I don’t need that.

I can’t speak for others, but I’m no extrovert. No matter how many people I may be Facebook friends with, the reality is that I don’t maintain relations with that many people. What’s more, I’m not convinced that you regularly talk to each and every one of your 130 friends. I’m fairly certain that you have a much smaller circle of people you actually spend time with, and you friended the rest so you could have an easy point of contact with them on the off chance you needed it. Not so they could see how many points you got on the last game you played on Kongregate, or leaf through your embarrassing Pandora musical choices, or know when you’re out of the house.

So what do I need a social backbone for? Nothing. I certainly don’t want it to constantly increase the amount of information it deliberately leaks. And thus, I propose we move our social networking activity out of entities like Facebook, and into ones we control ourselves. I propose we decentralize social networking, since if sharing is the social norm, we’re perfectly capable of sharing only to whom we care about.

You see, we all have the power to make our own social networks. And I’m not talking about something like Ning–I’m talking about a little site that you only reveal to a few specifically chosen people, and no one else. That is, a tiny communication platform where you know everyone else there, and where, since the entire site is secret in the first place, there will never be the possibility of anyone seeing something you didn’t want them to see.

As it happens, I did just that about six months ago with a small group of friends, and it’s working beautifully. No, I won’t link it here–that would defeat the purpose! I will, however, explain how I did it, and how you can do the same. It’s really not hard at all, and can be done by anyone in their spare time. All you need is a WordPress blog and your friends.

The WordPress P2 Theme

I assume WordPress needs little introduction. If you don’t know what it is, it’s blog software. That’s really it. Except, it’s extremely easy to configure and use, it’s open source, and it’s malleable enough to shape into almost any kind of content management system you can imagine–from webcomics to artist portfolios to forums. We’re after something like the latter.

The P2 theme should look familiar to anyone who’s used Twitter. It’s got an entry box at the top for typing out a quick post or uploading or linking in pictures or videos, and below it aggregates all the recent posts and displays threaded comments under them. It even brings up other users’ posts and comments in real time as they get posted. And, unlike Twitter, there are no character limits (since, after all, it’s really just a blog).

That, to be honest, is really all there is to it. I won’t bore you with the details of how to set up a WordPress blog–if you want to do it yourself, it’s pretty easy to just go to wordpress.com and install the theme in the theme browser. It’s also not hard to set one up in your own web hosting, though that takes a bit more technical knowledge. (If you’ve already got a domain and webhosting set up, you can even install it in a subdirectory.)

So go out there and make one! And of course, no need to tell me about it. Unless I’m your friend and all.

Can you imagine a scenario where Apple releases a fully-fledged laptop locked down like the iPhone or iPad? A fully fledged computer on which the only way to install software is through Apple’s built in App Store?

To borrow an overused phrase, it’s more likely than you think.

Would you buy it? Would other people buy it?

Package management can be awesome

I’ve written about package management before. I believe that locking down a package manager such that the user can’t change the available software channels is unethical and flies in the face of years of innovation. We’ve always treated computers as though they were owned by their users, and I see the popularization of devices like the iPhone and iPad as a disturbing precedent. Might Apple be emboldened to try locking down full computers the same way?

We live in an age in which the technology is powerful enough to implement such a thing. Apple is certainly capable of running the servers necessary for supplying its users with all their software, and it would certainly be lucrative, given how successful the iPhone’s app store is and how much 3rd party pay software exists for Macs right now (which Apple would then be able to take a cut of the profits on). There is thus a clear financial incentive for Apple to set up such a system, and for developers to continue to target it (and submit to their harsh developer restrictions).

And let’s face it: such a system would be amazing for users who don’t care. They would enjoy Apple’s rigorous testing process for all their software, and thus enjoy machines that almost never become bogged down by slow or unstable apps. They’d have an easy way of finding and installing all the software they could ever want–even simpler than what they currently have on Macs, and that’s saying something–along with Apple’s approval of all of it, which carries all the quality control that their name has become synonymous with.

I can imagine other possible models. Maybe they’d offer people “simple” or “advanced” options when purchasing computers, the former being cheaper and locked down for the “I really don’t know how to use computers” crowd. Such a thing doesn’t seem like them though, given how well they’ve avoided fragmenting their product ecosystem. Or perhaps they’d simply release their own blessed way to jailbreak the system if a user cares enough.

Right, jailbreaking! Can’t you just jailbreak it?

A cursory glance at the history of the iPhone would make one all but certain that if Apple released such a system without offering a way to unlock it, their users would find a way (as they will undoubtedly with the iPad).

I find this scenario similarly unpleasant, for two reasons. One is that if your enjoyment of a machine depends on an unauthorized hack, you are entirely dependent on those hackers to keep it jailbroken the next time Apple pushes out a system update that invariably locks you down again–the ease of which is never a certainty. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that some users appear more than happy to play, but in the long run it definitely doesn’t seem worth the effort to me.

The other is that you’re ignoring the device’s biggest selling point. If a device is locked down, it’s locked down as a genuine means of quality control, which Apple has shown itself to be superb at. To my mind, jailbreaking an Apple device invalidates everything good about it–Apple’s assurance that you’re getting the best you can get.

This argument may seem self-contradictory–suddenly a device being locked down is a good thing? It’s important to remember that the reasons for locking down a device in the first place are, in order:

1. Making a cut off of lucrative third-party software sales.
2. Making sure that 3rd-party software enriches the platform rather than makes it look bad.
3. Making the system easy to use.
4. Making the system stable, secure and fast.

For most users, a locked down system is protection from systems they don’t care about knowing how to use, and from software that might harm their systems. To users who care about customization, it’s a heavy-handed restriction on something they want to use that just gets in their way. Users in the former category genuinely benefit from a locked down system, and users in the latter category don’t.

So how likely is it?

I’ve always felt that Apple’s primary market is the former category, and that’s why I think this scenario is so likely. It worries me, because I’ve always clung to the idealistic notion that someone who uses a computer has a responsibility to know how to make changes to how it functions. An Apple user might counter that all Apple’s lockdowns do is simplify the method for those changes so more people have access to them. I would counter that such a thing is worthless if more fine-grained customizability is lost in the process.

But then, I suppose that’s why I’m an Ubuntu user. I have the tools I need to change where my software is coming from, and I use them. I just wish more people noticed or cared.

Sam sets up a dichotomy between price and value, which he defines as, respectively, “how much you pay for [a good or service]“, and “how much a thing is worth”. The former varies quite a bit for a given good or service; the latter, for the most part, does not. He then goes on to describe a disconnect between the two, and how in recent years it’s gotten worse:

We now live in a world where the minimum price you can expect to pay for a piece of music is zero dollars. And if people have trouble telling price and value apart, which I think it’s clear that they do, then there are a lot of people who think that recorded music isn’t worth anything at all. Now, this is an obviously erroneous belief, because these people listen to music, and therefore it has value to them. But they don’t realize that. They think that the value is the price, which is nothing. And by “they,” I mean “all of us.”

The problem with this argument is that it’s too narrow a description of what people are willing to pay for. This argument views buying a album of music as a straightforward money-for-music deal. The real market isn’t that simple. There are other factors to consider: what can I use to listen to this music? What does it cost me in terms of time? Am I limited in any way in how I use it? Am I in danger of legal trouble for using or having it?

From the purest standpoint of a consumer, what piracy ultimately boils down to is a different distribution method, which has its own conveniences and drawbacks. Let’s take CDs as an example. Clear costs are in red (since some are debatable). A CD’s features are:

• Can be played in portable CD players or computers.
• Must be physically retrieved to be used.
• Can be optionally encoded to a computer.
• Can be easily shared with friends.
• Comes with art and lyrics and possible other features.
• Costs around $10-15.
• Requires either a trip to a brick-and-mortar store, or a several day wait to acquire.

Now let’s look at pirated music through the same lens.

• Costs nothing.
• Requires no physical storage.
• Can be easily shared with friends.
• Instant or very fast gratification.
• Can be played on computers and PMPs, or optionally encoded onto CDs.
• Requires users to organize their music themselves.
• Carries a minor risk of legal reprisal from authorities such as the RIAA.

It’s hard to argue from those lists that CD’s are a superior format, no? Takes up little to no space, can be played on any device (including much smaller ones than CD players), and it costs nothing! Not to mention, so few people have been sued by the RIAA that the lawsuits that have happened have served more to piss people off than scare them into paying for things.

When piracy first became a viable option for the masses–that is, when Napster became popular–the music industry’s response was to try to defend their operations by attacking it. For whatever reason, their thought was not “here’s a new opportunity, let’s learn how to make money from it”, it was “this threatens our business model, let’s destroy it”. And let’s be clear: this is a service that was better. Yes, it being free was a factor in that, but CD’s don’t offer instant gratification and will always require physical storage.

It took a few years, but music distributors figured this out. They know that instant gratification is very, very, very important if you want to get someone to pay for something. That’s why the iTunes Music Store is the largest music distributor in the world–it provides music straight into a user’s iTunes library in just a few clicks (effectively a music package repository). Amazon understands this with their MP3 store, which can automatically export its downloads into a user’s iTunes library or Windows Media Player.

And it’s also why streaming music is changing everything now.

I’m talking about Pandora, last.fm and Spotify. I’m sure we all know the former two–the latter third has made a tremendous splash in Europe, and will undoubtedly make a similar one once it makes its way to the USA. It’s basically like iTunes, except all of its music comes straight from their servers on demand, ad-supported or for a monthly fee. Let’s look at the feature list for that:

• Costs nothing.
• Allows personalized choices of music on demand.
• Instant gratification.
• Requires no physical storage.
• Can be played on computers and increasingly common internet-conneted portable devices.
• Costs money to remove ads.

This is better in almost every way, for nearly all use cases.

Economics has been called the Dismal Science for a reason: it’s amoral. It assumes that people don’t do what’s right: they act in their self interest. But there’s an upside to that: it means that piracy can be beaten by offering a better product. In the early days of piracy, it’s true that the technology didn’t exist yet for making current and emerging distribution methods practical–but it’s constantly getting cheaper, and as it does it’ll only become easier to make services like Spotify profitable.

For other examples in other media, there’s Audible.com, Netflix and Steam–all services which clearly have something to lose from piracy, and yet are doing pretty well. These businesses have all come up with ways to be better options than piracy for at least a lot of people, and they’re quite rightly doing well for it.

So yes, there may be a disconnect between what’s right and what happens in practice. But that’s no excuse for anyone to dig their heads in the sand and refuse to innovate. The world changes; if that threatens your business, then change your business. Draconian measures to protect a demonstrably inferior business model will not halt progress.

That curse is URL shortening. And yes, it did exist before Twitter, but Twitter both limits how much its users can post and depends on those users sharing content with each other, often in links–and those URLs can take up a lot of space. The growth of URL shortening has brought with it the growth of URL shortening services, which apparently hope to monetize it.

Leaving aside the issue of how monetizing such a thing can be done, URL shortening is bad from a user’s perspective for the simple reason that if someone shares a link with me, I have no clue where it’s going. If someone just posts “OMG this is awesome”, the shortened URL they post it with could just as easily be a rickroll attempt as it could be an evildoer hijacking their account and sending me to malware. And while I may be running Ubuntu, there’s no way of knowing that there isn’t some kind of zero-day exploit already being used on it (I have no illusions about Ubuntu being perfectly secure, after all).

This isn’t just a security problem–it’s also a usability one. What if I’m playing music and I don’t want to see a Youtube video? What if I’m working and only want to click on a link if I know it’ll be something quick? What if it’s a link to an inflammatory Reddit post that’ll just get me angry and ruin my mood?

Clever users may respond that there are browser extensions and Twitter clients that can solve this problem by showing a preview of the destination. Maybe, but if they don’t show you the URL, do you really think it would be hard for a malware writer to put up a fake display of the site at the destination? If they’re willing to meticulously fake the appearance of a Windows security warning or antivirus program, would it really be hard to put up a fake image of a Youtube page and then switch it out with Javascript if an actual browser is detected? Admittedly, this would likely have to target specific previewers to fake them out, but it’s a real possibility, and not one that an informed user can ignore.

In order to avoid subjecting people to this danger, I’ve installed YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener… clever!) on my hosting to try to avoid putting people through that. I don’t intend to let anyone else use it for URL shortening, just me–so you can be reasonably certain that if you see a short URL beginning with perpetualstudent.net/, it came from me and not someone who hijacked my account. Yes, my domain isn’t especially short, but it’s probably short enough for my purposes. YOURLS is a great project, if only because it shows just how little work it takes to make a URL shortener beyond thinking of a clever short domain name. All it takes is a cleverly-written .htaccess file, a bit of PHP code and a MySQL database. YOURLS even gives you all the same URL tracking features that the likes of bit.ly do.

So please–if you’re going to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly or u.nu, have the decency to explain in context where those links go and what I’ll get if I click on them. The occasional rickroll won’t kill me, but the last thing I want is to feel paranoid when clicking on links my friends share.

Well, OK–to be fair, we don’t know for sure. Steve Jobs definitely wants us to think they’ll be more than that. And would it really be out of character?

The thing I’ve always found fascinating about Apple’s branding is how much effort they put into making things shiny. Their strict policy of vertical integration–producing both hardware and software–allows them to deliver a perfectly seamless and visually consistent user experience, something their competitors are incapable of replicating. Not only that, they’ve shown themselves to be great innovators time and time again, creating software that not only feels fresh and new every time, it has a quality of magical allure to it that draws in geeks and non-geeks alike. And yes, “magical” really is the best word I can come up with for it–Steve Jobs has all the qualities of the eccentric visionary, and I suspect he’ll likely be remembered in the future as the Edison of personal computing.

In the case of the iPhone and the iPod, what Apple’s competitors repeatedly noticed was that they couldn’t out-Apple Apple. Try as they might, they never could get the publicity or the attention that always followed Apple’s venerable name. No matter how cutting-edge their products were, they couldn’t make them sexy. The iPhone, after all, was the first smartphone that captured the public’s attention and wasn’t written off as too expensive/too businesslike for “normal people” to be seen with, despite its relatively limited feature set at the time of its release. All it needed was a pretty touchscreen, a sleek design and interface, a rather subpar sound system and the Apple touch.

What I find interesting now is that there’s been a glut of tablet news lately. (Yes, that last link is to an article about very shaky rumors of a Google-branded tablet.) These companies know the Apple tablet is coming. They’re trying to steal Apple’s thunder by showing that what they’re doing isn’t all that special–others are doing it too. They don’t want the tablet space to suddenly be dominated by whatever Apple’s releasing. But will it work? Obviously this depends on how well Apple can maintain their freshness image, and the press attention they get for it–when it does come, it’ll be the denouement of literally half a decade of speculation, so clearly they’ll make at least some people happy regardless.

What I wonder is: can any other company ever manage to capture the shine that Apple represents? Google certainly has a bit of it, but they’ve yet to be seriously tested in the hardware marketplace, and the Nexus One is hardly a groundbreaker (despite its luminary status as a Google phone, and the fact that Google deliberately made its bootloader unlockable!). Microsoft certainly doesn’t have it–their entire corporate image just exudes mundane. So who can?

This most recent change consists of a revamp for Facebook’s already-substantial privacy settings. This change didn’t actually affect anyone’s settings who didn’t tell it to; users were greeted with an unavoidable menu asking them if they wanted to keep their old settings or switch them to new, simplified privacy categories–the default of which in a number of them was “Everyone”.

This is, to be perfectly fair, not something I really have a problem with. While “Everyone” was preselected for some users (UPDATE: apparently not all, since for some at least, it was set to Original Settings), they gave you all the information you need to decide whether that was actually a good thing. Plus, I get why they’re doing it; they want all the data they have on their users to be available to search engines and marketers so they can monetize it, and so they can position themselves as the search result that people might want to come up on Google searches for their users’ names. Monetizing profile data without incurring the wrath of privacy advocates is something they’ve been doing for years through, among other things, their own targeted advertising network (the one that’s known for selling sex to men and weight loss to women), the ill-conceived and ill-fated Beacon, Facebook Connect, and the notorious ads that use friend connections to make it appear as though a user’s friends endorse a product.

Many of Facebook’s users tend to forget that Facebook is neither free nor intended as a public service. They’re in the game to make money, and the data they’ve amassed on their users is worth a fortune to the right people. With that in mind, I don’t really blame them for encouraging their users to make their profile data public. (As long as, y’know, they’re not doing anything shady on the side in complete violation of their privacy policy.)

On the other hand, I imagine many of their users neither take the time to learn about how far their profile data can go nor care about the issue, and might very well absently click their way through the menu without thinking about what “Everyone” actually means. Frankly, I have little sympathy for those users, but the EFF disagrees. I would be quite interested in statistics on how many users actually changed their settings to Everyone as a result of this menu–those would presumably be the ones who just didn’t want to be bothered and thought “yeah, whatever”.

It just goes to show: as always, there is no replacement for a smart user. Internet companies will monetize however they can. It’s up to users to decide where they want their data to go, or if they even care.

Edited: Fixed a minor typo. Also, I’ve received reports that Everyone wasn’t always preselected, which is quite significant for the “yeah, whatever” cases.

No matter how secure your system is, there’s never a replacement for a well-educated user who knows to at least be wary of untrusted software packages. While a smart security framework can make a user pause before making a mistake, it’s ultimately still at the user’s mercy. (Though having such a system in place is certainly much better than not having one, or providing a false sense of security.) A Linux user who joyfully installs every package offered is really in no safer a position than… well, the majority of Windows users.

Except in this case it clearly isn’t healthy. The App Store has attracted quite a bit of negative press in recent months for its seemingly arbitrary, bizarre, anticompetitive and possibly even politically motivated submission rejections.

These rejections represent a fatal flaw of the system that dooms it to always being a subpar and unethically managed package manager.

Let’s step back.

For years in the Linux world, we’ve relied on package management to handle software installation and removal. We install our OS as a distribution from some sort of organization, which could be an actual company that makes money or just a hacker releasing software in their spare time. The important thing about installing software in Linux is that without some form of automation, it’s a pain–you would have to compile your software yourself after looking up all of its dependencies, a time-consuming process that really doesn’t make sampling software easy or fun.

So, to ease that process, the distributor of the OS runs servers that your machine can download software from, automatically handling dependencies and keeping track of what’s installed where on your system and what software uses what assets. Package management has only improved over the years, as software libraries expanded and user demand grew. Today, it couldn’t be easier to install a program in Ubuntu; all you have to do is fire up the Ubuntu Software Center, browse, click install, and enter your password.

But package management does have its drawbacks. There’s a bit of a security risk–while it’s pretty easy to use cryptography to reasonably guarantee that no one’s breaking into the server and sending you malicious software, you can’t know for certain that the distributor isn’t doing nasty things (and while I’m willing to bet there aren’t many users who audit all the source code of everything they install on their machines, releasing everything as source code still gives you the ability to do so, which there’s a lot to be said for). But by far the biggest one is that you’re completely dependent on the distributor for software availability. If something you want isn’t in there, or if it’s not up to date enough, there’s not much you can do besides try to manually install it, which tends to muck things up.

The App Store’s fatal flaw is refusing to allow independent distribution channels. Allowing them instantaneously removes the biggest issue package managers have by freeing developers to distribute their products their own way, instead of having to go through Apple. If such a thing were allowed, Apple could further create incentives for developers to produce software for them by not taking a cut of the profits (or maybe even taking it anyway through licensing agreements), thus enriching the platform. It’s how Microsoft became successful–by allowing developers tremendous freedom with their development frameworks and leaving the market open to grow according to demand. It would even force Apple to clean up their own act in order to compete with them (though that can hardly be seen as a good reason from their perspective).

But the iPhone is a very heavily locked down platform, which only ever gained the App Store to quell demand that was being satisfied by jailbreaking, before it became one of Apple’s main moneymakers when it proved enormously popular and lucrative. It’s fundamentally changed an industry, and yet it remains a painful symbol of exactly how unfair it is to have a single entity acting as the entire channel through which users can install software. Some users still jailbreak, but others continue to use only what Apple makes available, and that’s not good for anyone–not for Apple’s users, not for developers hoping to make money off of them, and not for Apple’s reputation.

If I were an iPhone user or programmer, I wouldn’t be happy. I’d be demanding that Apple open up the platform immediately to 3rd party distributors, not just developers. That, to me, is a prerequisite for software development. I don’t want to be at the mercy of a company that gets to decide what software I use on a machine that I purchased–especially if I hope to make money off of selling software for it. The Linux world figured it out years ago, and there’s no reason why Apple can’t. Even other mobile OS developers figured it out–Android and Palm both allow it.

Is it just too lucrative for Apple to give up? Maybe. It’s still more than enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to touch their development platform. I can do better. And until Apple cleans up their act, so can you.

New URL for my feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/perpetualstudent/eEFV.

Maybe he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he just wants to go back to the good old days when a news establishment couldn’t be challenged by people working in their basements. Or maybe he genuinely does believe he can completely block off the WSJ’s content with a pay wall and have people actually pay for something they’ve always gotten for free and could just as easily continue to get for free from elsewhere.

But for better or worse, the Internet is here to stay. He’d be better off, y’know, innovating. Instead of shouting about pay walls and blocking his sources of traffic and trying to force his competitors to do the same thing to avoid losing his readership over it.

By the way, traditional news companies can innovate. The New York Times is doing an excellent job of this, even releasing public APIs for other developers making mashups from their content! The BBC even released an open source Javascript library for other web developers to benefit from their work!

But if Rupert Murdoch wants to try to wish away the Internet, I’ve no problem with that. I’ll just keep reading the NYTimes, giving them advertising revenue and link traffic. I might even buy a subscription. Maybe even through TimesReader, which runs on all platforms where Adobe AIR does.