you want to start something?

Asshat of the month award for July goes to Stan Beer of ITWire in Australia for being nothing more than a Dvorak channel.

Reading the essay titled Exploiting the iPhone on the website of security firm Independent Security Evaluators, two things are crystal clear. First, the iPhone is actually a computer. Second, Apple is about to get a taste of the security nightmares that have plagued Microsoft for the past 13 years since the Internet went mainstream.

Okay Stan, let’s see what you’re saying. By this logic, the Mac, which is also a computer, but one which is open source AND has for the last 7 years shipped with Terminal and Developer tools should have given Apple a taste of the security nightmares Microsoft has brought upon themselves. Apple have been shipping around 600 000 of these Mac computers a quarter until recently when that figure went up to a million which means there’s probably 10 million+ Mac OS X machines out there which are ripe for these exploits you fear so much?
But that hasn’t really happened. Has it. Come on, be honest.

Why is this such a big deal for Apple?

Did you make a big scary woo-woo when Palm bought the Treo? What about when the Psion devices moved their Symbian OS onto phones? Ah, the iPhone is going to be a game changer? It’s going to revolutionise the phone market? It’s also going to revolutionise the Spam and Malware market?

No, Stan, there’s always going to be asshats running underprotected versions of Windows and that low hanging fruit is far too tempting.

Tags: Commentary, iPhone by mj
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Critics of the iPhone have been screaming about the lack of MAPI support (as if that really mattered) whereas the biggest noise I’ve heard from developers regarding the iPhone is the lack of an official SDK.

Of course, the most obvious reason for no SDK is simply that It ain’t ready yet. iPhone obviously runs a subset of the Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” operating system due to it’s use of CoreAnimation and there’s currently no iteration of that operating system which could be considered “release-worthy”. so it’ll be a while before we get a release SDK and therefore a longer while before we can develop proper applications. Another minor thing to consider is that Apple wants to make sure there’s enough of a user base to support application development. That’s something not to be sniffed at and I’m 100% sure they’re working on some of the bugs that people have raised.
But then it’s not just the software ecosystem which is important, there’s also an important hardware ecosystem to consider.

Walk into any electronics store and you’ll be inundated with products for your iPod. Chargers for the car. Transmitters for FM radio. Microphones.

Back in the late 90s I used a Newton. I had the keyboard, I had modems and memory expansion cards for it. I had an ethernet card and much later a wireless card. Web browsing was possible but hardly a pleasure (heck, the machine has 4 MB of DRAM). Terminal usage was only enjoyable with the keyboard plugged in. The handwriting recognition wasn’t a heap of fun to be honest. I would place the Newt before me, in landscape mode and the keyboard behind it, using the display edges of the Newt as wrist rests. It meant for some very comfortable working while on planes and the Newton as it was developing quickly made my DELL Latitude completely redundant (and even my Powerbook began to get lonely).
The hardware ecosystem I can see for the iPhone will include hardware keyboards. It will include both a portable version and a docking version. Sure – you can’t hook up a phone like a flash drive and edit files on it (damn shame!) but that might change in the future.

There’s a few months before it’s released here in the UK and let it be said, I’ll be ditching my current carrier, Orange, in preference for whomever carries the iPhone – no qualms or romance about it. I’ve been with Orange for more than 7 years….and BOOM, like a rat out of an aquaduct.

Tags: Commentary, iPhone, infurious by mj
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Mr. Burns: I’ll keep it short and sweet — Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Tags: Commentary, Startup, infurious by mj
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Every see those courtroom dramas where there’s a beautiful woman’s life on the line and her lawyer (who’s secretly in love with her) is fighting to keep her out of the electric chair? And there’s usually a state prosecutor who has slick back hair and a weasel’s countenance? You know to look at the guy that he’s not going to play fair and, true to his typecasting, he makes a statement which demeans the beautiful defendant and raises “Objection” from the lawyer and horrified mutters from the jury and audience. The facts may be true, but the way they’re presented is sleazy and underhand. We know not to trust him. It’s not fair play. He’s playing dirty. He’s a bad man. He just wants the pretty girl in jail, he’s not interested in justice or fair play. It’s all about the numbers.

Last Thursday, some technology powerhouses were on a panel at a media pow-wow and Sony Head Sir Howard Stringer claimed that Steve Jobs wants a world where only he makes money and further Jobs is a hypocrite for claiming record companies are the greedy ones.

These facts are probably true.

But consider the source.

Stringer’s issue comes not from Jobs’ hypocrisy or for his desires for wealth and power but from his own thwarted dreams. Sony, now famous for deliberately installing a rootkit in their customers computers (though they’re now suing the company they hired to create it) has all but decided that competing in the MP3 player marketspace is simpyly too hard and have come out with an iPod-compatible speaker dock. They’ll still continue to push their proprietary formats through their own fugly designs but it must represent a certain amount of crow-eating to now start to compete with Logitech and  Altec -Lansing in this space.

When challenged on his statement, the Sony head made a beep-beep noise as he quickly backed away from his statement.

Sony calling Apple ‘greedy’ is the absolute definition of hypocrisy, simply put the pot calling the kettle black.

Now it’s possible that Sony’s Stringer was involved in some sort of internal struggle where he was identifying Sony’s own avarice as conditional on the market, on competition, on software and music pirates and the price of pork-bellies while decrying Apple’s Jobs because the latter obviously has a “greedy” quality which makes him a bad person, mmmkay?

So, in essence, if Sony were selling the #1 music player of all time, they’d be less greedy.

Does anyone remember the Walkman?

Tags: Commentary, Mac, iPhone by mj
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TUAW has a rant about web sites made specifically for iPhones and how it’s wrong!

Nothing irks me more than browsing to a site only to be greeted with a page that, based on the user agent my browser supplies, keeps me out. Try going to some of these new iPhone webapps in Safari 3 on a Mac or PC and that’s just what you’ll encounter. Why? These apps will run just fine on my desktop, and yet I am left out of the fun.

It’s a fair point. Just to choose a very very nice-looking example, FlickIM, which provides AIM/iChat services in a slick AJAX interface. It uses browser detection to lock those of us not on iPhones out.  That kinda sucks.

This is precisely what subdomains were invented for. And directories.

I don’t want to be snippy here but I’d rather be directed to http://iphone.somedomain.com or http://www.somedomain.com/iphone if I’m going to see iPhone-optimised content. Don’t direct me – the version of Safari in the iPhone is meant to be the real Web after all.

Tags: Commentary, Mac, iPhone by mj
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