It’s a rant, I wrote it because it bugged me.

A little story made the rounds on the Internet recently which seems to imply that come Mac OS 10.7 only applications that have been approved by Apple and distributed through their app store (for OS X) would be allowed to run on the computer, so no more downloading shady software from parts of the Internet just because you want. Apple won’t let you.

As it goes with stories like these the moment it “broke” the slagging started with people on the one side saying “Evil Apple” while others were more relaxed and essentially said: “Apple would never do that”, and a few even thought of this as a good idea.

So what are the odds that Apple would do something like this? From Apple’s perspective this actually makes sense, they are already controlling the iPhone and iPod environment via the app store. Sure, you can jailbreak your iPhone and then use any kind of app on it that you want, even install a completely new OS on it, but for the majority of people what Apple approves is what they will eat.

But iPhones and iPods (and iPads now) are one thing, a Computer is something else, aren’t we all just deeply excited to write our own programs, fiddle with code and have full control over every minute part of the computer? If you say yes you fall probably in the 1% of the population that actually does this. The rest will still be shaking their heads right now.

Still though, people aren’t quite used to the idea that they have to go through their Computer vendor to get software, but if Apple would want to do this, how would they go about it?

Firstly, they have already trained a lot of people to accept the app store as the arbiter of software to find. In turn for many smaller developer it has turned into a successful distribution method, so why not expand it?

Secondly, Apple could open an Appstore for OS X, once it is open they could make it “difficult” for apps that haven’t come from the App store by simply making it annoying. Right now if you download an application from the net and start it up for the first time OS X warns you that this application was downloaded from the Internet on a given date and that OS X isn’t sure you should really run this. Now imagine they would do this everytime you start an app, added with a note that trusted applications can be found in the app store?

Three, once people are used of using the appstore to find their apps instead of the internet, force them to go there. The majority won’t care as they are already used to it anyway and the few geeks that will be pissed off can be ignored.

So what about the public backlash if Apple would be doing this? I predict slim to none. The people who care about open systems are a minority. The average computer user “eats” what he is given, they don’t scour the internet for applications or try to custom build their own. If Apple shows them a big enough carrot in the form of the appstore combined with some nice fear mongering with regard to the dangers of the internet they can get people to buy into it.

Will they do it? Who knows, Steve Jobs maybe. But if you look at the way Apple has been developing it’s products it just seems to make some kind of sense. There was a huge outcry when the iPod came with unexchangable batteries, there was a huge outcry when Apple insisted on only letting applications on the iPhone that came via the appstore and again when they did the battery thing with the new Laptops (me being one of the by the way). Has it hurt Apple? Not in the least, they are selling more devices than they ever have before and they will continue to do so.

The one thing all the Gees and Free Software advocates forget is something very simple: Most people already treat their computers like appliances, if Apple can give them that feeling on the computer while still letting them do what they want they will like it.

Last night I had a wonderful example on how limiting online communication can be.

The whole thing started out when I noticed that Raincoaster had a poppy on her Twitter Avatar. I sent her a (private) direct message on twitter saying (in my mind at least mockingly) that I was surprised she actually did show a poppy.

The reply that came back was essentially: “There are many things you don’t know about me.” Which is fine, I don’t. I continued in a (to me) sarcastic tone and replied:

Shocking, Raincoaster giving in to peer pressure AND promoting Groupthink.

And this is where things took a turn to the utterly bizarre.

If you ever read or talk to / with her you realize very quickly that she is, how shall we call it, sarcastic and outspoken. Things that show up on her radar that she does not approve off she relentlessly mocks.

So imagine my surprise when the next reply was not a private message but a public one, and not only was it a snarky one but she also proceeded to retweet some of my replies (My tweets are private). Next thing I know some of her “friends” decided to kick me in the shins too, that even though they pretty much only knew (and retweeted) her tweets to me. So at best someone got only half the story.

The main accusation around this was that I didn’t bother to ask her as to WHY she was showing it, which is funny, because in the entire two preceding messages there was really no intend to seriously discuss this. In turn I could also say that she never asked what my problem with the poppy might be.

Now clearly, my remark seems to have hit some kind of nerve with her, which is fine; you don’t always know how people react to things you say, and if she would have indicated what she thought about my remark we could have easily cleared it up. Instead though she chose to make me a target for her “friends” and put words and opinions into my mouth that I don’t have (if you want to read my opinion on what I think of Remembrance Day and similar holidays, you can read it here).

The end result for me was a simple one. I ended up closing down the lines of communications this morning after sleeping over it. I removed her from my networks and I blocked her.

No, this is not about me being miffed that she shows a poppy or that she felt hurt or insulted by my remarks, it’s about the simple fact that she decided to take a private matter into the public domain in order to… Well, whatever it was / is that she decided to make out of it.

A few minutes ago, before I started writing this, she decided to kick after me yet once again. It is “funny” how she decided to make a big deal out of it that I am German and thus my opinion doesn’t count and any criticism of Remembrance Day by default should automatically be disregarded. If someone reduces me to my place of birth, how could I ever deal with that? Racism in reverse, but I am sure she’d disagree and would say it’s nothing like that. Let me channel my female here for a second: Whatever.

It is also interesting that her second argument was essentially: “Because you work for a large multinational, you have absolutely no right to criticize anybody in the DTES, many of whom who have served.” I love these kinds of “holier than thou” attitudes, but having been involved with some people in the DTES poverty industryThe Georgia Straight has a piece that echos many of my thoughts on the subject of the military.

Here it is, 2009 in all it’s HD glory. Enjoy, make sure to watch full screen.

It is a bit with sadness that I hear of the demise of CompuServe today… Back in 1989 (at the age of 15) I ended up getting an account on CompuServe, I spent an entire summer on there suffering severe jetlag, as the majority of people weren’t in Germany but in the US.

I also, fondly I might add, remember that I pissed some guy who showed up in a German forum with his Doctor Title proudly attached to his username. I dressed him down as it struck me as “show offish” and didn’t quite fit in the online world of CompuServe (and a little while later NewsGroups).

This, kids, was before the Internet Browser came along. It was an age where you were using command line tools to even navigate through CompuServe. Later on they came out with a Windows client that made things a bit easier, but I mostly used the command line edition as it was more flexible… Yeah, even back then, before I met Linux I was more interested in typing my way around the networks than clicking on buttons.

The end of CompuServe is somewhat bitter sweet to me. I left CompuServe after AOL bought them out, things changed, and not for the better. It ranks in there with the FIDO network for me, another thing I used heavily in the late 1980s early 1990s to “find my way around”. I guess most people who will end up reading this will have no idea what FIDO or even a BBS was, but back then, it was THE thing. You wanted warez? You got access through friends to a BBS, you wanted to send emails, you got something that was connected to FIDO.

My local FIDO note was part of the MausNet (Link in German) network in Germany, more precisely, Stuttgart II. I actually knew the SysOp who ran it literally out of his parents basement and we ended up playing Magic and a few other things. he also drove an old Mercedes with a Star Trek Sticker on it (“My other vehicle is a Starship”).

I just notice they still have a website up: maus.net.

It’s odd really, I haven’t used CompuServe or a BBS in a long long time, and yet, I look back at this and I just realize how much fun these were. We “abused” the German ISDN protocol, as we had figured out that via the data channel (the one that transmits the caller ID and other connection info) we were able to keep data flowing without having to pay for the connection. In Germany you had to pay by “unit”. Before they privatized the telephone business and turned it into the Telekom there was a “day rate” and an “evening rate”, but the data channel wasn’t part of that, so I was able to keep a connection (albeit at only 5K/s) open 24/7 without getting dinged… Good times I’d say

It was also before the masses started discovering the Internet, the tone was different…

In the mid nineties I switched over to a local ISP, back then the Internet in Germany was still mostly run by the Universities. The cool thing about this was that there were only a dozen or so peering points in the German Internet and I ended up knowing every single admin of these notes. If something didn’t route right I was able to talk to them and get the problem fixed. No crap of calling up a clueless tech support person, I was able to go straight to the source (literally).

I also knew the senior SysAdmin at the University Stuttgart who was also (at that time) the “owner” of the Stuttgart peering point, I was several times in the server room “touching” the Internet….

Yeah, I admit I miss the times. As fucked up as CompuServe became after the takeover by AOL (and AOLs invasion of NewsGroups, I remember that one too), the Internet was still mostly left to a few people….

Am I a snob for thinking back those times? Yeah, probably. There are many good things that a broader acceptance of the Internet has brought, the problem is, in my estimate, we don’t use it.

So yes, sorry to hear that CompuServe has gone the way of the Dodo, I had good times there, I had a good time on the internet back then in general, these days? Signal to Noise is clearly in favour of the noise…. Sad.

It seems since I wrote the original piece about the “swine flu scare” on Saturday things have taken a life of their own.

There have been quite a few “horror” stories in the media, not to mention the repeat mention of the “Spanish Flu” of 1918 and the millions of dead and the clear implication that the current outbreak could reach the same proportions.

Now Raul has pointed out an interesting article with regards to Twitter and how it is actually leading to even more panic (not that this surprises me).

If my reading list on Twitter was only restricted to the individuals who had produced the posts above, by now I would be extremely scared and probably feeling a great urge to post a scary Twitter update myself.

[...]

The problem is that while thousands of concerned and misinformed individuals took to Twitter to ventilate their fears, government and its agencies were still painfully missing from the social media space;

[...]

I think it’s only a matter of time before that the next generation of cyber-terrorists – those who are smart about social media, are familiar with modern information flows, and are knowledgeable about human networks – take advantage of the escalating fears over the next epidemic and pollute the networked public sphere with scares that would essentially paralyze the global economy. Often, such tactics would bring much more destruction than the much-feared cyberwar and attacks on physical – rather than human – networks.

The article makes a few good points, but the latter makes the mistake to think that this kind of abuse could be prevented.

Over the years I observed a few trends which Twitter now increases.

First of all there is the “participation” aspect. 9/11 was probably the first live broadcast terrorist event in human history, something that went around the globe in near realtime, with people participating online and at work, giving a play by play. Everybody was part of the event, even if you were thousands of kilometres away.

In the following months this became even more obvious as people repeatedly “felt” for the losses of the family members who had lost someone. Having outright emotional outbursts and depression.

This all comes down to the fact that we want to belong. With human face to face interactions having been greatly reduced by modern technologies and the way we live (from “hiding” in your car on the way to work, to living in large houses that are mostly self contained) people try to find other ways of emotionally connect. Part of this is the “fake” emotional attachments to completely strangers whose stories are broadcast in the news or the Internet.

Secondly, people are easily scared, very few people understand how a pandemic works, what makes things so dangerous and mostly how this could impact them directly. The examples given in the article linked above are symptomatic for this. The media is mentioning pigs (swine) and people but leaves a lot of additional information out that would calm people down. After all, if it doesn’t fit in the two minute blurp on TV or the 30 second read on the news website nobody will bother. Not to mention: “When it bleeds, it leads”.

Thirdly, the limited nature of twitter, as the article points out 140 characters don’t allow you to give a lot of context, though there is a bigger problem. People who are concerned first and foremost want to warn their “friends”, because of the “cred” that comes with having “befriended” someone people tend to be less suspicious of the information being presented and so a “Ponzi Scheme” of misinformation is being kicked off. This is were the amplification factor of Twitter comes into play.

Even people who may be skeptical will most likely think to be better “safe than sorry” and will contribute to the misinformation. After all, a “friend” warned them.

This is one of the downfalls of social media. Where there is a clear authority in the news media (in the past anyway) that you could question, in social media it all depends on the trust you give the person on the other end. The more scared you are though, the higher your bullshit threshold, because if in doubt….

If the media wouldn’t have been as sensationalistic about the outbreak over the weekend, my suspicion is that Twitter itself would be less flooded with these warnings and misinformation. As the media is continues feeding the fears with their talk about pandemics, millions of deaths etc. we have reached a perfect positive feedback loop in misinformation.

As people will “foster” more and more relationships through social media, the always connected, always plugged in and always short, way of life will continue to amplify these kinds of misinformation.

Unless people learn to be less panicky and more determined to get context this Swine Flu was just the beginning.

It seems almost daily newspapers in North America are shuttering their doors, in Canada TV Stations are being closed down, so far mostly in smaller towns but how much longer before large markets are being shuttered as well?

In Canada, CanWest, the parent to the National Post and Global TV (as well as Canada.com) appears to be in it’s death throws.

I am a bit torn over the news of the demise of the news media.

First and foremost the news media in the context of TV has long sold out to “headline grabbers” the “slang” “News at 11″ to denote useless crap and non-news is evidence of this.

Meanwhile in Canada (and from what I have read) the newspaper business underwent consolidation which means many smaller newspapers were fed most of their “news” from Headoffice and not sourced locally. Worse though is that most newspapers have turned to rebroadcasters for Wire Services like Reuters etc. Which means the real value of having the printed word and staff resources has gone out of the window. Instead of utilizing the power of a newsroom and staff reporters who have the time to follow up on leads, newspapers have reduced themselves to soap boxes for news bites.

The Internet, with it’s almost instantaneous “broadcasting” ability has not only beaten the newspapers but also the TV news, and where newspapers had the ability to be something else and make a difference they rather “gave in” to the arms race that is the Internet and lost… badly.

Of course this is nothing new. I met over the years people and reporters who still thought newspapers were important because things like Watergate broke in the New York Times and not on a TV station.

But those people missed the point back then and they do miss the point now. Just by it’s nature a newspaper could never compete with real time media like TV and the Internet. Sure, wire services, with people sitting in every remote corner of the world can punch out a news piece, but this is not reporting, nor is it what really is the strength of the newspapers. That is, in deep research and analysis that goes beyond yesterdays news.

The Internet is beating both TV and the Newspapers in the news reporting business. There was an earthquake somewhere? I read about it first in Twitter before it even hits the major websites. I do not know the details but I know it has happened. TV waits for the news hour (or a scroller at the bottom) and Newspapers may or may not get to it tomorrow if they don’t miss the deadline.

I call this post an “obituary of sorts” because even though the Newspapers are only put into their grave now the death has been going on for a long time. When the Newspapers decided to fight TV on “equal ground”, cut their newsroom staff down and turned themselves into a rebroadcaster of wire services they sealed their death.

I wish I could say I will miss the newspapers, but the reality is over the last ten years they have become less and less useful, not because something more superior (e.g. Blogs or the Internet itself) filled their role, but because they gave up. They came to a duel with a sniper and only brought a pocket knife. It wasn’t fair, it isn’t pretty but they are done for.

So no, this is not an obituary on the newspapers, if anything it is an obituary on a well informed public, on the ability for a few people to make a difference. Just imagine for a moment if Watergate would have happened in the 2000s. It would have been published on a blog, by two anonymous guys that nobody knows. It would have been dismissed as some crooks cooking something up. No harm would have come, no inquiry etc.

Just imagine how the future will look like without a respectable organization that really does work for the people. There is a reason why the newspapers once were considered the fourth power… It’s too sad that we were willing to sell one of the foundations of our democracy for a quick buck and quick news…. Just imagine we couldn’t know what Paris Hilton was doing tonight right when she’s doing it.

Yes, the last thing was sarcastic.

Rest In Peace, Fourth Power and News Organizations.