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Enough with the Apple bashing!

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 10:54pm CET par Carmi Levy

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

As the hype machine for iPad availability revs up into overdrive (and, in some cases, tacks on afterburners), in a desperate effort to restore balance to the universe -- or, in some people's lives, what passes for a universe -- backlash against Apple increases to compensate. I'm thinking it's getting more than a little ridiculous to demonize a company because it's managed to succeed where others have failed.
I'm thinking it's time to stop the silliness.
Ever since Apple's return from the dead began about 13 years ago, it's become almost de rigeur to criticize it for being overly secretive, cultish, and obsessive. Apple-friendly consumers are dismissed as "fanboys" having drunk the Kool-Aid (a phrase Jerry Pournelle now probably wishes he'd never have coined). CEO Steve Jobs is accused of using his "Reality Distortion Field" to get customers to buy Apple products without asking so much as a single question.
Some opposition is well-deserved
I can appreciate where some of the opposition comes from. Apple is, after all, not the world's easiest company to deal with. It often seems to act in its own best interests and to the detriment of many of its stakeholders -- something iPhone developers appreciate all too well. Apple's behavior, as befits its position as the leading consumer electronics vendor of our time, isn't always as nice as it could be. Companies that choose to build their business models around Apple's platforms -- especially the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad -- must first come to terms with the cold reality that Apple may taketh away as quickly as it giveth. They know the risks going in, and they steel themselves for a rough ride as a result.
This is the price that stakeholders pay for being part of a vibrant market. If they want something a little warmer and fuzzier, I'm sure lesser islands of sanctuary like Nokia would be more than happy to coddle them a little. Unfortunately, all the coddling in the world won't ever make up for the fact that there's a lot more money to be made in Apple's App Store than Nokia's Ovi.
What I can't appreciate is the deep-rooted nastiness expressed by some who insist on remaining opposed to Apple's products or its way of doing business, on principle alone. To a certain degree, our complex allegiances to the tech companies that increasingly define the tools of our modern lives naturally lend themselves to polarized opinions and passionate clashes. In a simpler age, Chevy and Dodge aficionados would duke it out at the drag strip before declaring a victor, shaking hands, and going home. The tech industry, unfortunately, doesn't seem to shake hands much. More often than not, the high-spiritedness of the community tends to descend to mean-spiritedness almost as soon as the first article has been published.
Aside from being more than a little distasteful, the breakdown also clouds the core issues of whether or not a given product has value. We spend so much time flinging barbs back and forth that we forget that there may, perhaps, possibly, be something about the product that's worth appreciating.
It saddens me that a company can't succeed without being slammed for being successful. It saddens me that the industry as a whole can't seem to shake this knee-jerk, childlike behaviour. It saddens me that regular business folks, of the genus homo sapiens, observing us from behind the glass wall, conclude no one in the tech sector ever graduated beyond lame teenaged insults and put-downs. Sometimes I wish we could simply congratulate Apple for succeeding where others have failed, critique the company for its rough edges, and then move on.
The conspiracy to invent a conspiracy
So, to set the record straight, from where I sit, the media are not biased toward Apple. While there will always be those who lean one way or the other, there is no industry-wide conspiracy to paint Apple in a favorable light.
While I'm still on the conspiracy thing: No one has it in for wannabe-competitors, either. We'd all love to see countless worthy iPad competitors, and can't wait for other vendors to bring their offerings to market. The demand for something different has been obvious to us all since the very first tablet-like machines were demonstrated two decades ago. It's a category that's generated countless waves of unfulfilled hype since then, so forgive us all if we cut Apple some slack now that it has apparently cracked a very long-standing and stubborn nut. If it hadn't been Apple, the industry would still have gone a little giddy.
Detractors of all things Apple point to initial iPad sales figures as evidence that something is amiss. They claim supporters are manipulating the stats to depict Apple favorably. First off, no one cares about initial sales figures. They may fill editorial space on a slow news day, but they don't say much about a given device's long-term chances. Call me in three months and let me know how the thing is selling. Until then, trying to count a couple of days worth of sales is a patently useless exercise that proves nothing beyond the fact that some people have lots of free time on their hands.
Success makes you a target
In an age marked by endless waves of start-ups that are forgotten before anyone has a chance to remember them, the few companies that forge their own path to domination often become targets. In that regard, Apple is no different than IBM, Microsoft and, more recently, Google. If success is its own reward, it is also a prime motivator of the kind of mean-spiritedness that long ago might have been classified as sour grapes. It's high time we raised the level of discourse and rediscovered the basic principles every consumer values: Namely, does the product or service being discussed meet a given need at a given price at a given point in time? Does it do so more effectively than competing offerings? Will you buy it? Did you buy it?
Like it or not, Apple has taught itself well over the last 13 years. It reads consumers better than any other market competitor and, as a result, is able to generate levels of interest and buying activity that others can only dream about. It has learned to efficiently and effectively market itself, using processes that are rewriting the marketing zeitgeist. It succeeds where others have failed because it learns from the mistakes of others. Apple is the quintessential business success story, and we'd all do well to learn from its experience.
We'd all do well to learn from something, anyway.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Has SSL become pointless? Researchers suspect state-sponsored CA forgery

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 10:14pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The most powerful deterrent against the use of man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL/TLS-encrypted connections may be how much easier it may be to simply attack from the endpoint. Certainly "man-in-the-middle" sounds more sophisticated, and as a pair of well-known academic researchers are preparing to report, the phrase has actually become a "starburst" marketing point for the sale of digital surveillance equipment to government agencies.
But perhaps the most serious defect in the SSL system, allege Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian and Mozilla security contributor Sid Stamm, lies in the ability of government agencies (or individuals acting in the name of government agencies) to acquire false intermediate certificates for SSL encrypted trust connections. Those certificates could enable them to, in turn, sign and authenticate Web site SSL certificates that purport to be legitimate collectors of personal information, such as banks.
In the draft of a research paper released today (PDF available here), Soghoian and Stamm tell the story of a recent security conference where at least one vendor touted its ability to be dropped seamlessly among a cluster of IP hosts, intercept traffic among the computers there, and echo the contents of that traffic using a tunneling protocol. The tool for this surveillance, marketed by an Arizona-based firm called Packet Forensics, purports to leverage man-in-the-middle attack strategies against SSL's underlying cryptographic protocol.
"Using 'man-in-the-middle' to intercept TLS or SSL is essentially an attack against the underlying Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key agreement protocol," reads a Packet Forensics sales brochure obtained by the researchers. "To protect against such attacks, public key infrastructure ('PKI') is often used to authenticate one or more sides of the tunnel by exchanging certain keys in advance, usually out-of-band. This is meant to provide assurance that no one is acting as an intermediary. Secure Web access (HTTP-S) is the best example of this, because when an unexpected key is encountered, a Web browser can warn the subject and give them an opportunity to accept the key or decline the connection. To use our product in this scenario, users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate key they obtain (potentially by court order) or they can generate 'look-alike' keys designed to give the subject a false sense of confidence in its authenticity."
As the researchers report, in a conversation with the vendor's CEO, he confirmed that government agencies can compel certificate authorities (CAs) such as VeriSign to provide them with phony certificates that appear to be signed by legitimate root certificates.
So if someone is browsing a Web site whose SSL/TLS connection appears to be signed by a legitimate authority, and renegotiation (a big problem for SSL in recent months) enables the certificate securing that connection to be swapped out for a second one that appears to be signed using the same authority (because it was, but on order of a government agency), the browser may not inform the user. Suddenly a surveillance operative is acting as though he'd performed a man-in-the-middle attack like the one described in the sales brochure...but it's not really the same. The operative doesn't break the chain of trust in this scenario; instead, it falsifies the trust.
The researchers have developed a threat model based on their discoveries, superimposing government agencies in the typical role of the malicious user. They call this model the compelled certificate creation attack. As Soghoian and Stamm write, "When compelling the assistance of a CA, the government agency can either require the CA to issue it a specific certificate for each Web site to be spoofed, or, more likely, the CA can be forced to issue an intermediate CA certificate that can then be re-used an infinite number of times by that government agency, without the knowledge or further assistance of the CA. In one hypothetical example of this attack, the US National Security Agency (NSA) can compel VeriSign to produce a valid certificate for the Commercial Bank of Dubai (whose actual certificate is issued by Etisalat, UAE), that can be used to perform an effective man-in-the-middle attack against users of all modern browsers."
The researchers offered a number of such hypothetical attacks, most of which named governments and real certificate authorities (among them: VeriSign, Etisalat) by name, even though they repeatedly asserted they had no evidence that any of these governments or any of these CAs participated in such activity. "Nevertheless, VeriSign, the largest provider of SSL certificates in the world, whose customers include many foreign banks, companies and governments from countries that do not have friendly relations with the United States, also happens to make significant sums of money by facilitating the disclosure of US consumers' private data to US government law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This fact alone may be sufficient to give some foreign organizations good reason to question their choice of CA," they wrote.
The researchers do have a significant personal interest in this issue: They're working on a Firefox add-on called Certlock, yet to be released, which will augment the warnings Firefox typically presents about unusual certificate behavior. Users will be given the opportunity, for example, to take note when a certificate signing one site has itself been signed by a root certificate authority in another country or district -- for example, a "protected" Hong Kong Web service signed by mainland China.
As Stamm and Sogohian write, "When a user re-visits a SSL protected Web site, Certlock first calculates the hash of the site's certificate and compares it to the stored hash from previous visits. If it hasn't changed, the page is loaded without warning. If the certificate has changed, the CAs that issued the old and new certificates are compared. If the CAs are the same, or from the same country, the page is loaded without any warning. If, on the other hand, the CAs' countries differ, then the user will see a warning."
The question of whether a user should automatically trust all the certificates in his browser's root store, became a sticky one for Mozilla earlier this year. At that time, the organization added the state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) to its store of trusted roots, a decision which upset many Chinese users who have reason to believe China forges its own trust links in order to conduct man-in-the-middle (or from another aspect, "man-at-the-top") surveillance.
"We Chinese users don't trust CNNIC...CNNIC is an infamous organ of the Chinese Communist government to monitor and control the Internet in China," wrote a Mozilla contributor last January, in response to a request for public comment. "For secret reasons they even distributed spyware by making advantage of their administration privilege. They're one of the tools used by the CCP government to censor the Internet users. If CNNIC root certificate is added by default as Builtin Object, they can forge verified Gmail certificates to cheat the Chinese users by using MITM attack against the SSL protocol."
Other contributors agreed there may not be due cause to withdraw CNNIC from Firefox's root store, until specific evidence of claims such as this one emerges. In the meantime, many suggested the browser should arm the user with more information about the nature of the certificates he receives, as well as when and how trusted connections change. The problem with too much information, however -- as Microsoft discovered with Windows Vista -- is that users can eventually come to ignore it.
As another Mozilla participant queried in February, "Legitimate certificates do change over time...even Google has changed certificates a few times recently. Let me ask, how many of you -- yes you, the Internet experts -- have called Google to verify the change of the certificate? Let alone those writers, spiritual leaders, dissidents, farmers deprived of their land, parents whose children were buried in the bribed-to-poorly-built-school and were denied compensation and denied legal assistance, and relatives of Falun Gong practitioners whose organs are taken...You expect them to record and call to verify every certificate change?"
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
That phone you're about to throw away could be worth $500

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 8:25pm CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The lifespan of mobile phones is getting very short, and CTIA is packed with evidence to prove it. When I met with HTC at CES in January, they had an array of eight handsets to show off, most of which had only been released into the market within the last six months.
Now, just two months later, HTC has added four new high-end smartphones that put the entire batch that I saw in January to shame. Smartphones only remain on the cutting edge for a matter of weeks before they're usurped by the latest hot device. In the case of Android, sometimes it's only a matter of days.
When your phone draws close to the end of your two-year contract, it may seem old and worn when compared to the hot new devices. But its constituent parts have a much longer lifespan and retain a very high value.
The lens in your iPhone camera, for example, can fetch as much as $200 in the second-hand market. All those high-megapixel cameraphones with Karl Zeiss optics that were released in 2008 retain quite a bit of resale value for the camera parts alone.
In short, many high-end smartphones are worth nearly as much now as they were at launch.
I had a chance to sit down and chat with CBM Wireless Group (CWG), a consortium of companies that reconditions, recycles, and repurposes old mobile devices. From what they told me, it appears the second-hand business is thriving.
And why shouldn't it be? More than a billion phones are taken out of circulation every year already, and now that the lifespan of individual devices is shortening to just a single year in many cases, there is a lot of hardware to reclaim.
While a strong recycling policy is ultimately better for the environment, companies are jumping into recycling for reasons far beyond the "green" buzzwords. It's very profitable.
So what does CWG recycle? In short, everything. They buy back used handsets from OEMs and wireless carriers in any condition. If they can be brought back to working condition, they wipe all data, replace the broken parts, and send them back into the market. If they aren't reusable as a complete unit, they're broken down into desirable parts and resold back to manufacturers, repair shops, and the carriers. And that's not just the major parts, like keyboards, screens, and chipsets; they reclaim individual parts less than a single square millimeter in size. Everything else is then destroyed, and the case of many plastic components, turned into a new, composite recycled plastic.
So if we're going to be ditching our year-old phones en masse for the new EVO 4G this summer, its good to know that recycling them will be as good for the economy as it is for the environment.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Verizon: Current telecom law is 'irrelevant' to the modern Internet

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 4:54pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

"Thanks to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission, we now have a National Broadband Plan, which lays out a vision for a vibrant broadband and Internet marketplace," began Verizon Executive Vice President for Public Affairs Tom Tauke, in a speech to the Washington think tank New Democrat Network yesterday. But that's where the perfunctory appreciation stopped: "In my view, the current statute is badly out of date. Now is the time to focus on updating the law affecting the Internet. To fulfill broadband's potential it's time for Congress to take a fresh look at our nation's communications policy framework."
It was an important speech not only for who was speaking, but where it was spoken: NDN is perhaps the furthest thing from a libertarian free-enterprise institute. It's a group of active Democrats who are celebrating the passage of step one of health care reform, and who believe that federal policy reform can reset and reinvigorate the public agenda, on issues including broadband buildout and human rights. Verizon cozying up to NDN would be like allying itself with Google...but then again, it has allied itself with Google.
What Tauke and Verizon appear to be doing is carefully connecting with the audience best equipped to move Verizon's technology agenda forward, with a message that would seem more naturally tailored to suit that group's opposition. In an amazing high-wire act yesterday that appears likely to be deemed successful, Tauke advocated to a group of supporters of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's new federal Broadband Plan, a rewriting of telecom laws that could conceivably take the FCC out of the Internet picture altogether.
"Verizon's effort over the last year or two to find common ground with Google and others on the issues of net neutrality, behavioral advertising, privacy protection, and other Internet policies, really brought home to me the dilemma we face," Tauke continued. "Too often these important discussions about policy for the Internet degenerated into disputes over the statutory authority of the FCC. Then, with the Comcast / BitTorrent case, it became clear that the debate over jurisdiction wasn't just an intellectual exercise. The authority of the FCC to regulate broadband providers under the so-called 'Information Services' title, or Title I, of the Communications Act was at best murky."
Title I is the federal statute that effectively created the FCC, giving it the authority to regulate American communications systems. But that was in 1934, when there were the public airwaves and the telephone. That statute was amended in 1996, but the new language inserted a concept of "information services" whose regulation would fall under FCC guidelines. But the Internet isn't just a two-way newspaper; business transactions take place here every moment. And the FCC has never had the authority to regulate business transactions. Title II of the statute applies to telephone networks, and one option under consideration is simply declaring broadband a telephone network.
If you ask the FCC commissioners outright, they'd say they don't want either outcome -- either to be the online equivalent of the FTC, or the modern overseer of the online Bell System. But denying either option, some say, would have the FCC forfeit its right to tell Comcast not to throttle BitTorrent traffic -- the subject of the DC Court of Appeals case to which Tauke referred. There, judges have indicated they may very well rule in Comcast's favor. If they do, the entire question of whether the FCC has the authority to execute the Broadband Plan, would be turned on its ear.
You'd think that would make Verizon happy. But in front of the NDN yesterday, Tom Tauke put a virtual piece of duct tape over that grin.
"One idea recently floated to solidify the FCC's jurisdiction was to place broadband under the old rules that applied to telephone networks under Title II. To us, that clearly was outside the scope of the statute," Verizon's Tom Tauke told the New Democrat Network yesterday. "It also highlighted the danger of attempting to apply statutory provisions intended for the telephone industry of the 1900s to the communications and Internet world of the 21st Century. In confronting this hard question about jurisdictional authority, we also faced this policy question: If Title I and Title II don't apply to the Internet space, what are you saying about the authority of government in this space?"
Long-time followers of the campaign for free enterprise among Internet stakeholders are familiar with the key phrase "light touch" -- a phrase coined by former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard (who served under Pres. Clinton, and who is now US Ambassador to the EU). With respect to broadband, it represented Chairman Kennard's perspective that government should only step in to keep competitors in bounds, but should otherwise let the market decide how the nation's broadband network is built.
It was an ingenious campaign, largely because it quelled the growing arguments of legislators on both sides of the issue of the FCC's role in broadband. Those opposed to the FCC having any role at all, on the grounds that the Internet was not like the public telephone network or the public airwaves, appreciated the FCC saying its own role should be limited. And those who favored more rigorous regulation of the market to stop unfair competition -- for instance, from a potential behemoth such as AOL Time Warner -- appreciated that the FCC would continue to keep a lookout for unfair business practices. "The approach Bill Kennard talked about years ago of using a light regulatory hand to create a highly competitive marketplace has worked," stated Tauke, praising a well-liked Clinton-era Democrat. "Now, we need to put in place a framework that will continue to encourage ongoing investment and innovation for this vibrant ecosystem we see. This should be the cornerstone for a refreshed policy framework.
"So what's the problem? The problem is that the statute is irrelevant to the ecosystem that has developed. The Internet today hosts a quarter of the world's population -- close to two billion users. The Verizon network alone connects 100 million of these users with over 1.7 billion text messages and 50 million video/pictures exchanged, 400 million e-mails received, 8.7 petabytes of video streamed. There are new pressures and challenges and problems cropping up that policymakers didn't consider a decade ago, such as the 5 billion potential cyber-threats monitored and acted upon each day."
Next: The vision of an Internet without the FCC...
The vision of an Internet without the FCC
Now that the Broadband Plan (which some say is more a list of goals than a concrete agenda) has been published, there is renewed debate over whether a federal government agency should be dictating just how broadband buildout in this country is to be completed, and which companies should be the ones doing it in what areas. What Verizon would want is an authority comparable to Bill Kennard's 1990s vision of the FCC in the broadband space. But if Julius Genachowski's 2010s FCC resembles something different, maybe there's a new way to go about realizing that early vision.
"The instinct is to impose regulation, but it's a balancing act. We want order, but we also don't want to hinder investment and innovation in this dynamic broadband and Internet marketplace. How do we accomplish this?" asked Tauke.
He immediately responded by saying he didn't have all the answers. But then he adeptly proposed one: essentially, implicitly, and without fanfare, the creation of a new federal rulemaking authority overseeing just the Internet:
"Traditional agency 'fact finding' -- often through notices or public requests for comment -- are usually geared towards specific rules or regulatory outcomes. Instead, we could structure a process that uses the innovative, flexible and technology-driven nature of the Internet to address issues as they arise. Instead of the traditional rule-making process, federal enforcement agencies could structure themselves around an on-going engagement with Internet engineers and technologists to analyze technology trends, define norms to guide such questions as network management, and understand in advance the implications of new, emerging technologies. Technology leaders and experts from all players involved in the Internet should set up voluntary organizations and forums to provide advice, recommendations, and advisory opinions to government agencies. This will help inform the agencies' role as backstops that deter damaging activities that undermine the vibrant competition and openness that defines the Internet."
This new agency was nameless in Tauke's speech, except for the fact that it did not bear the name "Federal Communications Commission."
It should be a Republican plan. But Republicans aren't in the majority at the moment (and if Tea Partiers keep throwing bricks through Congresspersons' windows and leaving death threats on their answering machines, Republicans could end up staying there). Tauke's proposal has the virtue of implicitly creating an entirely new government agency (that should be fun!). And it would empower that agency to give government grants to low-income households who would otherwise not be able to afford service -- the kind of approach that resounds with more liberal agendas.
The NDN has yet to issue a response, though one is likely forthcoming, and will be well thought-out. And if it ends up supporting Tauke's position, somewhere over the horizon, one might glimpse the face of Sun Tzu smiling.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Review: Eye-Fi X2, my CTIA secret weapon

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 8:36am CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Two years ago, Lexar brought the Eye-Fi brand into the mainstream when it released 2GB SD cards endowed with Eye-Fi's 802.11b/g wireless connectivity. The capability turned any camera with an SD slot into one with Wi-FI. Since that time, Eye-Fi has grown its product line to include support for 802.11n, improved security features, improved capacities, and overall performance improvements.
On Tuesday, Eye-Fi's new X2 series of wireless SD cards hit retail, bringing the 4GB Connect X2 ($49.99), 8GB Explore X2 ($99.99) and 8GB Pro X2 ($149.99) to photographers across the country.
I'd been toying with the idea of pairing up an Eye-Fi camera with a MiFi portable hotspot for a sort of goofily-named dream team that could provide a constant connection for shooting tons of pictures that instantly piped up to the cloud. Since I was headed to Vegas for CTIA this week, and Eye-Fi was launching its new X2 series, I thought it was time to try it out with a 4G Sprint Overdrive.
So I've been walking the showfloor with a WiMAX hotspot in my backpack, and the Eye-Fi Connect X2 in my point-and-shoot Canon. Short of having a camera with a built-in mobile broadband module, this is the best way to shoot pictures. While I have been concentrating on getting exciting shots, Eye-Fi has quietly been uploading them to photography-sharing sites the second they're snapped. When I finally get to sit down in the press room, all the photos are up, sorted by date, and geotagged online, and when I connect my computer to a hotspot, the photos automatically download to my Eye-Fi desktop folder.
I stuck to sending all the photos to Picasa, but I could have chosen Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, Shutterfly, MobileMe, Fotki, Facebook, Whrrl, Evernote, Dotphoto, SmugMug, TypePad, or even to a custom FTP site. Eye-Fi offers 28 different destinations that your photos can be sent to. Additionally, it can send video to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, SmugMug and Photobucket.
The only troublesome aspect of the X2 was installing the software on my computers. I first tried it on a Vista PC, but it kept crashing it, and then I tried it on a Mac running the older 10.4 Mac OS, and it also did not want to work after half a dozen attempted installs. Eventually, however, it managed to get itself installed and has been running ever since.
Though the Eye-Fi helps heat up my camera very quickly, it has not had an appreciable effect on its battery life. In the three days I've been using it, I have not run out of battery any quicker than I would have if I was using a regular SD card. This will no doubt vary from camera to camera, and I intend to test it with other models to corroborate. Not all SD-supportive cameras are compatible with Eye-Fi SD cards.
And it doesn't require a mobile hotspot in your pocket for Eye-Fi to be useful on the go. Eye-Fi users have automatic free connectivity at 21,000 U.S. hotspots including Starbucks coffee shops and Harborlink hotspots such as BP gas stations.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Windows Phone 7 Series imitates Apple's iPhone in the worst ways

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 7:22am CET par Joe Wilcox
By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

For years, people have accused Microsoft of being an imitator, rather than innovator. Finally there is evidence: The ways Windows Phone 7 Series imitates the very worst of Apple's iPhone. Unless there is the strangest of coincidences -- like two students having the same wrong answers on a high school history test -- Microsoft is imitating Apple, using the same strategy to make the same mistakes. It's either imitation or incompetence, and out of fairness I assume the former.
The first imitation is the most baffling: Limited multitasking. Like iPhone, Windows Phone 7 Series will allow multitasking for some of its own applications, but not others. When open but not in use, third-party apps go into a pseudo-off ("dehydrated") state. By comparison, Google's Android, Nokia's Maemo or Symbian OS and Palm's WebOS all multitask (e.g., run background applications) just fine.
CNET's March 8 "Ways Android beats iPhone" expresses my sentiments: "Unlike the iPhone, Android devices like the Nexus One by HTC (pictured here) can multitask and run background processes. And how much do we love that notifications bar? A lot." As smartphones extend -- and someday replace -- the PC, multitasking will become a must-have feature.
Does Microsoft not understand this? People take multitasking for granted on the PC, which will make its absence more noticeable on the smartphone.
The Wicked Taskmaster
Case study: Joe Wilcox. Whenever out and about, I frequently use multiple background applications: Any combination of email, camera, instant messaging, music player or radio, news reader, RSS reader, Twitter or Web browser, among others. Then there are the widgets pulling down live content to the home screen(s). Given the phone's form factor, there generally can only be one visibly active application. But others run in the background. So it's possible to talk on the phone (with Bluetooth headset) while taking pictures and sending them to blog, Flickr and Twitter. Surely, other smartphone users reading this post have experienced similar benefits.
Microsoft's multitasking -- or lack thereof -- imitation will look really bad should Apple allow background applications to run on iPhone OS 4.0. Such change would bring iPhone OS on par with other multitasking mobile operating systems and make Windows Phone 7 Series look out of date even before the first devices reach market. Apple has got to do something to chip away at Symbian OS and hold back the Android army. Multitasking would be big.
To overcome some of the limitations imposed by truncated multitasking but deliver a pseudo-background application experience, Microsoft will follow Apple in another way: Like iPhone, Windows Phone 7 Series will use push notifications. It's a wild workaround -- using push to deliver, say, Facebook, IM or Twitter notifications instead of running the apps or, better, widgets in the background. It's the difference between sometimes and real time.
Waste Not, Paste Not
Another imitation follows something iPhone used to not do but Apple fixed (finally) in iPhone OS 3.x: Copy and paste will be MIA. Windows 7 Phone Series will include a pseudo copy-and-paste feature, that, for example, would "take an address and view it on a map, highlight a term in the browser and do a search or copy a phone number to make a call," according to a statement from Microsoft. "Instead of the user manually doing a copy and paste in these scenarios, we recognize those situations automatically and make them happen with just one touch." Right, but what about third-party applications? There's no copy and paste -- pseudo or real -- for them?
That question segues into yet another way Microsoft is imitating Apple. Google and Nokia offer open-source operating systems and applications platforms. Microsoft could copy from their playbook and open the development war chest. But n-o-o-o-o. Microsoft is taking an approach even more closed than Apple. Like Apple, Microsoft is effectively shutting any potential platform competition from third-party developers. Microsoft is doing this by reversing years of development philosophy: Windows 7 Phone Series won't support native applications. Developers must use the Silverlight runtime for apps and XNA for games. There are claims Flash 10.1 would run natively.
Microsoft talks big ecosystem with respect to Office, Windows, Windows Server and even Windows Mobile (now called Windows Mobile Classic). What exactly strong Windows Phone 7 Series ecosystem does Microsoft hope to generate without native applications? Mozilla already has cancelled its Fennec browser for Windows Mobile Classic and Windows Phone 7 Series; no native application support is stated reason. By the way, the Silverlight approach feels like Java in the 1990s. Write once, run anywhere -- in this case wherever Silverlight is supported.
Making Small Sense of Nonsense
Looked at differently, there's a strange sensibility to these Windows Phone 7 Series imitations because of how they hang together. From a grand product perspective, why should third-party multitasking be necessary if the only native apps are Microsoft's? Then there is copy and paste. Last I checked, copy and past isn't fully supported by Silverlight, which partly would explain limitations imposed on Windows 7 Phone Series developers. Related, as perviously stated: Pseudo copy and paste is for native applications, and they're only from Microsoft (unless Flash makes the guest list).
If Microsoft must imitate Apple, how about extending desirable features, like supporting native applications? Apple limits platform competition through the developer terms of agreement. For iPhone developers it's Apple's way or the highway. The Windows Phone 7 Series would benefit from imitating Apple's terms limitations and what Apple, Microsoft (with Windows) and most other major platform developers support: Native applications.
So what do you think? Is Microsoft imitating Apple? Does multitasking matter? Or is Microsoft treating multitasking just right? Should Windows 7 Phone Series support native apps. Please answer these questions in comments.
Related Posts:
One more question: Do you plan on buying a Windows Phone 7 Series smartphone?
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
How I slashed my connection to cable TV without missing anything

Publié: mars 25, 2010, 7:06am CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Mission: Find an affordable alternative to cable/pay TV using only off-the-shelf products.
Deadline: Today (with a clause for extension)
Like 24 million other Americans, I have a subscription to Comcast for cable television; and like an untold number of those subscribers, I feel that it costs far more than it should.
Annually, I pay more than $675 for service on one HD receiver with no premium content, even though I only watch a couple of hours of television a week. It amounts to 212 unique stations (minus the redundant HD channels.) This wasted money could be put toward something I'd actually use, like a mobile broadband subscription or a second data line, so I began looking for more cost effective alternatives.
I started this project with the idea that I could replace cable with a second broadband connection, dedicated strictly to grabbing video content from the Web, but I ended up going in a totally different direction thanks to a serendipitous TiVo Premiere review I was supposed to be writing at the same time.
You see, TiVo sent us its new Premiere DVR to check out, and I was going to hook it up to my Comcast signal to review it, but that required a cableCARD. I called Comcast to get one, and they had to send a technician out to install it, and one wouldn't be able to come out to my house for 20 days.
With the TiVo Premiere review due in just 8 days, I had no choice but to hook up the TiVo to a DTV antenna and try to make the best of it. Little did I know that this would completely change my mind about how I could cancel cable for my other project.
Part 1: Using TiVo Premiere without pay TV
I hadn't turned on over-the-air television since long before it shifted to digital broadcast, and I thought I was going to be reviewing TiVo's brand new DVR with only a measly handful of channels to work with. I was not happy.
Some quick background: I grew up in the Baltimore area, and we only got about 6-10 over-the-air stations depending upon where you were tuning in. If you moved northward, for example, you may have been lucky enough to pick up some Pennsylvania stations, If you moved southward, you started to get Washington D.C. and Virginia stations. But as far as central Maryland goes, there were 3 VHF and 3 UHF channels and nothing else.
When I plugged the brand new DTV antenna into the TiVo Premiere, I was shocked to find that I was receiving 33 over-the-air stations. Furthermore, with the TiVo Premiere, I could hit "guide" and find information about what I was watching, and what was scheduled to come on later in the day.
Then it dawned on me. I have 33 channels worth of free linear content that TiVo can turn into free on-demand content.
What's more, TiVo beefs up the free stuff I'm going to be watching by indexing casts, and linking shows to related Web-based content like Netflix Streaming, Amazon on Demand, Blockbuster on demand, and YouTube. It makes watching free, over-the-air content as good as, if not better than, pay television.
Sure, the TiVo Premiere's new UI has issues...well, one issue, really. It's not finished. Some menus are in HD and some are in SD, and the switch between them is jarring both on the viewer and a little laggy. As long as you're parked on the home screen, information pops up quickly and smoothly. But when you have to get into a part of the UI that's still in SD, you're going to encounter all-black loading screens pretty frequently.
Maybe I'm too forgiving, but I can overlook a menu that's both HD and SD. After all, I'm not offered standard 100% HD service packages from any content provider, either, and streaming videos vary in quality from 720p all the way down to tiny, blurry molecules of unwatchable crap.
Besides, TiVo says it's going to be rolling out UI updates pretty frequently, which will make the menus that pop up over live TV high definition, and then the utility screens and messages sections will follow. The first update to the Premiere will roll out in May and will improve the features of the discovery bar located across the top of the main TiVo menu.
The funny thing about the TiVo Premiere is that it really doesn't do anything new. It's a TiVo, it does what TiVo always does. It does it with a more powerful dual-core processor and high definition Flash-based UI, but it remains the same viewing experience that turns regular TV viewers into TiVo cultists.
That said, it's got a number of limitations that mean it's only a single part of my solution for canceling cable, one of them is the fact that it cannot access the majority of the free content on the Web.
At $299, the TiVo Premiere makes up about half of the year's cable bill that I'm saving and helps to replace 11 channels in the Comcast package. Some of the over-the-air networks I receive are not included in my Comcast package, but could serve as a loose replacement for others. MGM's THiS network, for example, takes on characteristics of both TV Land and AMC.
I have not broken it down to its show-by-show replacement value because that would have REALLY extended me past my deadline, but my early estimate is that an OTA TiVo Premiere could replace between 20%-25% of the content I would have been watching on my cable subscription. This is made up of the content it captures from live broadcasts, the access it has to YouTube, and its extensive roster of video podcasts it can capture. With the addition of a single-disc Netflix account, my overall annual cost rises by $108, but the amount of content available to me also significantly increases. (note: I don't think I should include this in my overall cost since I was paying for Netflix already, but I am just for the sake of everyone who doesn't.)
Since Amazon on Demand and Blockbuster on Demand are both pay-per-item, they also increase available content, but only really replace the pay-per-view section of Comcast's lineup.
Next: Bringing the Web to your TV for $40...
Part 2: Bringing Web content fully to the TV
The bottom line in free web-based television content is still Hulu, and your options for bringing that to your TV with regular old consumer gear are pretty limited. However, there is one software solution that gives all three major home video game consoles access to Hulu and other Web video sites for a single $39.99 license fee: MediaMall's PlayOn Digital Media Server.
Now, I've heard people complain about PlayOn because of MediaMall's charge for the license. But the fact remains that it's been the most consistent TV-based access to Hulu when all the other free solutions keep getting blocked. That alone is worth it to me.
So PlayOn gives your console access to content from networks like NBC, ABC, Disney, PBS, and Comedy Central via Hulu, and there are user-installable plugins (or "channels" if you prefer) for Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Discovery Channel, SyFy, ESPN, Food Network, Fox News, HGTV, a surprisingly comprehensive one for MTV, Spike TV, C-Span, VH1, Nickelodeon, and CNN.
You install the MediaMall server on your connected PC, and all of your game consoles have access to PlayOn channels, the content on your PC's drives, and any networked storage.
One of the most startling parts of PlayOn is that every single feature works on the humble Nintendo Wii through its built-in Opera browser. THE most startling part is that it's actually the best implementation of PlayOn on all three consoles, and it's still only in beta. I am fully aware that the Wii is not an HD device, but when you consider the source quality of most of the content you'll be watching, you realize that the lack of HD can actually be a blessing.
With Hulu and all of the other plugins, PlayOn delivers content from more than 20 networks, and could replace as much as 40% of the content that I paid for on Comcast.
The problem remains that there are still a ton of cable channels putting up their content for free on the Web, but there's no central place to view them on your television. This includes stations like FX, Bravo, E!, USA, and ABC Family, all of which offer full episodes of their most popular shows directly on their Web sites, and other stations like QVC and Home Shopping network, which run 24/7 streams of their channels on the Web.
In a nutshell, the content is out there, there's just no comprehensive way to get it without building a custom home theater PC. However, I've cut my expenses by 33% and have access to anywhere from 55%-70% of the content at my disposal with Comcast, I consider quitting cable easily justified.
I'm still looking for a way to increase my access to online video without significantly adding to the price to sweeten the setup further. I've got $227 left before I'm back to what I'd spend for one year of Comcast, so I'd say things are looking pretty good.
Mission: Ongoing
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010