Digital Nostradamus

Maybe it's just because as a programmer I keep up on technology trends, and perhaps because I'm a fan of Apple, I tend to see a lot of predictions in the technology sector. Some of it is interesting, but most of it consists of soothsaying which ranges from inane to irritating. The sheer bulk of it tends to get me frustrated.

Guessing the future is hard. Guessing about the technology future is even harder. Forecasting just a year or two in advance is difficult enough, but 5, 10, 25, or 50 years is almost impossible. And yet, somehow, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to share their prognostications.

I don't mind predictions. I like it when people state their opinion and share facts to support their claims. I don't mind when people state what they hope will occur. But it drives me crazy when I repeatedly encounter people state their guesses (outlandish or not) as though they were facts. And all too often these same people are unwilling to entertain alternative ideas or viewpoints. The place where this impacts me the most is at work. On the Internet at large, nut-jobs are a dime a dozen; one has to expect a deluge of nonsensical divinations. But at work I have a vested interest in keeping my company afloat and myself sane. Here are a few topics which spawn repeat offenders for me:

Will Flash ever be supported on iOS?

Will HTML 5 kill Flash?

Will Android supplant the iPhone?

Will [insert most recently announced Android tablet] be the iPad killer?

Will the iTunes App Store's walled garden eventually be its demise?

Most recently the Internet (and my work) is abuzz with speculation around the news of Steve Jobs stepping down from his CEO position at Apple. It confounds me how quickly people jump to conclusions and bend any fact or rumor to fit their viewpoint, often with disjointed logic.

It's wearisome to keep up with and read, let alone try to reason with these people. And it's all about how the arguments are framed. For example, consider the differences between these arguments:

1. Android will eventually win because it is an open platform.
2. It's only a matter of time before Android tablets dominate the market, leaving the iPad a niche competitor.
3. I prefer Android because I can customize it. I hope it continues to gain mass market acceptance so more developers will make apps for it.
4. Apple is not the future, Android is. It's the Mac vs. PC all over again.
5. Apple seems intent on losing market share by keeping it's hardware and software proprietary. Also, it refuses to support Flash. I predict it will eventually support Flash in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, but by then Android will be running on 80% of mobile devices. I can't think of a single reason to buy an iPad.
6. Android has a strong possibility of becoming the eventual mass-market winner in the smartphone wars. Adoption from many carriers and handset makers have helped it gain recognition and cut into the iPhone's market significantly.

Can you guess which of those arguments make me shudder? I'll give you a hint, there are only two which I find acceptable.

#3 expresses an opinion. Good.

#6 makes a prediction of a possible outcome, backed up with some evidence. Good.

The rest are terrible to me. And sadly, they are actual arguments I've read. They are comprised mainly of opinions stated as facts, and arguments without substance. Could they be right? Sure, anything is possible. But they'd only be right due to chance and circumstance; not due to any insight on their part.

I'm very open to the possibility of things like Android supplanting iOS. I just don't see any evidence of it. I think it is very reasonable to assume that if a great Android tablet hit the market that it could topple the iPad's dominance. I just don't see any evidence indicating that happening. What I do see is a veritable landslide of second-rate, bug-ridden, also-ran tablets being rushed to market.

Businesses need to try to look into the future to do strategic planning. I just hope that my company doesn't get lost in this sea of speculation.

I don't have much hope for the lunacy to end. But I trust that at least some rational thinking people will provide me some shelter from the madness.

Reflections on Piracy

To round out my current thoughts on piracy, I want to delve briefly into the nebulous quagmire of ethics.

In general, it seems that most people frown on piracy and identify it as an unacceptable behavior. This is likely due to the negative connotations associated with the word: pirates are generally considered to be unscrupulous and unsavory criminals. Few people want to be associated with such ideas, nor do they want to be imprisoned for stealing. And yet, it is not uncommon to find people who hold such beliefs to be guilty of infractions with regard to piracy.

Usually such infractions are claimed as 'minor'. Concepts of ownership and "fair use" are used as a shield, but these do not always adequately cover the situation. But more often than not, it is justification of some sort which leads the person to believe they have a moral high ground and therefore should not be considered a pirate. "I have a right," "it's all because they don't do ____," or "there are extenuating circumstances" are all excuses which I have heard -- an in the past, I've made some of them myself.

In years past, I found myself using such justifications because my friends and I were rabid anime fans. The primary justification I used surrounding this was the idea that "if this content were available here in the U.S., then I would buy it. But since it isn't, this is the only way I can experience these shows. After all, if I were in Japan, I'd just see this on TV for free anyway."

Certainly such justifications are part of human nature. Whether they are right or wrong is a matter of perspective. In many ways, each of us is a modern-day Francis Drake. On the one hand we can say that what we are doing is right; perhaps we are even heros in a way. But on the other hand, we are clearly pirates as well.

The Techstuff podcast from How Stuff Works had a very interesting discussion about this topic in an episode entitled "The Ethics of Piracy". While listening, one point stuck out to me more than any other:

You do not have a right to access content.

When I heard that I immediately agreed with it, and also realized that younger me never considered the idea. In the past, I labored under an assumption that just because something was available to someone out there, I ought to have access to it as well. That's only "fair," right? I was using this justification and pretense of fairness to mask something I hadn't ever realized: my desires were a form of selfishness.

The idea that no one has an inherent right to content was an epiphany to me. That single watershed moment changed how I look at piracy.

I do believe that everyone does have a right to some things, like education. And there are some things in the 'public domain' like art and literature which are so engrained with our cultures that we need them to function. At the very least, people ought to have the same opportunities; but we know that isn't the case in practice as we look at the problems across the world. But that does not mean that people can claim unilateral access to content; especially content created for the livelihood of another.

Luckily, the Internet is making it easier to have legitimate access to content. There is a lot available on the web. New services (like Netflix and Hulu) make it easier and cheaper to watch things you want to watch. iTunes and Pandora make it easier to get music. These types of things can drastically reduce the impulse to justify one's piracy.

Personally, I am happy to have come to this new paradigm. I intend to dispose of my metaphorical jolly roger as I have no further need for it. Hopefully this insight will help me to identify similar things in my life in the future so I can better understand myself, others, and gain some small bit of wisdom.

Encryption and the FBI

In a similar vein to my last post, another futile endeavor I hear about is the FBI wanting to enforce encryption backdoors in software.

Basically the idea is that the FBI has trouble catching bad guys because they use state-of-the-art encryption to mask their communications, to secure their hard drives, and generally hide their nefarious schemes. Therefore, the FBI wants service providers (like Skype, Dropbox, and everyone else) to maintain the ability to decrypt data or communications if served a subpoena.

At first blush this seems like a sensible idea. But unfortunately it has three major problems:

Problem #1
Bad guys already have access to state-of-the-art, (essentially) uncrackable encryption. The cat is already out of the bag. Free, open-source solutions for asymmetric (public key) and symmetric encryption have been available for years. The algorithms are well known. Tools already exist.

Bad guys can already share their secrets. And if they merely encrypt their data first, they can take advantage of services and systems regardless of whether they have backdoors. For example, if a hacker puts an encrypted file on Dropbox, the FBI can only ask Dropbox to remove its secondary encryption; the original data is still secure.

Problem #2
If the service provider can decrypt information when subpoenaed, that means they can also decrypt information at will. This opens the door to an "inside job" attack. Companies typically have privacy policies stating how they won't do such things, but a disgruntled or malicious employee isn't going to care about company policy.

Problem #3
Adding decryption backdoors adds a burden on service providers. In many cases, existing technologies have to be radically re-architected. Additionally, it forces the provider to assume the position of a "middle man", watching communications (and using up bandwidth) to allow secret decryption for traffic which would otherwise be sent point-to-point.


There are those who say that problem #1 is irrelevant, because at least we'd be able to catch the more stupid criminals. The ones who aren't tech savvy enough to secure their data. But I view this as a short-term solution. Because the important technology is already out in the open, all criminals need are for good tools to be created.

Problems #2 and #3 are very real, but many people don't realize that these issues could stunt the development of otherwise useful services. Or in some cases, cause existing services to disappear.

Personally, I don't have secrets to hide. Though I value my privacy, I don't have any sensitive data which I need to secure. But I can understand that there legitimate reasons for people to hide their data. For example, my work has intellectual property which they want to keep safe.

Arguably, we could say that no one has a right to privacy. In the physical world there are many things which cannot be done in private; even something as simple as walking around. So perhaps the digital world shouldn't have the right to those things either.

This post just scratches the surface of this issue. But I see these three major problems at the heart of the matter. I'm sympathetic to the problems the FBI faces. I want them to be able to catch bad guys. But I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it. And I am sure that it's already too late to catch the really scary ones who know how to use encryption.

Piracy and the Digital Jack Sparrow

The futility of Digital Rights Management (DRM) is, to me, summed up in a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (a.k.a. the first one) . Sparrow and Turner are fighting in the blacksmith's shop. Turner has the upper hand in sword combat, but then Sparrow pulls out a pistol.

Will Turner: You cheated.
Jack Sparrow: Pirate.

DRM has a fundamental problem that I don't think is possible to overcome: at some point, legitimate users must be able to access the content. Be it on Blu-ray, streaming video, audio files for an iPod, or an XBox game, eventually the end-user needs to be able to consume that digital content; otherwise there's nothing to sell. But this very same access also allows the Captain Sparrows of the world the opportunity to engage in piracy.

It's like handing someone an uncrackable safe and then telling them the combination to open it. "But when you open it, you have to abide by our rules! Just look into the safe; don't take anything out!" Okay, sure, no company is going to literally hand over the decryption keys, but they do the next closest thing: providing hardware or software that does it for us. Blu-ray players and programs can be disassembled and reverse-engineered.

Deterrence is the best that DRM can hope to accomplish — companies can add more hoops and make things more difficult to figure out in the hopes of discouraging would-be pirates. But it only takes one success to break the DRM and then it's out for the world. Not to mention that time-honored simple methods still work just fine: a video camera pointed at a TV screen won't provide a perfect recreation, but for many pirates it's good enough.

In some ways, I think that copyright makes a better deterrent than DRM, though that is certainly fraught with problems too. Copyright provides for some additional legal recourse but doesn't serve as a real barrier itself.

So in the end, what purpose is DRM serving? It tends to be an annoyance to pirates, but not a prevention. It adds extra complexity (and therefore price) to what is being sold. It tends to be a nuisance to legitimate customers. It seems that many companies regard it as a necessary evil; they claim that removing all DRM would make it too easy for pirates. But if only one pirate has to succeed for them all to win, that difficulty argument loses a lot of steam.

One counter example that I've seen surface a few times (and sorry, I don't have any specific links on-hand) is the idea that you can go DRM-free if you lower the barrier to entry. Pirates are always going to be pirates, so don't spend too much time worrying about them. Instead, make it easier to purchase the item than to find and download an illegal version. This seems especially effective when combined with a low price.

The iTunes music store seems to be on track with this kind of solution. iTunes has made it extremely simple to buy music. Everyone knows where to go to get it, and the songs are cheap. Also, iTunes has your credit card info, so purchasing is easy. For the average user, it's much easier (and safer) to just buy the songs they want and remain honest. With the RIAA and MPAA foaming at the mouth and rabidly chasing after any slightest infraction, it's much better to avoid their wrath.

So to wrap up, DRM is fundamentally broken. It just cannot work. When faced with piracy, it is a perpetual Will Turner, always surprised that someone cheated. For sake of disclaimer, I'm not condoning piracy in any way. I'm just saying that DRM is futile.

OS X

Over the years I've used a variety of machines. I grew up using Macintoshes on System 6 & 7, then moved to a Win95 box as a teenager. In college I used OS X, Linux, and WinXP.

For the last several years, I've been mostly using XP at work. At home my old blue-and-white G4 tower just wasn't cutting it, so eventually my gaming XP box turned into my de facto primary machine. But when that XP box started showing some problems, I decided that it might be time to consolidate to a single machine.

So I bought a Mac Mini. It's a nice low-power box, and I thought it would be nice to be using OS X again. And was I ever right about that! I had forgotten how nice it is to use OS X — it's just a smooth, pleasant experience as compared to XP.

It came with a lot of stuff I use pre-installed, including developer stuff like Apache, Subversion, and ANT. It doesn't take forever to respond to user interaction, load programs, or reboot the machine. I was reminded how great Expose is — I wish my work machine had that. Lots of little things like this.

I find that it's the little things — the polish — which makes me love OS X and despise Windows. WinXP is always doing little things that make me angry. Like deciding to page out all the virtual memory to my full-drive-encrypted disk, thus locking up the UI while I'm in the middle of typing something. To be fair, I haven't used Win7 yet. So maybe there will be some improvement there, but I'm not holding my breath.

Apple prides itself on design and user experience. And I think that shows in OS X. I'm glad to be familiar with so many different operating systems, if for no other reason than it makes me extremely flexible for work. But this experience has reminded me how great it is to use OS X. It is definitely my operating system of choice.

iPad Revisited

After letting this blog lie fallow for a year, I'm finally planting a new post. I won't bother with the usual, "Dear Diary, Sorry I haven't written in so long. So much has happened." I save that for my journal which I'm likewise bad at keeping up to date.

About a month after posting my iPad review, I went out and bought one. As stated in my review, I really didn't need it. But I had harassed my wife far too long with my constant talk of iPads, to the point that she just told me to buy one so I'd shut up about it.

Now that we've had the device for almost a year, I look back at that review and find that I still agree with what I said then. It's a great device which I don't need but very much enjoy. I mostly use it for reading blogs and feeds (recently I've been using Flipboard for this) or visiting websites. Sometimes I play some games on it. And most of this usage is at night when I'm in bed but not quite ready to sleep. I've also started using it for watching Netflix, especially while running on the treadmill.

One thing I did not expect is how much my wife would use the iPad. She's become the primary user! She got hooked on it when our baby was born and she was up at all hours of the night for feedings. She mostly reads websites and public domain (read: free) books, but also listens to music, watches shows, and plays games. Sometimes she uses it for recipes while cooking.

The baby likes the iPad too, but mostly inasmuch as he likes anything he can get his hands on. Sometimes we turn on Tesla Toy and let him touch the screen to make things move. It kind of blows my mind that this kind of technology has been around longer than he's been alive. He'll grow up with it and probably know how to use the iPad well by 2 or 3 years of age!

All in all, the iPad is a fantastic device. I'm glad we have one.

iPad Review

At my work, our department is starting to do some iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch development. This week I had the opportunity to check-out a company iPad to bring home and play with. They want employees to get better aquainted with the device, and who was I to argue?

I brought home the device, hooked it to my computer, then installed pretty much everything that I normally have on my iPhone (my apps, music, and videos). I checked w/ my boss to get the "OK" before doing so, of course. Before I took it back I restored it to the factory settings, wiping out all my personal data.

The result: for about a day I had an iPad with the exact configuration as if I had purchased one myself.

Most of the iPhone apps were as I expected: exactly the same as on the iPhone, but with the option to double the size. Peggle and Sudoku were a little pixelated, but fun to play on a bigger screen.

The iPad-specific apps were very interesting to explore. The extra real estate provided by the larger screen makes a huge difference. There are a lot of improved user interface controls that just aren't feasible on the iPhone's small screen. Apps like Safari, Notes, Calendar, and Email are beautifully improved.

Let's take Safari as an example. The larger screen means that you can keep the controls (address bar, search, next, back, etc.) constantly on the screen instead of scrolling them off like the iPhone does. That alone is a huge improvement in convenience! The larger screen also means you can get more webpage in at a time (less scrolling required).

I've always been impressed with the way Apple works to refine the user experience. The iPhone felt like having The Future^TM in my hands, and the iPad just improves on it. It's the little things that make the difference. I find it amusing that one of the "little" changes is making the screen bigger.

Some people have complained that the iPad is just a big iPod Touch. While this is basically true, I think it really misses the mark. To draw an analogy, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle isn't just an oversized moped. The UI changes "under the hood" alone make the device more than what it appears at first glance.

Probably my favorite feature of the iPad (and my iPhone for that matter) is the "instant on": when you press the home button it's ready to go. No need to wait around for the OS to boot up like on my laptop. If I want some information, to play a quick game, or to check email, the device is ready immediately. And the battery supports this model of use.

If I owned one, I'd primarly keep it on the end tables next to the couch and next to the bed. I'd use it as a convenience device more than anything. But in the end, it unfortunately falls into the category of "luxury item". I want one in the same vein as wanting any other new toy.

My wife also played with the iPad and also liked it. She basically agreed that it is a neat device, but not something we need to rush out and buy.

I can easily see how the iPad could be a perfect fit for some people. For example, someone who just wants to get their email and do some light web surfing. Someone who doesn't need to do much content creation but is a content consumer. Because the interfaces are so good, I could see it being great for a parent or grandparent who isn't so hip to computers.

So in summary, the iPad is a wonderful device. I love it and totally want one, but I don't have a real need for one. Maybe someday I'll get one, but probably not in the near future (I'm focusing instead on getting a new iPhone to replace my 1st-gen one).