Genius? What genius?

This morning’s Observer column

In triumph of the Nerds, Robert Cringely’s 1996 TV documentary series about the rise of the personal computer industry, Steve Jobs was asked what made Apple such an unusual company. ‘It comes down,’ he said, ‘to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.’

Before we get too sanctimonious about this, it’s worth remembering that Jobs’s adoption of Picasso’s mantra is what has made Apple such an innovative force in the computer business. Its unique selling proposition is that it takes good ideas and turns them into products that ordinary human beings can use…

PA sacked by Ministry of the Interior

From The Register

The Home Office has today terminated a £1.5m contract with PA Consulting after it lost the personal details of the entire UK prison population.

In August the firm admitted to officials that it had downloaded the prisons database to an unencrypted memory stick, against the security terms of its contract to manage the JTrack prolific offender tracking system. The data included names, addresses and dates of birth, and was broken down by how frequently individuals had offended.

Following an inquiry into the gaffe, Jacqui Smith told the House of Commons today that PA Consulting’s £8m of other Home Office contracts are now also under review. She said: “The Home Office have decided to terminate this contract. My officials are currently working with PA to take this work back in-house without affecting the operation of JTrack.”

Data handling for JTrack has been taken on by the Home Office, and maintenance and training are due in-house by December.

The inquiry found the Home Office had transferred the data to PA Consulting securely, but that the firm then dumped it to unlabelled USB memory to transfer it between computers at its premises. The stick hasn’t been found. Smith said: “This was a clear breach of the robust terms of the contract covering security and data handling.”

What took them so long?

Back from the dead

This morning’s Observer column

Premature obituaries have their uses. It is said that when Alfred Nobel, the Swedish arms dealer, read an obituary which described him as a ‘merchant of death’ he was moved to endow the Nobel Prizes as a way of laundering his image. They also provide opportunities for setting up jokes, as when Mark Twain observed that ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration’, or when the Daily Telegraph published an obit of folk singer Dave Swarbrick after he’d been admitted to a Midlands hospital with a chest infection. ‘It’s not the first time,’ Swarbrick observed, ‘that I’ve died in Coventry.’

What are we to make, then, of the obituary of Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial CEO, which was inadvertently released by Bloomberg News last week?

Apple’s control freakery

Nice rant by Charles Arthur.

Apple’s top-down approach to design is a bust when it comes to its approach to the software for the iPhone. Developers for that are up in arms.

People are astonishingly angry at the fact that Apple first won’t let them talk about how to develop for the iPhone – because everything about programming for it remains under a non-disclosure agreement – and second, hasn’t let them get at its most useful application programming interfaces (APIs). Mike Ash, a programmer at the independent Mac developer Rogue Amoeba, has posted a long and annoyed rant about this in which he says that after a month using the new iPhone, with its new software: “I feel like I’ve gone back to the dark ages.” Multitasking is a thing of the past, and it’s impossible for third-party developers to design well, because Apple’s keeping the best parts of the API hidden. Apple can design something that will multitask but others can’t. The developers want in too.

Apple’s constant refrain is that it’s all about making sure the phone isn’t going to be destroyed by applications doing what they shouldn’t. It’s starting to wear thin, though. Palm opened its platform to outside developers, which helped it kill Psion. Apple’s disdain for badly designed outside software is hurting it more than it knows. The developers who were ready to be its friends are turning into its enemies.

Apple’s ImmobileMe fiasco

So… at last we know

In an internal e-mail sent to Apple employees this evening, Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe was launched too early and “not up to Apple’s standards.” The e-mail, seen by Ars Technica, acknowledges MobileMe’s flaws and what could have been done to better handle the launch. In addition to needing more time and testing, Jobs believes that Apple should have rolled MobileMe’s services out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service.” For example, over-the-air iPhone syncing could have gone up initially, then web apps one by one (Mail, Calendar, etc.).

IMHO, the service is still a turkey. (I write as an ‘upgraded’ dot-Mac subscriber.)

Jobs goes on. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

Apple’s paranoia: the downside

Good column by Bill Thompson…

Different calculations apply when it comes to dealing with people who already use its products, where Apple’s unwillingness to divulge details of security flaws or even the specifics of how flaws are fixed leaves customers confused, ignorant and possibly exposed to attacks that could be avoided.

Patches are simply distributed through Software Update, with little detail about the problems they address or the changes they make, and discussion of security is severely restricted.

We have seen this recently, as two Apple-related talks at the 2008 Black Hat hacker convention were pulled at short notice. A discussion of flaws in the Mac OS disk encryption system FileVault by Charles Edge was withdrawn because he has signed confidentiality agreements with Apple…

Apple’s Culture of Secrecy

There’s a very good article by Joe Nocera in the New York Times about the recurring rumours about Steve Jobs’s health. This is a tricky subject because of the need to balance a CEO’s right to privacy with his duty to shareholders — and to a stock market which is increasingly intrusive. Mr Nocera treads the line adroitly. But his concluding passage is interesting.

It would be horrible if Mr. Jobs had a recurrence of cancer. I hope it never happens. At 53, he is in the prime of his life, the father of a young family. And for the rest of us, it’s exhilarating watching him work his magic in the marketplace. Steve Jobs has created more value and driven more innovation than just about anybody in business. Who doesn’t want to see what he’ll come up with next?

He also, though, needs to treat his shareholders with at least a modicum of respect. And telling them whether or not he is sick would be a good place to start.

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

Apps

I’m not overly impressed by most of the Apps currently on offer in the iTunes store, but FileMagnet is an exception. It makes it easy to transfer files from Mac to iTouch using WiFi. Works only for Macs running Leopard. Really neat; and useful already.

(Thanks to Kevin Cryan for spotting that the link as originally provided was duff.)

Vista woes fuel Mac sales surge?

Interesting Register Hardware report.

According to US investment house BMO Capital Markets, cited by AppleInsider, Apple will have shipped up to 2.5m Macs between April and June inclusive – enough for a 39 per cent year-on-year growth rate.

More to the point, that rate of increase is more than three times the industry average of 12.2 per cent.

BMO analyst Keith Bachman told investors that it’s largely the result of Windows Vista: “Thus far, user satisfaction ratings for Vista have been weak, and start-up times for Vista have been known to be much slower than the Mac OS X. Thus, more than 50 per cent of recent customers buying Macs in Apple retail stores are first-time buyers.”

Daily Mail loses personal data on employees

Well, well. According to this report, the Voice of Middle England isn’t too careful about keeping sensitive data secure.

Northcliffe Media, owner of the Daily Mail, is the latest company to lose a laptop load of sensitive staff information.

A laptop containing names, addresses, bank accounts and sort codes of Mail and General Trust staff has been stolen, it emerged last week. The company told staff that the laptop was password protected – and so, presumably, not encrypted.

The company confirmed to The Register that the theft had occurred and that staff had been informed. Police and the Information Commissioner were also informed.

According to the letter from Northcliffe Media sent to staff, and seen by the Reg, staff were advised to contact their bank to warn them of potential problems.

The letter, signed by group finance director M J Hindley, said:

The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen.

I can assure you that we take security of personal data very seriously and have, since this incident, which was inadvertently caused by a technical issue, already further strengthened procedures.

The company apologised for any inconvenience or annoyance caused by the theft.

I bet this won’t stop the Mail castigating the government for its casual attitude towards data security.