Why Apple is evil: They’re less secure than Microsoft products

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There’s not much to report here, other than security expert Marc Maiffret claiming that Apple appears to have a lax attitude towards security, and sticking with security through obscurity to avoid malware.

Sure, there’s not much malware for OS X now, but Apple’s lax attitude towards security (including leaving major Java vulnerabilities unpatched for six months) means that there’s not much security there if anyone does ever target OS X.

Like at Pwn2Own, where every year of the contest, Apple products got pwned – and from 2008 on, they were the first to fall.

Source: LA Times Blogs

Why Apple is evil: Political cartoons aren’t allowed, they might offend someone

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Never mind that you can get to this sort of thing on Safari… apparently political cartoons aren’t allowed on the iPhone.

Ridiculing public figures being defamatory? What ever happened to parody? Also, being public figures, IIRC, the level for whether the speech is defamatory is higher.

Now, one thing I’ll say… this would be a non-issue, of Apple deciding they don’t want to distribute it, if Apple allowed external software. But, Apple has control over what runs on the iPhone completely.

Yes, they are reversing their decision on this app, but only because of the public backlash. This is actually a good sign – public backlash against their actions, such as this series of blog entries, makes them respond. But, they’re obviously willing to do something if they think they can get away with it.

Source: Slashdot

Why Apple is evil: Requiring specific programming languages to develop for iPhone

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Today’s “Why Apple is evil” entry deals with something that’s not quite news, but I wanted to cover it.

Apple is requiring that applications originally be developed in Objective-C, C++, C, or JavaScript (executed by Safari’s JS engine.)

This is intentionally used as a way to prevent certain companies from making tools for the iPhone platform.

Despite what you might think about Adobe (honestly, my opinion is that they’re the vile scum of the Internet, and Flash is worse than IE6, because at least there’s alternatives to IE6,) this is still rather troubling – the market should push Adobe out with superior solutions, not anticompetitive actions, especially when those anti-competitive actions have collateral damage, and severely negatively affect developers. Apple is now mandating the development process, not just what the program does.

Of course, in classic Apple fashion, they’re doing things horribly inconsistently – other development frameworks that clearly violate the agreement are being explicitly allowed, showing just how anticompetitive this is.

Waging a personal war is one thing. Waging a personal war using your developers and users as pawns is another.

Source: many, but I decided to post about this today because of The Register

Why Apple is evil: Banning apps for being potentially able to display objectionable content

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I’m going to start a regular series, hopefully daily, inspired by this article on OSnews.

My goal is to, every day, post a piece of bad PR, ideally sourced externally, about Apple. I intend to post other things on this blog as well – this will be in addition to my normal infrequent posting.

Let’s start this out with an app rejection. (A lot of these will be app rejections.)

Apple has rejected an app, “You Are Hot,” for containing objectionable content. Problem is, at the time of review, it didn’t contain any content. It allowed users to submit content, and that content was moderated to make sure it WASN’T objectionable.

So, by that logic, Apple should ban Safari from the iPhone. After all, it might potentially show a breast. And, by their logic, you wouldn’t even be able to slap WebSense in front of the internet connection to prevent that breast from showing – if it can show user-generated content, it’s objectionable, apparently.

Isn’t this what parental controls are for, if you’re using the walled garden app model?

Source: App Rejections

My ideas for open source licensing

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There’s been plenty of debate over open source licenses. The GPL forces freedom (and therefore isn’t freedom at all,) the BSD license arguably doesn’t provide “enough” freedom… so how about a compromise?

Start with a GPL-like license. Specifically make it GPL compatible, so that forks of the code can be made under the GPL, if the fork’s author so desires. However, only the fork’s author’s modifications will be GPLed, the rest of the code will be under this original license.

With this idea, the GPL-like license would have a “timebomb” in it. The length of the timebomb isn’t important, but IMO, it should be 5 years at the very maximum. (Then again, I think copyright should be at 5 years at the very maximum, as well as patents.)

Upon the timebomb triggering, code released 5 years (or whatever the length was) before the timebomb was set reverts to a BSD-like license. If someone is distributing code that they began using under the terms of the GPL-like license, they still need to abide by the GPL-like license (as that’s what they agreed to when they began distributing it,) but any derivative works originally released after the code they used expired could be completely under the BSD-like license, and anyone using the code from them would be under the BSD-like license.

That way, the GPL types get to force “freedom” for a limited time, before a certain piece of code reverts to actually being free. On the flip side, the BSD types get to allow true freedom (which includes allowing non-freedom) afterwards.

Thoughts? Questions?

Random rambling on user interfaces – part 1

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In my last entry, I linked to a music video of Every OS Sucks by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.

It’s really true, every OS does suck – both under the hood and at the user interface level.

I don’t feel qualified enough to comment extensively on the internals of various OSes, as I’m no programmer, but as a user, I (and any other computer user) work with UIs every single day, and I feel qualified to comment on that. I’ve used various graphical UIs in day-to-day use, primarily Windows (almost every version from 3.1 to 7, and I even used 1.01 daily for fun at one time,) but also Mac OS System 7.1 and X 10.5, IIGS System 6.0.1, KDE 3, GNOME 2, RISC OS 4 and 6, and CDE 1.5. I’ve also supported users of varying skill levels on Windows XP. I, however, am not a UI researcher.

This will likely be a multi-part series, hence “part 1.” I’ll be commenting on my opinions of what’s bad and good in a wide range of UIs. I might be able to tie this all together in something resembling a description of a good UI, I might not. If none of this makes sense, or if I’m flat-out wrong about something, please let me know in the comments.

So, let’s get the first thing out of the way: what is a good UI? A good UI is one that makes it as easy as possible to complete your computing tasks. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why is it so hard to make a good UI, then? Several reasons. Continue reading “Random rambling on user interfaces – part 1”

Green software?

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So, lately, people have been making a big deal about green hardware – hardware that’s produced using environmentally friendly methods and uses as little power as possible.

But what about green software? You don’t really hear all that much about that. And, all this green movement right now is, make slower hardware, and expect users to put up with it. It works because hardware arguably passed the “fast enough” point in the past few years.

However, for a lot of tasks, we arguably should’ve passed the fast enough point 10 or 15 years ago. Word processing and web browsing are not rocket science, for two examples. Operating systems (all of them, yes, I’m even looking at you, modern Linux distributions) are bloated. Let’s not even talk about Adobe’s stuff.

Why isn’t there an equivalent green software movement? Improve compilers, strip out bloat, don’t pull the “you’ve got the CPU power, don’t worry about optimization” card. That way, we can either use slower CPUs and have quite good performance, or our current CPUs and run them at partial load (resulting in less power consumption) or have mindblowing performance.

I know, I know, that’d require actual work.

But, just a thought.