Return of the Mac

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Paul Graham is one of the best essayists about technology writing today. He’s just published an interesting essay on a phenomenon I’ve also noticed.

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I’ve noticed this too. At the FOO camp in Holland last year, for example, the only laptops that weren’t PowerBooks were Sony Vaio machines running Linux. Paul Graham argues that this migration to the PowerBook and OS X is significant because geeks tend to have an influence on the evolution of computing out of all proportion to their numbers. What they run today, the business community may find itself running ten years on.

Adobe Acrobat now enables spying on readers

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Like many non-Microsoft users, I rely on Adobe pdf as a way of circulating and publishing documents. But now it transpires that

The well known PDF reader Adobe Reader reports back to a central server whenever you open specially marked PDF documents.

The newly released Adobe Reader 7 again allows authors of PDF documents to embed an arbitrary web address which is then informed whenever you open the document.

According to one of the Slashdot postings, the current Remote Approach tracking code already sends off the full file path to the PDF on your computer, which could in itself include confidential information. This use of “web-bugs” is the same functionality used by spammers to track and verify use of your email address and is done without informing the user and without his or her consent.

It’s all done with Javascript. According to the link, you can disable the spying ‘feature’ either by deleting all plugins or by renaming the plugin directory acroread7/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins. (But you have to remember to repeat this every time there is an update.)

Alternatively you can use one of the free PDF viewers (xpdf, kpdf, evince etc.), none of which allows this surreptitious functionality of reporting back.

[Thanks for Seb for the link.]

The Grokster case

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My Observer column on the case now before the US Supreme Court is out.

In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.

Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.

This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me…

Read on.

The truth about Gerry Adams & Co

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Terrific piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Financial Times pointing out that the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ was based on suspension of disbelief by the British, Irish and US administrations. They chose to believe that there was a Chinese wall between the terrorists of the IRA and the leaders of Sinn Fein, whereas in fact no such division ever existed. (‘Naive Idiot’ was the code phrase for Blair found in secret Sinn Fein documents during a security raid in 2002.)

The simple truth that is emerging, even in the US, is that the IRA, which is inextricably linked with Sinn Fein, has grown into one of the richest and most sophisticated criminal organisations in Europe, with tentacles extending to the US and Colombia. Its ultimate ambition is to take power in the Republic, and to this end it funds a huge army of Sinn Fein activists. It has planted sleepers in politics, the media, the law and business. It is using money obtained by criminal means to buy up legitimate businesses (it is now the biggest pub owner in Ireland) and it is replicating northern ghettoes in some southern inner cities.

Yet Blair, who is terrified of a bomb during his election campaign, and Ahern, who follows his lead, continue to talk to Adams and to bleat about inclusivity and the need to revitalise the peace process. If they refuse to face reality, there is a real danger that should Sinn Fein pretend to split from the IRA, they will go along with another disastrous fiction.

One of the few good things about the Bush regime is that it never fell for the proposition that Gerry Adams was a light-skinned Mandela.

Today…

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… is the bicentenary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen.

How I wish my friend Elias, who wrote the definitive biography, had lived to see the day. He died in August 2002, a few days before my Sue, who was mad about him, as were my kids. Elias had been in the Danish Resistance during the war and had known both Leon Trotsky and Bertrand Russell. My children loved him because he was tall and elegant and courteous in an old-world way, and they recognised immediately that he was, in some way, genuinely distinguished. To this day, every time we pass his Cambridge College — Peterhouse — they sing out “Elias’s college!”