Month: June 2009

Yet another Kindle DRM oddity

A recent Gizmodo article reports on Kindle users being left in the dark with regard to knowing how many times they can download a purchased book, and on how many different devices they can read said book.

The limits vary by publisher, but obviously Amazon has to maintain them on the servers responsible for the digital restrictions management (DRM). Yet, somehow, it’s beneath Amazon to actually tell the users. This excerpt detailing a tech support call to Amazon says it all:

“How I find out (sic) how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed – “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say `this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

Jack Loftus, who wrote the article for Gizmodo, opines:

With certain books, you could be limited in such a way that your reading material does not follow your gadget’s natural upgrade cycle.

Such is the pitfall of DRM. My take? It’s time to give DRM the burial it deserves. Everywhere.

Bozeman backs off of the snooping (followup)

Following up on a previous story:

Not surprisingly, the city of Bozeman, Montana, decided to back off on requiring social networking site passwords for hiring.

CNet reports that the city sent out a press release on Friday with an update to the policy, where they also mention EFF attorney Kevin Bankston had some choice words for the city government:

I think it’s indefensibly invasive and likely illegal as a violation of the First Amendment rights of job applicants… Essentially, they’re conditioning your application for employment on your waiving your First Amendment rights… and risking the security of your information by requiring you to share your password with them… Where does it stop? How about a photocopy of your diary?

The Register updated their original story with information that Facebook itself has taken issue with its users passwords being collected. As well they should. I’m surprised more sites have not followed.

I personally believe even a requirement to add an official account as a friend on Facebook or similar sites goes over the line. (I saw this mentioned somewhere when reading up on the news today but can’t find it now.) Any background check on someone should only be based on public information tied to that person under an identity that can be confirmed as theirs. Even some blogs should be off-limits if they are written under pseudonyms.

Michael Jordan vs. Bill Gates: a second look

First, before I get to the main topic of this post, I think I need to say a little piece here. As many times as I have condemned the actions of corporations such as Microsoft, I have as of yet seen no reason to extend condemnation down to individuals working for the company. In fact, as a general rule I have not condemned the actions of individuals at all in my blog posts.

This, unfortunately, is unsustainable. Corporations are a function of the people that work for them, particularly their leadership. This is true of behemoths such as Microsoft all the way down to small garage/basement operations where the corporate filing fee is a relatively large expense.

I have not finished writing it, but I am drafting a post expressing my strong criticism of and contempt for something else Bill Gates has been doing, which is entirely disconnected from his involvement from Microsoft. There’s no sense leaving the gloves on now if I know I’m going to be taking them off later. With that said, on with the rest of the post…

I recently ran across this gem during a particularly lazy StumbleUpon session. I’ll cut out all the fat and leave the meat:

Is It Better To Be a Jock Or A Nerd…?
Michael Jordan having “retired,” with $40 million in endorsements, makes $178,100 a day, working or not.

(skip a whole bunch of silly things that put $40 million per year in some kind of perspective)

Amazing isn’t it? However…

If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 450 years, he’ll still have less than Bill Gates has today.

Game over. Nerd wins.

The premise is that one’s life is a success solely based on money. This is not always the case.

I never was Michael Jordan’s biggest fan, though mainly that was due to my rather strong team loyalty at the time; during the height of Jordan’s spectacular career, I was strictly a Houston Rockets fan, and even today I will quit following a sport’s post-season once my team has been eliminated. (Quick trivia note: the Houston Rockets never faced Michael Jordan as a player even once in the post-season.) These days, I can take a further step back and admire most great athletes strictly for their talent, regardless of which teams they play for.

I would much rather be Michael Jordan than Bill Gates today. I could not live with myself doing what Bill Gates has done. It is not the amount of money as much as the journey of getting it, looking back later, and being able to look myself in the mirror and being able to say (or not) that I am proud of what I have done.

I would never be proud of building walls between people, and forbidding them from helping their neighbors. This is exactly what Bill Gates has done, as the leader of Microsoft.

I just happen to have open an FSF Europe page entitled “Six questions to national standardisation bodies about MS-OOXML (Office Open XML). [edit: see note below] As a key shaper of the corporate culture at Microsoft, Gates played a strong role in making this kind of thing happen. Though his two decades plus of day-to-day involvement with the company ended recently, the corporate culture will take much longer to change. The questions FSF Europe raises here with regard to OOXML highlight just one example of Microsoft’s “holier than thou” mentality.

(I misread the Wikipedia article when I first wrote this; Gates was around day-to-day at Microsoft well into 2008, not 2006.)

Microsoft has changed in how it has countered the human tendency to help one’s neighbors. In 1976, Bill Gates himself wrote the well-known Open Letter to Hobbyists. Through the 1990s Microsoft ran an “Install One, Copy None” campaign, and by the turn of the century when CDs were the major form of physical media for software, most of Microsoft’s were imprinted with “Do Not Make Illegal Copies Of This Disc.”

And finally we have the obnoxious and draconian “product activation” that came into play with Windows XP. This is part of what fueled my desire to cut ties with Microsoft once and for all, and never give them another penny of my money. I had tolerated keeping Windows on one of my PCs, used primarily for running games not available for GNU/Linux. Today, I’m simply less picky about the games I play; today, the only time I use Windows–or any other proprietary OS such as MacOS X–today is on computers that do not actually belong to me.

Put Michael Jordan up against Richard Stallman, and I will agree the nerd wins. But if the choice is Michael Jordan or Bill Gates, sorry, the jock wins this one hands down.

The WNBA’s Twitter gaffe

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” — unknown (“probable misattribution” to Edmund Burke according to Wikiquote)

I’d like to know what the person in charge of the WNBA’s Twitter account was thinking when he or she blocked a well-known fan account associated with a blog called, oddly enough, WNBA Outsiders. The latter’s words on the matter include the following:

Let me explain to you a lesson that my mother taught me when I was just ten years old. When someone is bothering you and trying to get under your skin, the best thing that you can do to minimize that voice is to ignore it. But, @WNBA (whoever you really are), you have failed to practice this wisdom. Instead of pretending that the authors of this website do not have a voice or an audience, you have chosen to actively work against us. By blocking us, you have recognized our influence on the coverage of the league. We deem it a foolish action by a league that seems to specialize in such ill-advised decisions.

And further down:

The aggressive action against the Outsiders has been noted, but it will not be tolerated. Let it be known that a failure to accept the olive branch of peace we have graciously extended will be interpreted as nothing less than a declaration of war.

“Foolish” is a bit too mild for me; I have tagged this with “galactically-stupid” which is a tag I reserve for the most decisive lapses in intelligence. I don’t know how anyone at the WNBA could possibly see this as a wise move.

If it’s a trademark or trade dress issue, that’s a complete non-starter. For one, it is impossible to get the WNBA Outsiders blog mixed up with any real, genuine WNBA publication. The site design is completely different. The WNBA would never use a minimalist design with only a 770×150 pixel or so tight crop of a generic basketball.

I have remained a WNBA fan despite the folding of the Houston Comets (which I think may well be one of those “ill-advised decisions” that WNBA Outsiders makes reference to). I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not a mistake now.

Apple rejects C64 emulator on iPhone

Few computer users from the 1980s will soon forget the rivalry between the myriad computer companies in business at the time. Apple and Commodore were at the forefront of that rivalry, as IBM’s PC didn’t really take off until later in the decade.

In fact, my earliest BBS experience from 1991 involved a fellow user–at the time he was actually a sysop–making a “Commode Commodore” joke to a friend (or maybe rival) of his who insisted upon using one of the things well past its prime. (Commodore was still in business making the Amiga line until their bankruptcy in 1994.)

So maybe it is only fitting, in a bizarre way, that Apple rejects a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone, as reported by Touch Arcade. It would almost be humorous except for the fact that the programmer spent several months on his project only to be censored by Apple. And I do use the term censored for a reason: this is censorship, and I fail to see a good reason for it. Several other emulator applications exist for the iPhone, and Apple still continues to leave them be.

Yet more evidence that Apple requiring the “seal of approval” on every iPhone application is unsustainable.