of all the OSS code they write and use, then you have rendered the term meaningless.
Cue the fanboys saying otherwise... I agree with you, Apple seems to have a distinctly anti-OSS agenda. To add insult to injury, almost all their products use OSS as a base except they use BSD licenses rather then GPL so they dont have to contribute back.
That's just idiotic. Apple uses BSD licenses so they don't have to give back... then they give back anyway? Really? Webkit is BSD licensed and Apple forked it from KHTML. Apple has no obligation to contribute those changes, but they've contributed all of them, going out of their way to help others implement things. They've even gone so far as to build in a protected threading model for plug-ins so that all Webkit applications can use that functionality (Google built this functionality separate from the engine in Chrome resulting in other browsers being unable to make use of said code easily). Apple wrote LaunchD from scratch and licensed it with the Apache license so anyone can use it. Hell the core of their OS, Darwin is BSD licensed but they've kept right on releasing it even though they have no obligation to do so. They dump tons of money and code into Apache, Sproutcore, CUPs, gcc, dtrace, and plenty more.
You may not like Apple, but denying that they support a lot of OSS projects and contribute a lot of code is a sign of ignorance. Apple, like many large companies, understands the value of open source as a way to spread out the costs of commoditized parts of software, help interoperability of those parts, and allow them to focus their efforts on money making differentiators instead of reinventing the wheel. A lot of us benefit from their contributions just as they benefit from ours. That's what the mainstream OSS movement is about.
I don't particularly like Glenn Beck, but should he endorse products he doesn't believe in?
Congratulations on making a strawman argument. No one said he should endorse products he doesn't believe in. That was all you. I'd say if he's being paid by a news channel maybe he shouldn't be endorsing products at all, certainly not on air and while being paid by the company and while not disclosing the conflict of interest.
Tensions between the open source community and Oracle, a big proprietary software company, can hardly be called infighting in the OSS community.
I disagree. Like it or not, Oracle is part of the OSS community. A huge portion of the development done on OSS is done by employees of big companies, most of which also write proprietary, closed source software. Apple, Google, IBM, Nokia, HP... well you get the point. Basically, Oracle dumps enough money and human resources into improving Linux and the userspace that they've earned the title of OSS community contributor.
That doesn't mean they and other companies don't do lots of things counter to the interests of the OSS community in general, when it helps their bottom line; or that this is anything new. It just means maybe you should revise your view of what the OSS community is to be a little more realistic and a little less black and white. Sure there are long haired, bearded hippies working for free in their spare time to make the world a better place. There are also a crapload of on the clock developers getting a paycheck to work on OSS projects used by their corporation to create salable products and services. They're all part of the community.
What you're missing is that Glenn Beck's radio show is sponsored by a competitor "Goldline International" and he gets significant money for doing regular TV and radio ads for them. He used to be listed as a "paid spokesman" for their product until someone notified Fox with regard to his regular rants on his Fox News Channel program about how everyone should buy gold. Since that is against Fox's policies, the gold peddler changed all the adverts to say he is a "radio sponsor" and Fox ignored the issue, which shows how much they actually care about the integrity of their programming.
If you don't already have a Mac, iOS requires Apple hardware for development. You also need to learn objective-C which doesn't get much play outside of a Mac environment.
Xcode supports C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++, for the iPhone. You can also do things like HTML5/javascript apps compiled with a tool like PhoneGap or one of the tools to compile Flash apps into iPhone apps.
Personally, while iOS is currently ahead of Android (user base, # of devs, apps, etc) I think before long it's going to start playing catch up to Android. Android has got a lot of momentum.
I think your metaphor is broken. If iOS is ahead it can't play catch up to Android until Android finishes catching up. Android is certainly growing and iOS is going strong as well. I'd argue it makes sense to work with cross-platform HTML5 apps where you can target not only the iPhone and Android phones, but also WebOS phones and everything with a modern Web browser (phones with Webkit or Opera and a internet connection). It's a bit limited as far as dev tools and the like so far, but clearly functional and going to be a useful platform going forward.
By "easily" I mean for the average random person on campus. Most college students aren't computer science students, and aren't adept at networking, and probably would not know how to setup an ad-hoc network.
DNS-SD on modern OS's auto-discovers local systems, so they show up in listings of available networks. Most modern OS's offer to either join a network or create an ad-hoc network when they see other wireless devices advertising themselves and are not part of a network already. You don't have t be a network engineer to click "ok" in the create a shared network dialogue box. That is, unless you're running an outdated OS.
Plus, depending on what you're transferring, wireless connections are not all that snappy, are they?
The discussion began talking about transferring notes from an iPad to a laptop or desktop. I doubt bandwidth will be an issue there and if it is, there are better ways than USB.
...if the iPad even allows you to work with files like that, which I have heard it doesn't all that easily?
The iPad uses a wireless connection and iTunes to synch content to programs on your desktop. This includes synching things like notes to programs that support them (there are a handful of such apps on Mac and Windows). On Linux you may need to install libimobiledevice to facilitate transfers in lieu of iTunes.
Not really owning or controlling your own hardware has some serious practical implications that are more than just "politics".
Look, I'll probably never buy an iPad because I prefer more open devices I can hack on easily. That said, how do people "not own or control" their iPad? Is there anything stopping you from installing your favorite Linux/Android OS on it? Is there anything stopping you from jailbreaking it and installing any apps you care to? What Apple is controlling is the Apple supplied service for buying/downloading/and installing applications. That's pretty much it.
If you don't like Apple's approach, by all means feel free to speak up and tell people why. But please drop the hyperbole or you're just going to discredit by association those people who are making legitimate arguments.
So with easy storage devices and networking availability, we're going to move stuff between two computers that are sitting right next to each other by e-mailing it. That doesn't sound very smart.
Nope... but it still beats Sharepoint:)
In all seriousness, many, many people do use e-mail for just that purpose because file transfer software tends to suck for usability. As for server size limitations, doesn't everyone have a Gmail account by now?
Not all campus networks allow you to easily network two computers on the public campus network.
Really? In what way do they prohibit computers from easily networking? I'm really trying to picture it. Maybe requirement use of a VPN that filters DNS-SD for some unknown reason? Even so that won't stop an ad hoc network connection between the two.
What I'm trying to figure out now is: do you just use gear with really, really crappy networking controls, or if your campus network engineers are brilliant and evil. Care to tell me what campus network you're talking about?
What if you somehow took notes or something and want to put it on another computer? A USB port is rather useful for that sort of thing... basically, any attempt to move data off your iPad to work with it on another platform, how does that work?
Why would you use USB for that? You have your wireless internet connection. Even for PC's you can use wireless or ethernet to transfer data more efficiently. And if you don't, Firewire is a crap-ton faster than USB for moving data.
As of right now, the iPad is more secure in terms of malware and viruses
It's no more secure than Linux or MacOS.
It's no more secure than Linux or OS X (both of which are fairly secure) except it has to be those OS's being run in a specialized environment where security policies forbid unsigned and un-sandboxed end user applications and all applications have some vetting process. Since that eliminates 99% of all installations of either OS, I'm going to have to disagree with you and say the iPad is more secure than most desktop Linux or OS X installs in use today.
The problem with the PC approach is Microsoft software, not the PC approach.
I don't know what you mean by "the PC approach" but locked down distribution of applications has been used by many organizations worried about security. It can be done in a way that is less restrictive than Apple's approach while still providing the same level of security, but so far no one has stepped up and implemented such a system on a mainstream consumer offering.
While Sweden/Norway and the US might have similar number of guns per person the type of weapons own differ. In Sweden over 80% of all guns are hunting rifles and hunting shotguns.
Do you have a citation?
The most credible numbers I've seen show those numbers in the US are about 60% for the US.
Very few of these weapons make for usable self-defense weapons which means their usability when committing crimes is also low.
What?!? Hunting rifles make for excellent weapons for the commission of a crime. As do shotguns, which are also probably the most common home defense weapon in the US or Sweden. Put some slugs or buckshot in a 12 Gauge and you have an effective tool for home defense, robbery, or murder.
First, I was referring to (and I called this out later) percentage of households that have a firearm, where Norway is within a percent or two of the US. I think that's a more appropriate statistic because it weeds out the statistical outliers who own hundreds of guns in display cases. Second, why do you think there are more restrictions on gun ownership in most european countries than in the US?
Actually, my assertion was that the idea that gun ownership makes you more safe doesn't seem to be true, but unfortunately in your seemingly patriotic rush to the defence of the good name of your nation that flew right over the top of your head.
It's always amusing to see people refer to me as patriotic or unpatriotic, all depending upon what particular topic I mention and their own views, as if you can dismiss any argument as irrational simply by applying whichever term you think applies in a given case. How you can read a post where I enumerate flaws of the US political system and culture, point by point, and then refer to my comments as "patriotic" is beyond me. So what evidence do you have that increased gun ownership rates don't decrease violent crime or increase safety? I think it's pretty well established that the UK's implementation of strict firearm laws coincided with and was perhaps causative of an increase in violent crime. So show me your correlation and support for it being causative.
"Who says we have more freedom?"
Tea party folk, NRA members and the like mostly.
If you're listening to nutjobs like the majority of tea party members who are crazy enough to get quoted in the news, then there is little hope. It's like my asserting that Europeans hate black people, based upon the rantings of several eastern european political candidates of late. As for the NRA, they're yet another lobbying party, about getting quoted in the news and swaying politicians. What the average member thinks is anyones guess because no one polls them.
My fundamental point is that the idea that Europeans are somehow negatively effected by lack of gun ownership freedoms in general (please read the post I originally responded to to understand the context of my post) simply isn't true.
But I think it is true in some parts of Europe, where draconian firearm ownership laws have been implemented. The UK is an excellent example. Truly anyone can argue the numbers back and forth, but violent crime in the UK has been going up, despite trends that would normally expect sociologists to predict a slight decrease. Violent crime committed with firearms is down, but not enough to make up for all the other violent crime including beatings with bare hands, blunt instruments, and bladed weapons and violent crimes associated with home invasions. And so the UK looks to try to restrict ownership of knives and starts doing random searches of people riding the subway. I'd say both of those are negative effects, one the direct result of legislation.
The idea that unless you have the absolute right to bear arms, you are living under a tyrannical government- an idea that all too many Americans seem to try and sell is blatantly false, because European countries are, for the most part, doing better.
While I agree the right to bear arms is not the fundamental test of tyranny, I dispute much of the rest of this. Most european countries do allow firearm ownership, which is orthogonal to quality of life. You seem to be asserting that european countries don't allow gun ownership (false) which you then seem to claim is causative of a better quality of life. Yet some of the european countries with the best quality of life have the most lax gun ownership laws and lowest violent crime, while some (like the UK) are rated much lower in happiness and have very strict gun control laws and a great deal of violent crime. Your assertions simply don't make sense unless you're forming them fr
We both enjoy firing and talking about guns, but gun culture isn't something that interests us...
While a lot of modern "gun culture" in the US is juvenile and mixed in with some of the more idiotic ideas floating around our society, both the olde time hunting culture and the marksmanship cultures share some very valuable cultural traits. Most importantly, a strict, almost ritualistic adherence to firearm safety rules, even when they don't understand the purpose behind them. It's a trait that seems to be slowly going away which is sad. Too often I hear people joke about pointing guns at others and knowing they aren't loaded and such, all of which misses the point. The idea of conditioning yourself with safe behaviors through repetition, so that you behave safely when you don't have time to think clearly is, frankly, beyond a lot of people. It's too bad more people don't have a grouchy grandfather or strict sergeant enforcing said conditioning and making sure they pass it on.
Yeah, a guy I used to work with did a project with solar powered repeater antennas. People would shoot at the shiny solar panels from the next mountain over, causing significant damage on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, in the camera app, there would be no need to have music playing, if you want to change the volume of your phone you could just use the silent/loud switch included.
There are two issues here. First, Apple requires that apps use the published APIs according to their guidelines so things don't break as hardware changes. Apps that won't work on the new version because the switches have changed are a no-no. Second, if I'm playing music through my phone and also doing something else, no I don't want the second app to prevent me from adjusting the device volume when a louder song comes on, that's just freaking annoying. I'm not a big iPhone fan (don't own one, probably never will) but complaining about Apple requiring developers to use the APIs as published is just dumb.
I think it would be more apt to say that those without altered genes would be physically disadvantaged.
Among men, height is the single most important characteristic for attractiveness, more so than intelligence, wealth, and physical fitness combined (both heterosexual and homosexuals attracted to men). For every inch of height, you can see a correlative increase in the average income of men. Since it is not likely not be required that people advertise that they have been genetically altered, those people who have been engineered to be taller will be at a significant advantage already. And from there it is only a matter of affordability until short people are a disadvantaged minority with all the current disadvantages combined and the stigma attached to characteristics mentally associated with being poor. In 20 years don't be surprised if short people are considered likely to be criminals by much of our society.
I don't see the GATTACA connection here, other than a knee-jerk response to any DNA discoveries.
If we know what genes encode desirable traits, that is the first step towards genetically altering offspring to have those traits... ala Gattaca. This isn't about knowing who has the genes for tallness, but about the potential of altering those genes so that people who do not have altered genes are societally disadvantaged.
Learning what genes do what isn't Gattaca-ish, it's scientific progress.
The previous poster never said that Gattaca type things were happening now, but wrote that they should be concerned about such things, as in this makes the potential more likely. I strongly suspect they were talking about genetically engineering our offspring and the potential negative consequences; one of the movie's main themes.
You don't need to read the code for a "flashlight" app if you look at the ACL and see it wants to access location and internet and the phone number list. After that you can look at the code a little and test it to see what it actually tries to do, much of which can be automated. We have enough experience automagically detecting the existence of malware these days that we can weed out a good percentage that way.
But that's a really obvious suspicious case, and is a case where the existing system works perfectly
How does the existing system work perfectly? Right now Android users download apps from anywhere and if the ACL says it needs access to the internet or some other resource, they have to see that and understand what it means. While this may be obvious to me and you and security experts, it certainly is not obvious to everyone, which is why the OS should outright refuse to run such apps or Google and other parties should be investigating the people who paid to sign the app or at the very least the user should be given some very, very strongly worded warnings with a default of not running the app.
...you'll get a bunch of negative comments from users about your weird permissions, be complained about, and be removed.
Removed from where if you're not selling it through the Android Market? Even if you are, that's after some of the damage is done, as opposed to this happening before the user installs the app or before the app is even offered by a more robust marketplace.
Remember that you fundamentally can't use a permission you're not notifying the user of.
Too bad many users don't have any idea what those notifications mean.
I'm talking about what you'd do if you actually wanted to get away with it, which is build an app that already has some legitimate use for the permissions you're requesting.
This is certainly a route for malware, but it's a lot harder to make something that appears to have a legitimate purpose and the user actually wants. And even then, you'll have to be sneaky to get the app to do something malicious when it is being vetted in even an automated fashion.
In those cases you'd need to do code review, and you'd have no idea you should be looking in the first place.
Code review is the last step, after you've already inspected the ACLs and done both automated and manual blackbox testing for suspicious network and disk activity.
This means you'd need to code review everything with any special permissions, and doing a passably thorough job of that is basically impossible.
Not really, since you can build in a review process for those apps that makes legitimate developers unwilling to use them unless they actually need to. You provide a few nice services for developers to do things like updates, registration, serve ads to users, and connect to gaming servers VMs, and the remaining cases are fairly manageable for testing. You certainly won't catch everything, but enough to make malware a lot harder to write and the number of people doing it few enough that you can go after all of them through legal channels.
...is there an iPhone equivalent to the "uses internet access", "uses coarse location services" page that the Android Market displays to you?
Yes. Both systems use similar schemes for jailing apps, with user permissions for access to various services.
There's a ton of iPhone, Blackberry, Parlm, etc apps using advertising support, which is what the vast majority of this article is finger-pointing.
True, but most are transitioning to iAd, which divorces the advertiser and location services from one another such that it is not so much of privacy concern.. at least if you trust Apple to do what they say (as opposes to every app developer).
Nobody, at any marketplace service, is going to have time to do a code review of everything that gets submitted.
Well, they could if they put the resources into it. It might even be important enough to end users if malware becomes a real issue on mobile platforms. That said, while they can't review all the code for every app they certainly can review the ACLs for every app, which spell out what an app is and is not allowed to access to see if the app makes sense. You don't need to read the code for a "flashlight" app if you look at the ACL and see it wants to access location and internet and the phone number list. After that you can look at the code a little and test it to see what it actually tries to do, much of which can be automated. We have enough experience automagically detecting the existence of malware these days that we can weed out a good percentage that way.
You're going to have to trust your developers folks, and make use of the user-ratings tools if you don't.
I don't want to have to trust developers. Thats what access control is all about, letting me safely run software from people I don't trust and trusting as little as possible to get what I want.
Android's model of showing you what special access the software uses is about as good as I think you can get in the real world without learning to use a packet sniffer.
Sadly, that's still pretty useless to the average user. What users really want are vetted apps tied to real developers so that they know someone looked to see if it is malware and they have two someones to sue if it is discovered to be malware.
Ideally, the system could be more open than Apple's model where they weakly vet apps and if their efforts are poor, the user has no recourse. Better yet would be a system where various organizations (Google, phone makers, security companies, security organizations, government agencies, etc.) all vet apps based upon the ACLs included with those apps and the result is weighted baed upon the security feeds and how the end user has weighted them. Some could even be pay services like anti-malware software is now.
RIM's ability to disable individual types of access is cool as well, but if the software needs it to function (or says it does) I'm not sure how the user is supposed to be in a position to use it intelligently.
I might note, if software requires you to tell it your location to function at all, there's no reason the OS can't hand it dummy data when the user says "No" to the permission dialogue. It's harder for internet access, since the app can test that easily.
Since when are rights deserved? ... Rights exist or don't exist.
You're misreading the phrase, badly. It doesn't ask if rights deserve to exist, but if corporations have rights and thus deserve to have them protected by law.
When someone writes, "does a tree deserve the rights to life liberty and happiness", they aren't asking if rights are deserved, but if the tree has rights deserving of protection.
I'm not convinced that Oracle *has* become a part of the FOSS community. Their actions have been, at best, ambiguous. And often a bit predatory.
How is that relevant?
Buying a company in order to kill of it's FOSS projects doesn't make a corporation a FOSS community member.
No, writing chunks of the Linux kernel, however, does.
How they react to this will be quite telling, and how they develop Java will be even more telling.
Telling about how helpful they will be to the community, maybe, not about whether or not they are part of it.
Microsoft also produces some Free Software. That does not necessarily make them part of the Free Software community.
Well, it sort of does, just not a very important part. Oracle, on the other hand, has contributed a lot of code to Linux over the years, important bits too.
This particular announcement only shows that the Free Software community has basically given up on working with Oracle to push changes upstream.
I thought the free software community had given up long ago, which is why things like go-oo.org exist in the first place. The only difference is before Sun was sinking significant resources into it and no one was willing to fork in a way that would make getting the resulting improvements cumbersome. This announcement is more like a vote that things have gone one step further and most don't expect much useful from Oracle to be added.
Combine this new schism with the fact that Oracle is suing Google over a Free Software Java-alike (Dalvik, and Harmony), and the recent closure of OpenSolaris, and Oracle is not looking particularly friendly right at this moment.
You seem to be misinterpreting my comments. I never said Oracle was a model OSS contributor. I simply said they are a major one and that claiming Oracle being problematic is not a conflict within the ranks of OSS developers is not really accurate. Oracle is an OOS contributor on a significant scale.
This might seem like the sort of thing that only "long-haired, bearded hippies" care about...
It has nothing to do with who cares about it, you just have to realize different part of the community have different priorities, some of which are simply to minimize their costs and maximize their profits... and that's okay so long as they contribute.
I tend to think you haven't followed much of the whole story of Open Source software or it's timeline.
Then you'd be wrong. I've professionally developed open source software for a decade or more.
Oracle has never been much of an advocate of Open Source and the recent buyout of Sun has not been a good thing for Open Source advocates.
You don't have to be vocal to be part of a community. Oracle is a huge user of Linux and for many years they've had full time, paid employees coding on Linux where they found it lacking for their needs. That right there makes them part of the OSS community, as in they are both users and developers of OSS software. As for Oracle buying out Sun being a good thing for the community, when did I say it was? I think it has been almost entirely negative, but then I think a lot of members of the OSS community do more harm than good. Some would argue that about Stallman. That doesn't mean they aren't part of the community.
I'd almost have to say you're just trolling...
Why would I care if an AC claims I'm trolling? It doesn't make it true and you don't really support that opinion with anything useful.
...statements referring to 'revising' our views is totally irrelevant in this particular matter.
When people claim users and developers aren't part of the OSS community, I find that very relevant. It's trying to cherry pick based upon purely subjective criteria.
Yes companies, big and small, contribute a lot to the Open Source community. Oracle's history is steeped in corporate IT and very little of it was focused towards Open Source.
Their contribution to the Linux kernel alone are significant, more than you've done I'd wager. Yast, IPv6 support for NFS, etc. But hey don't take my word for it:
"Oracle's development work for the Linux kernel represents vital contributions to the open source community, which benefit anyone using Linux." – Andrew Morton, Linux Kernel Maintainer, Google
If Oracle is not a a member of the OSS community by virtue of all the OSS code they write and use, then you have rendered the term meaningless.
Cue the fanboys saying otherwise... I agree with you, Apple seems to have a distinctly anti-OSS agenda. To add insult to injury, almost all their products use OSS as a base except they use BSD licenses rather then GPL so they dont have to contribute back.
That's just idiotic. Apple uses BSD licenses so they don't have to give back... then they give back anyway? Really? Webkit is BSD licensed and Apple forked it from KHTML. Apple has no obligation to contribute those changes, but they've contributed all of them, going out of their way to help others implement things. They've even gone so far as to build in a protected threading model for plug-ins so that all Webkit applications can use that functionality (Google built this functionality separate from the engine in Chrome resulting in other browsers being unable to make use of said code easily). Apple wrote LaunchD from scratch and licensed it with the Apache license so anyone can use it. Hell the core of their OS, Darwin is BSD licensed but they've kept right on releasing it even though they have no obligation to do so. They dump tons of money and code into Apache, Sproutcore, CUPs, gcc, dtrace, and plenty more.
You may not like Apple, but denying that they support a lot of OSS projects and contribute a lot of code is a sign of ignorance. Apple, like many large companies, understands the value of open source as a way to spread out the costs of commoditized parts of software, help interoperability of those parts, and allow them to focus their efforts on money making differentiators instead of reinventing the wheel. A lot of us benefit from their contributions just as they benefit from ours. That's what the mainstream OSS movement is about.
I don't particularly like Glenn Beck, but should he endorse products he doesn't believe in?
Congratulations on making a strawman argument. No one said he should endorse products he doesn't believe in. That was all you. I'd say if he's being paid by a news channel maybe he shouldn't be endorsing products at all, certainly not on air and while being paid by the company and while not disclosing the conflict of interest.
Tensions between the open source community and Oracle, a big proprietary software company, can hardly be called infighting in the OSS community.
I disagree. Like it or not, Oracle is part of the OSS community. A huge portion of the development done on OSS is done by employees of big companies, most of which also write proprietary, closed source software. Apple, Google, IBM, Nokia, HP... well you get the point. Basically, Oracle dumps enough money and human resources into improving Linux and the userspace that they've earned the title of OSS community contributor.
That doesn't mean they and other companies don't do lots of things counter to the interests of the OSS community in general, when it helps their bottom line; or that this is anything new. It just means maybe you should revise your view of what the OSS community is to be a little more realistic and a little less black and white. Sure there are long haired, bearded hippies working for free in their spare time to make the world a better place. There are also a crapload of on the clock developers getting a paycheck to work on OSS projects used by their corporation to create salable products and services. They're all part of the community.
What you're missing is that Glenn Beck's radio show is sponsored by a competitor "Goldline International" and he gets significant money for doing regular TV and radio ads for them. He used to be listed as a "paid spokesman" for their product until someone notified Fox with regard to his regular rants on his Fox News Channel program about how everyone should buy gold. Since that is against Fox's policies, the gold peddler changed all the adverts to say he is a "radio sponsor" and Fox ignored the issue, which shows how much they actually care about the integrity of their programming.
If you don't already have a Mac, iOS requires Apple hardware for development. You also need to learn objective-C which doesn't get much play outside of a Mac environment.
Xcode supports C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++, for the iPhone. You can also do things like HTML5/javascript apps compiled with a tool like PhoneGap or one of the tools to compile Flash apps into iPhone apps.
Personally, while iOS is currently ahead of Android (user base, # of devs, apps, etc) I think before long it's going to start playing catch up to Android. Android has got a lot of momentum.
I think your metaphor is broken. If iOS is ahead it can't play catch up to Android until Android finishes catching up. Android is certainly growing and iOS is going strong as well. I'd argue it makes sense to work with cross-platform HTML5 apps where you can target not only the iPhone and Android phones, but also WebOS phones and everything with a modern Web browser (phones with Webkit or Opera and a internet connection). It's a bit limited as far as dev tools and the like so far, but clearly functional and going to be a useful platform going forward.
By "easily" I mean for the average random person on campus. Most college students aren't computer science students, and aren't adept at networking, and probably would not know how to setup an ad-hoc network.
DNS-SD on modern OS's auto-discovers local systems, so they show up in listings of available networks. Most modern OS's offer to either join a network or create an ad-hoc network when they see other wireless devices advertising themselves and are not part of a network already. You don't have t be a network engineer to click "ok" in the create a shared network dialogue box. That is, unless you're running an outdated OS.
Plus, depending on what you're transferring, wireless connections are not all that snappy, are they?
The discussion began talking about transferring notes from an iPad to a laptop or desktop. I doubt bandwidth will be an issue there and if it is, there are better ways than USB.
...if the iPad even allows you to work with files like that, which I have heard it doesn't all that easily?
The iPad uses a wireless connection and iTunes to synch content to programs on your desktop. This includes synching things like notes to programs that support them (there are a handful of such apps on Mac and Windows). On Linux you may need to install libimobiledevice to facilitate transfers in lieu of iTunes.
Not really owning or controlling your own hardware has some serious practical implications that are more than just "politics".
Look, I'll probably never buy an iPad because I prefer more open devices I can hack on easily. That said, how do people "not own or control" their iPad? Is there anything stopping you from installing your favorite Linux/Android OS on it? Is there anything stopping you from jailbreaking it and installing any apps you care to? What Apple is controlling is the Apple supplied service for buying/downloading/and installing applications. That's pretty much it.
If you don't like Apple's approach, by all means feel free to speak up and tell people why. But please drop the hyperbole or you're just going to discredit by association those people who are making legitimate arguments.
So with easy storage devices and networking availability, we're going to move stuff between two computers that are sitting right next to each other by e-mailing it. That doesn't sound very smart.
Nope... but it still beats Sharepoint :)
In all seriousness, many, many people do use e-mail for just that purpose because file transfer software tends to suck for usability. As for server size limitations, doesn't everyone have a Gmail account by now?
Not all campus networks allow you to easily network two computers on the public campus network.
Really? In what way do they prohibit computers from easily networking? I'm really trying to picture it. Maybe requirement use of a VPN that filters DNS-SD for some unknown reason? Even so that won't stop an ad hoc network connection between the two.
What I'm trying to figure out now is: do you just use gear with really, really crappy networking controls, or if your campus network engineers are brilliant and evil. Care to tell me what campus network you're talking about?
What if you somehow took notes or something and want to put it on another computer? A USB port is rather useful for that sort of thing... basically, any attempt to move data off your iPad to work with it on another platform, how does that work?
Why would you use USB for that? You have your wireless internet connection. Even for PC's you can use wireless or ethernet to transfer data more efficiently. And if you don't, Firewire is a crap-ton faster than USB for moving data.
As of right now, the iPad is more secure in terms of malware and viruses
It's no more secure than Linux or MacOS.
It's no more secure than Linux or OS X (both of which are fairly secure) except it has to be those OS's being run in a specialized environment where security policies forbid unsigned and un-sandboxed end user applications and all applications have some vetting process. Since that eliminates 99% of all installations of either OS, I'm going to have to disagree with you and say the iPad is more secure than most desktop Linux or OS X installs in use today.
The problem with the PC approach is Microsoft software, not the PC approach.
I don't know what you mean by "the PC approach" but locked down distribution of applications has been used by many organizations worried about security. It can be done in a way that is less restrictive than Apple's approach while still providing the same level of security, but so far no one has stepped up and implemented such a system on a mainstream consumer offering.
While Sweden/Norway and the US might have similar number of guns per person the type of weapons own differ. In Sweden over 80% of all guns are hunting rifles and hunting shotguns.
Do you have a citation?
The most credible numbers I've seen show those numbers in the US are about 60% for the US.
Very few of these weapons make for usable self-defense weapons which means their usability when committing crimes is also low.
What?!? Hunting rifles make for excellent weapons for the commission of a crime. As do shotguns, which are also probably the most common home defense weapon in the US or Sweden. Put some slugs or buckshot in a 12 Gauge and you have an effective tool for home defense, robbery, or murder.
First, I was referring to (and I called this out later) percentage of households that have a firearm, where Norway is within a percent or two of the US. I think that's a more appropriate statistic because it weeds out the statistical outliers who own hundreds of guns in display cases. Second, why do you think there are more restrictions on gun ownership in most european countries than in the US?
Actually, my assertion was that the idea that gun ownership makes you more safe doesn't seem to be true, but unfortunately in your seemingly patriotic rush to the defence of the good name of your nation that flew right over the top of your head.
It's always amusing to see people refer to me as patriotic or unpatriotic, all depending upon what particular topic I mention and their own views, as if you can dismiss any argument as irrational simply by applying whichever term you think applies in a given case. How you can read a post where I enumerate flaws of the US political system and culture, point by point, and then refer to my comments as "patriotic" is beyond me. So what evidence do you have that increased gun ownership rates don't decrease violent crime or increase safety? I think it's pretty well established that the UK's implementation of strict firearm laws coincided with and was perhaps causative of an increase in violent crime. So show me your correlation and support for it being causative.
"Who says we have more freedom?"
Tea party folk, NRA members and the like mostly.
If you're listening to nutjobs like the majority of tea party members who are crazy enough to get quoted in the news, then there is little hope. It's like my asserting that Europeans hate black people, based upon the rantings of several eastern european political candidates of late. As for the NRA, they're yet another lobbying party, about getting quoted in the news and swaying politicians. What the average member thinks is anyones guess because no one polls them.
My fundamental point is that the idea that Europeans are somehow negatively effected by lack of gun ownership freedoms in general (please read the post I originally responded to to understand the context of my post) simply isn't true.
But I think it is true in some parts of Europe, where draconian firearm ownership laws have been implemented. The UK is an excellent example. Truly anyone can argue the numbers back and forth, but violent crime in the UK has been going up, despite trends that would normally expect sociologists to predict a slight decrease. Violent crime committed with firearms is down, but not enough to make up for all the other violent crime including beatings with bare hands, blunt instruments, and bladed weapons and violent crimes associated with home invasions. And so the UK looks to try to restrict ownership of knives and starts doing random searches of people riding the subway. I'd say both of those are negative effects, one the direct result of legislation.
The idea that unless you have the absolute right to bear arms, you are living under a tyrannical government- an idea that all too many Americans seem to try and sell is blatantly false, because European countries are, for the most part, doing better.
While I agree the right to bear arms is not the fundamental test of tyranny, I dispute much of the rest of this. Most european countries do allow firearm ownership, which is orthogonal to quality of life. You seem to be asserting that european countries don't allow gun ownership (false) which you then seem to claim is causative of a better quality of life. Yet some of the european countries with the best quality of life have the most lax gun ownership laws and lowest violent crime, while some (like the UK) are rated much lower in happiness and have very strict gun control laws and a great deal of violent crime. Your assertions simply don't make sense unless you're forming them fr
We both enjoy firing and talking about guns, but gun culture isn't something that interests us...
While a lot of modern "gun culture" in the US is juvenile and mixed in with some of the more idiotic ideas floating around our society, both the olde time hunting culture and the marksmanship cultures share some very valuable cultural traits. Most importantly, a strict, almost ritualistic adherence to firearm safety rules, even when they don't understand the purpose behind them. It's a trait that seems to be slowly going away which is sad. Too often I hear people joke about pointing guns at others and knowing they aren't loaded and such, all of which misses the point. The idea of conditioning yourself with safe behaviors through repetition, so that you behave safely when you don't have time to think clearly is, frankly, beyond a lot of people. It's too bad more people don't have a grouchy grandfather or strict sergeant enforcing said conditioning and making sure they pass it on.
Yeah, a guy I used to work with did a project with solar powered repeater antennas. People would shoot at the shiny solar panels from the next mountain over, causing significant damage on a regular basis.