Month: August 2009

Squashing Shakespeare: silly entertainment permit rules

According to this story in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, a zoning-related entertainment permit rule intended to limit disorderly drunken conduct has had the odd and unintended consequence of squashing a monthly Shakespeare reading that has been going on for years at a bar in the Old Port section of Portland. From the article:

The bar does not have an entertainment license and cannot get one because a bar next door already has one. A city ordinance prohibits any bar from having an entertainment license if another bar within 100 feet has one.

It appears to me that the city has done a rather unfair job enforcing this incredibly quirky zoning ordinance. One of the owners of the bar appears to agree:

“It’s interesting that they grapple with this versus grappling with a
place that wants to have more dancing girls in short-shorts and cowboy boots dancing on the bar,” he said.

Another quote from the story says the odd rule is “working as intended – for the most part.” While that may be true, I think it’s a terribly written and terribly enforced rule which sweeps too broadly. I’m certain Maine has laws regulating alcohol service in bars and the standard criminal mischief and public intoxication laws. I don’t see why those laws can be enforced, and let those who want their Shakespeare have it, even if the venue is next door to, say, a rock/heavy metal bar.

(Story originally found from a Laughing Stalk post.)

A Florida family’s high-rise hell

I’ve let this one age a bit longer than I’d have liked, but better late than never. If it wasn’t actually in the news, I’d swear this was the plot of a horror movie.

CBS News reports on the family of Victor Vangelakos, who moved from New Jersey in the middle of a housing boom in the Fort Myers, Florida, area. Due to a variety of reasons, the Vangelakos family found themselves in a very uncomfortable and eerie situation: they are the sole occupants of Oasis Tower One, a 32-story high-rise condominium tower with over 200 units.

Quoting the article:

On subsequent visits, however, the building grew more deserted.

The lights on the pool and palm trees were off. Their garbage shoot was sealed, a trash bin placed in front of their unit instead.

Despite the empty units, they faithfully parked in their assigned spot on the second story of the parking garage. Then those lights went off, too.

Then there were security concerns. One night, someone pounded on their door at 11 p.m. They called the front desk at the next door building, which contacted police. A search turned up no one, though a pool entrance was open.

This article struck a particular chord with me; my dream home is a high-rise condominium (specifically, I’m leaning towards the Hermann Park area, but keeping others in mind as well). I’m often a bit of a loner by nature. But this situation would probably drive me to insanity, and I can only imagine the kind of mental and emotional strain this family has to endure.

Or maybe not, as it appears from the rest of the story the family has apparently turned down an offer to move into the other tower, because they would still be paying the mortgage and maintenance costs on their purchased unit.

I’d certainly take them up on the offer, figuring a buyout was inevitable. But, this family isn’t me.

The Ninjawords slice-and-dice

Yet another nice little gaffe on the part of Apple.

John Gruber (daringfireball.net) reports on the recent flap regarding an iPhone app called Ninjawords (note: Gruber’s blog entry does contain profanity). Part of this is a case of unfortunate timing on the part of Matchstick (makers of Ninjawords), who wanted to release an app prior to Apple’s rollout of age ratings.

The other part is where Apple drops the ball. Other apps contain the not-so-nice language reviewers objected to in Ninjawords, yet do not have a 17+ rating. In general, I find it silly to rate an entire dictionary “adults only” for its inclusion of profanities. And apparently Phil Crosby of Matchstick agrees. Quoting from Gruber’s article:

Regarding this discrepancy between the ratings for dictionaries, Crosby said to me, “Apple may slap a 17+ rating on our app and wash their hands, saying ‘you’re not required to censor your app’, but at the same time, they’re putting a great deal of pressure on us to do so. Who wants to be the only illicit dictionary on the App Store? That may work for Urban Dictionary, but not us. I think that applying parental ratings inconsistently is tightly related to censorship in our case, and will be true for other apps as well.”

A certain parallel can be drawn here between the MPAA’s NC-17 rating and Apple’s 17+ rating. The MPAA claims their ratings board does not actually censor. While the letter of this is true, the spirit of an NC-17 is that distribution becomes much narrower and most theatres will not show an NC-17 film at all. So it is de facto censorship in that most producers who actually want to turn a profit wind up cutting or editing movies to get an R rating.

I’m not quite as well versed in the iPhone App Store, but from a cursory browse it appears that the 17+ rating definitely changes the way people look at a given app, and it’s entirely possible company-owned iPhone users may be restricted by company policy from using a 17+ rated app. In the past Apple has treated 17+ apps differently (not allowing promo codes for 17+ apps for a short while) and may yet decide to do so again.

I do find it distasteful that Apple may, on one hand, say “you’re not required to censor your app” but engage in de facto censorship of that app after it’s on sale.

Rootkits in a keyboard? Really?

A recent ZDNet blog entry mentions probably the most bizarre type of exploit I have ever run across in about a quarter-century of computer use. Apparently, a firmware update for an Apple keyboard can be infected with such things as keystroke loggers and nearly undetectable rootkits.

From the post:

Chen, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, said malicious code embedded into the firmware would be immune to the typical rootkit detection methods which examine the integrity of the filesystem, check for hooks or direct kernel object manipulation, or detect hardware and/or timing discrepancies due to virtualization in the case of a virtual-machine based rootkit.

Now, this may sound pretty damned scary to those of you who usually glaze over the technology-related articles I write and happened to land on this, and yes, it’s pretty scary stuff. What I really find scary about this whole thing, is the question that goes completely unanswered in this article and the other articles I have read about this.

That question is: Why the hell does a keyboard need to have a software-updatable firmware capability to begin with?

The function of a keyboard is so simple that it barely needs to have a microcontroller. There has traditionally been no way for PC keyboards with PS/2 connectors to have their firmware updated. I don’t get why Apple would open up their customers to such a gaping security hole, either knowingly or recklessly.

This security exploit highlights the very real risk of having updatable firmware where it is not needed. If Apple’s engineers get firmware programming wrong to the point where keyboards have to be software updatable, I think a manager at Apple needs to start firing engineers and replacing them with people more capable of doing their jobs in a competent fashion. Unfortunately, I don’t see any revolving door installations happening in Cupertino any time soon, as badly as they may be needed.

FCC takes aim at Apple and AT&T re: Google Voice app rejection

Fred von Lohmann, writing for the EFF Deeplinks blog, reports on the FCC’s investigation regarding the highly dubious and potentially anti-competitive rejection of a Google Voice app for the iPhone.

And my not-so-humble opinion, of course, can be summed up thusly: About damn time. Hopefully, a decision on this will be at least useful as some kind of precedent so that Apple’s out-of-control rejections of iPhone apps are at least reined in a bit.

One of the more interesting quotes from the blog entry:

When a dominant hardware platform vendor teams up with a dominant network services provider, and then selectively blocks or hobbles software applications on the platform, consumers should smell an anticompetitive rat. After all, if Microsoft had a veto right over every app that ran under Windows, and used that power to selectively ban competitors who “duplicate” functionality offered by Microsoft’s own apps, we’d expect competition regulators to be up in arms.

Indeed, even Microsoft knows they would never be able to get away with locking down Windows to the extent Apple has locked down the iPhone platform. Of course, it’s much easier and nowhere near as risky (legally and otherwise) to install an alternative operating system on a PC compared to jailbreaking an iPhone.

Hopefully, the FCC will see Apple’s shenanigans for what they are: anticompetitive, unfair, and unacceptable.