Monthly Archives: April 2006

Apple v. Apple

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From The Register…

The Beatles’ recording company, Apple Corp., was given an opportunity to object to Apple Comp.’s use of the apple logo in association with the iTunes Music Store. But it chose not to, the iPod maker’s advocate claimed yesterday. Apple Corp. received an ITMS [iTunes Music Store] demo in January 2003 – four months before the service went live, Anthony Grabiner QC told the English High Court.

Grabiner and Apple Corp. lawyer Geoffrey Vos QC made their concluding remarks this week following written and presented testimony from the likes of Apple Corp. chief Neill Aspinall and from Eddie Cue, head of Apple’s iTunes and iPod division.

The judge indicated that he would give a ruling within a month.

Internet use and access in the EU

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AP reports that a European Union report released yesterday shows wide differences in the level of Internet use among EU nations, with Benelux and Nordic countries leading the way and eastern and southeastern Europe generally lagging behind.

In the Netherlands, 78 percent of households are connected to the Net, compared to just 16 percent in Lithuania, according to the report from the Eurostat statistics agency, based on data gathered in early 2005.

The Dutch also lead the way in domestic broadband access, with 54 percent of homes linked up compared to 1 percent in Greece, 4 percent in Cyprus and 5 percent in the Czech Republic.

In Greece, 73 percent of the population say they have never used the Internet, the survey said, well above the EU average of 43 percent. More than half the citizens of the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Portugal have never logged on to the Net.

Among students, only 7 percent across the EU have never used the Internet.

Overall, the survey showed a rise in Internet connections since 2004. Domestic connections in the EU rose from 43 percent to 48 percent. The number of homes connected to broadband rose from 15 percent to 23 percent.

For EU businesses, Internet access rose from 89 percent to 91 percent, while broadband connections increased from 53 percent to 63 percent.

At least 90 percent of businesses are linked to the Internet in all nations included in the survey, except Latvia, Hungary, Cyprus, Lithuania and Poland. In Sweden, Denmark and Finland over 80 percent of firms have broadband access, compared with less than 45 percent in Cyprus, Poland and Greece.

The survey did not include France, which declined to take part.

The price of insecurity

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Er, I know I can now run Windows XP on my Mac. Or at least I could if I had a fancy new one like Quentin has. But answer me this: why would I pay £195 + VAT to make my machine vulnerable to the plagues of viruses, worms and trojans to which Windows is vulnerable?

Podcasts are huge; it’s just the audience that’s tiny

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Who’s listening to podcasts? Apparently no one. According to a new report from Forrester,  only 1 percent of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts.  “Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use,” Forrester analyst Charlene Li explains. “One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.”

So podcasting, for the moment at least, is not only a bare trickle in the media stream, but one whose appeal is limited to those who use it to time-shift broadcast radio.  Now to be fair, we’re only 18 months or so into the podcasting phenom, and Li predicts that  it will grow to reach 12.3 million households in the U.S. by 2010.  So there’s a chance yet that it will someday become a mainstream medium. But right now it seems there’s little evidence to merit all the bloviating we’ve been hearing from podcast evangelists.

How I Work: by Bill Gates

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Interesting interview in Fortune…

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.

We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs…

Hmmm… I get more emails than Bill Gates. What am I doing wrong?

The Donaldson murder

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Many things puzzle me about Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Feiner who spied for the Brits in Northern Ireland, not least the question of why the Director of Public Prosecutions decided some time ago that it was “not in the public interest” to proceed with the prosecution of Donaldson and others for their alleged espionage in Stormont.

His murder took place in one of my favourite parts of Ireland — the hinterland of Glenties, a lovely country town where we always stop at Highlands Hotel on our way through. So there was a creepy edge to the story for us. It’s a reminder that Ireland is sometimes like Sicily — all that warmth and family values and hospitality, while below the surface is a dark underbelly of savagery.

Robin Wilson has a thoughtful piece about the murder in OpenDemocracy.net. Excerpt:

My guess (and that is all it is at this stage) is that the deed was done by IRA members embittered by Donaldson’s treachery, and meanwhile keen to taunt the Sinn Féin leadership of Adams and McGuinness for their endless preening in front of the TV cameras in pursuance of a “peace process” that is doing nothing to deliver the objectives for which the ordinary IRA volunteers sacrificed so much of their adult lives.

An additional political aim would be to signal to the governments of Bertie Ahern in Dublin and Tony Blair in London that some Republicans remain defiantly outside any tent of “inclusion” and “reconciliation” they can construct.

If dissident IRA members are indeed responsible, this might signal the beginning of the collapse of the organisation’s own edifice, which could take place quite quickly and engulf a Sinn Féin leadership that is already finding the reception has got much colder in Dublin, Washington, and even London.

It seems highly improbable that the attack could have been authorised by the IRA leadership. Adams and McGuinness “condemned” the killing, a toxic word they have not used since the Real IRA splinter-group committed the Omagh atrocity in August 1998; this suggests they are serious about their denials of any responsibility (when the Provisional IRA commits a murder but won’t admit it, the organisation just says it’s “wrong”). And while I think the Real IRA or Continuity IRA would have claimed Donaldson’s murder if they had authored it, internal Republican dissidents who had decided it was time to give up on loyalty to the leadership and “whack” the informer would have no reason to identify themselves.

Aside: I launched Google Earth to have a look at the location of the cottage — only to find that it had been obscured by cloud on the day the satellite pictures were taken.

Going phishing still works

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From a BBC report…

Sophisticated phishing scams could be catching out 90% of those that see them, research suggests.

The academic study looked at whether web users could tell legitimate online bank websites from the fakes produced by phishers.

Though many phishing sites were easy to spot, the best were judged real by almost all participants.

It found that users ignored most of the visual cues on browsers that warn people that they are being scammed.

Sigh. I wish more people would take our online course.

Iran’s nuclear aspirations

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Wanting to have nuclear weapons is a perfectly rational aspiration for the leaders of the Iranian regime — for two reasons. The first is that they saw what happened to Iraq (which didn’t have nukes) — and what hasn’t happened to North Korea (which does). The second is that they have a hostile country in the region which surreptitiously obtained nuclear weapons many years ago — Israel.

I’ve always been baffled by the way Israel’s nukes are NEVER talked about in polite conversation. The Israelis always refuse to discuss them in public, and there the matter ends. Imagine the hoo-hah if the Iranians took that approach. It’s as if the Israeli nuclear capability isn’t an issue. But it clearly is for the Arab world, and for Iran (which, remember, was bombed by Israel some decades ago, with the aim of disabling Iranian nuclear capability). So it was refreshing to see this article by David Hirst which doesn’t just mention the unmentionable, but actually ponders it at some length.

For all I know, there may be good reasons for Israel to have nuclear weapons. (There are some countries in the region which deny the right of Israel to exist.) There may be rational reasons for the West to be less worried about Israeli nukes than they would be about Iranian ones. (Israel is a democracy, for example, whereas Iran is not.) But these are all reasons to talk about the Israeli weapons, not to pretend that they don’t exist.