Born Digital

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Lovely story by Kevin Kelly.

Another friend had a barely-speaking toddler take over his iPad. She could paint and handle complicated tasks on apps with ease and grace almost before she could walk. It is now sort of her iPad. One day he printed out a high resolution image on photo paper and left it on the coffee table. He noticed his toddler come up to up and try to unpinch the photo to make it larger, like you do on an iPad. She tried it a few times, without success, and looked over to him and said “broken.”

Thanks to Quentin for the link.

Quote of the week

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“Donald Trump often talks about running as a Republican, which is surprising. I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Comedian Seth Meyers, at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.

[Source]

Lies, damn lies and corporate ‘explanations’

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When Apple eventually deigned to respond to the furore about iPhones logging location data, it issued a PR-mediated statement so slippery that it practically slid off the monitor. But it did contain one apparently unequivocal statement:

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

Oh, yeah? Consider Exhibit A:

It comes from a patent application entitled “Location Histories for Location Aware Devices” which Apple filed in September 2009.

(Thanks to Leander Kahney for the patent link.)

A location aware mobile device can … collect network information (e.g., transmitter IDs) over time. Upon request by a user or application, the network information can be translated to estimated position coordinates … of the location aware device for display on a map view or for other purposes. A user or application can query the location history database with a timestamp or other query to retrieve all or part of the location history for display in a map view.

Here’s how TechDirt tells it:

Apple’s key points are:

Apple (not researchers, or tons of other people who have noted this “bug” for a year or so) “discovered” a bug with location data on the phone:

The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly

There’s no tracking going on. There’s nothing to see here.

Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

Even though there’s no tracking and nothing to see here, it’s still a bug which will be fixed.
The reason people are concerned about this is because people are confused.

Got that? People are confused and there’s nothing to see here, but Apple has discovered a minor bug which will be fixed.

There’s a staggering level of hypocrisy here which is par for the course for Apple. It’s a bit like the old newspaper mantra in the glory days of print: “Never apologise, and never explain.”

Except that it won’t wash any more. And the strange thing is that we get this crap all the time from companies that are supposed to be, well, 20th-century organisations. Matthew Ingram had a good post about this on GigaOM in which he looked at the way Sony and Amazon as well as Apple have displayed a steam-age sense of responsibility in an online age:

Given its past behavior, it’s possible that Apple is beyond help in this area. The company’s approach seems to be that people will unfailingly line up to buy its products regardless of how it handles such PR gaffes, so it may be a lost cause. But Amazon and Sony arguably have a lot more to lose.

Sony in particular — a former technology leader — has not been doing well on a number of fronts for years now, as Apple has taken over virtually every market segment that the technology company used to own. Not only that, but the company is already infamous in computer security circles for its last major fiasco in 2005, the “Sony rootkit” affair, in which users had a virus-like software program installed on their computers without their knowledge if they played a CD. So you might think that the company would try hard to get out in front of the most recent issue — which venture investor and technology analyst Paul Kedrosky described as “among the worst such debacles in modern financial/technical history” — as quickly as possible. Oh, but it’s really complicated too.

Amazon is not nearly as desperate as Sony, but the company has still pinned a lot of its hopes for the future on the success of its cloud-hosting and cloud-based services business, and seeing hundreds of major companies and websites fail — and lose critical data — is a huge issue. And yet, while Amazon eventually did release something that was much closer to an actual apology than anything Sony or Apple came out with, the company still avoided discussing the issue for what seemed like an eternity in Internet time. One Internet analyst said that Amazon’s “anemic public response” was a major flaw, and that arguably wasn’t the only one.

This isn’t an issue just for Apple, Sony and Amazon — it’s something that companies of all kinds are still struggling to deal with. The reality is that social media such as Twitter and Facebook have increased the ability of customers and users to speak out about such issues, and decreased the amount of time that companies have to deal with them. And that means the old approach of taking days to hold “war room” meetings and come up with elaborate PR plans just doesn’t work any more.

Those things still have to be done, but they have to be done a lot faster.

Yep. Matthew also provides a link to a fascinating diagram summarising the USAF’s “Rules of Engagement for Blogging” from which companies could learn a thing or two.

Quote of the day

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“What I think Krugman got intuitively is that liberals understand politics as a policy argument,” says Ezra Klein, now a Washington Post columnist and then an influential political blogger. “On the right, there’s something of a cultural underlay to the worldview: We are the real Americans, and they are not. Liberals want to say, We are correct on the evidence, and they are not.”

From an insightful profile of Paul Krugman in New York magazine.

The politics of the Windsor-Middleton Merger

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Terrific column by Nick Cohen.

As if to distract us from the thought that Kate Middleton will discover that love is a thing that can always go wrong in the House of Windsor, Buckingham Palace added a Balkan touch to its “fairy-tale wedding”. A man it called “King Constantine of the Hellenes” was in Westminster Abbey. “Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia” and one “King Simeon II of Bulgaria” were included on the guest list, too. And, as if to make Dorothy Parker’s point for her, they were joined by “King Michael I of Romania”.

But while there was a Marie of Romania – queen from 1914 to 1927 – there is no King Michael I. Greece, Bulgaria and Romania all deposed their monarchies, and even after the brutal experience of fascism and communism, no one could persuade their citizens to take them back. Meanwhile, the Palace’s “Alexander of Yugoslavia” not only has no throne, but also claims the title of a country that no longer exists except on old maps of cold war Europe.

The royal family’s willingness to ban Labour prime ministers from the wedding has already told us much about the monarchy’s ideology. After that cheap snub, I hope to hear less self-deluding babble from Labour leaders about the Windsors being “above politics”. If they cannot see that royal rule is a justification for conservatism, surely they must now realise that royals are Tories and their political opponents.

The Windsors’ decision to address deposed monarchs as if they were sovereigns rather than private citizens is, if anything, more revealing. A king is still a king in their eyes. Even if “his” people don’t want him, divine right or dead tradition gives him a presumptuous and ineradicable claim to be head of state…

Great stuff. I wondered as I read the guest list why the descendants of the Tsar had been excluded.

Privacy: the perfect storm of surveillance

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From an Editorial in today’s Observer.

A pattern is emerging. A researcher discovers that a product or service offered by a large (generally US-based) company contains a security flaw or a feature that compromises the privacy of internet users. The revelations are confirmed by other experts across the internet. The company responsible then goes through a predictable series of steps: first, “no comment”, followed by indignant denial, then a PR-spun “explanation” and, eventually, an apology of sorts plus a declaration that the bug will be fixed or the intrusive practice terminated.

A recent example was Apple’s extraordinary contortions over the discovery that its iPhone was covertly collecting location data and storing it in unencrypted form. But last week also saw the revelation that devices made by TomTom, the leading manufacturer of GPS navigation systems, had effectively been spying on Dutch users and that the aggregated data had been sold to the police in order to guide the location of speed traps…

Journal of the cyber-plague years

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My piece in today’s Observer.

In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the "creeper" on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the "reaper".

Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world…

Trumping Trump

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As the Donald Trump “candidacy” for the presidency unfolded, most people in the UK must have been astonished that such a buffoon could be taken seriously. Part of the reason is that an idiotic proposition on the scale of a Trump presidential bid would never have survived the unruly British media. But American journalism is either irredeemably partisan (e.g. Fox News and talk radio) or obsessed with strange notions of ‘impartiality’ that allow absurdities to flourish. (The old “balance as bias” problem.)

Anyway, after a bad few weeks in which one watched with incredulity as Trump raised the ‘birther’ fantasy to new heights, it was just lovely to see Obama, for a change, take the idiocy on. And what made it really delicious was that Trump was in the audience, as a guest of the Washington Post, no less. Which makes one wonder what the hell an allegedly serious newspaper is doing having him as a guest. It’s a strange come-down for a paper that once brought down a crooked president.