U.S. District Judge George H. Wu is, quite possibly, a very unpopular man right now. He overturned the conviction of Lori “MySpace mom” Drew and, many would say, took away the justice that her victim, Megan Meier, deserved.

I am not going to discuss the finer points of bullying and trolling. I am not going to comment on the ways in which people like Drew disgust me, or the judgements that I find fit for behaviour such as hers. I feel for the Meiers and I wish justice is handed down on Drew for what she did.

Be not blinded in the pursuit of justice and let reasoning, not passion, be the guide.

The pursuit of justice is a noble one, and nobody can be blamed for trying to make the world a better place. Justice is blind, and justice blinds its followers, often making them forget the greater goods they should be serving. Trying to serve justice in the name of a 13-year old makes even the best of us forget what kinds of things we may be bringing down in the process. Convicting Lori Drew on a felony charge for violating the MySpace terms of use would have been a most terrible way to deliver justice.

“If this verdict stands,” Mr. Grossman said, “it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions.”

— Andrew M. Grossman quoted in the New York Times

The EFF agrees that letting this conviction stand on such grounds is detrimental. Many that are angry today that Drew walks free (for now) are simply letting their passions get the better of them. It is easy to jump on a bandwagon and cry against today’s decision, but please take a step back and think about the implications a bit more.

UPDATE: It seems a lot of people are upset about the overturn without actually knowing what she was acquitted of. Drew was not on trial for cyber-bullying, but for computer fraud because she violated the MySpace ToS. It was a stretched attempt to have her go down on some charge, whatever it may be, because there is no anti-cyber-bullying law that could bring her to justice otherwise. It would have made the Internet landscape very unpleasant for everyone, for the reasons quoted above.

Apple does not give its users as much freedom as other software vendors

Correction: Apple does not give its powerusers as much freedom as other software vendors.

Owning the Experience

The point is, Apple wants to own the experience. We have seen this with the iPhone, with the App Store, even with Apple retail. Apple knows a lot of users are not computer-savvy, and Apple does not want its users to be computer-savvy. It is not a matter of keeping them in the dark, as many would say, but rather an acknowledgement that a computer is, for many, as banal a tool as any household appliance, and it should be out of the way. Owning the experience means that Apple wants to minimize the kinds of things that go wrong on their platform, and so they put control mechanisms in place. The App Store, for all the issues that developers have about it, does improve the iPhone platform in some important ways. More importantly, though, Apple is making sure applications with poor performance do not go on the platform. Even if only subconsciously, having a “feature-phone” that works 95% of the time without a hitch is a great thing for the company that makes that phone, not just the customer/user.

Input Managers and Operating System Hacks

On Mac OS X, Apple has been interested in removing Input Managers for quite some time now. And, by all accounts, Snow Leopard is tightening that noose. Input Managers have been the way for hacks to alter core operating system functionality for a long time, and many have spoken against them. So Apple is phasing them out, and I reckon most people using this functionality have some kind of Safari enhancements installed — at least given the variety and number of such enhancements available.

Safari and Plugins

One has to wonder, then, why Apple is not providing an official mechanism for plugins in Safari. A plugin API would surely diminish the interest in misusing Input Managers while making Safari more interesting to people that stick to Firefox only because of its limitless extension potential. My guess is that it is still a matter of owning the experience. Safari is an Apple product aimed at the general user, a complicated piece of software that is, potentially, the way malware uses to enter a system. And security is not even at the forefront here, the experience of using Safari is core. Plugins often have memory leaks that eat up the whole RAM and plenty of swap—I woke up to machines frozen because Firefox ate up everything, including disk space due to swapping. Maybe it is the browser, maybe a plugin, but the average end user, for whom the computer is just another appliance, does not care about that distinction. He or she only cares about the crashed browser that took away their tabs with all the information they have entered. He or she will curse Safari, curse Apple, and soon enough switch browsers. And respect for Apple will be lost, since one of their most visible applications is such crap. These things slowly add up in customers’ minds, and soon you find yourself in a position like Microsoft’s.

Competition

Firefox and Google Chrome have plugin APIs. It may be that Apple is thinking about one as well for safari. After all, with the new crash protection in Safari 4, it may be possible to isolate all the plugins and make sure the browser does not crash. It is certainly more in tune with Apple’s minimalist, “it just works” approach to keep Safari simple and plugin-free, something that works for most users.

The following has been tested on the WWDC ‘09 Snow Leopard build 10A380. SIMBL is a hack, and you should only use it if you know what you are doing. And while it has been fine on Tiger and Leopard for the most part—except for certain issues that some extensions may have presented—it has not been tested extensively on Snow Leopard, and by default it is ‘broken’ because, while SIMBL is a 32-bit extension, Safari (which is what I assume most people are using SIMBL with) runs in 64-bit mode on Snow Leopard by default. So the fix is simple: right-click on Safari, select Get Info and check the option to Open in 32-bit mode.

You can now restart Safari and you will regain SIMBL support. The same process can be applied to other applications that you want SIMBL in, but where it seems to have stopped working—like Terminal.

I needed a way to display my text messages online, so I made a quick PHP ‘application’ to do just that. Maybe someone else needs something like that, so I thought of posting it online. You can read more about it here.

Nothing irks me more than having to switch from my RSS reader when I am deep into reading my feeds. A lot of sites want to force readers to the web version of the content, and while I may understand the reasoning behind it, I do not always feel like I should agree with that reasoning. For me, reading the RSS feed for a particular website is all about getting straight to the content, largely ignoring everything else. So if I am not allowed to do it from my RSS reader, I will do it courtesy of Instapaper.

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In the interest of posterity, I wanted to retrieve some of the SMSes stored on my iPhone and do things with them like parse them into something resembling the SMS.app view that I can peruse whenever I want. Getting to the file that stores them is easy if you have a jailbroken iPhone, and even simpler, one would argue, with Pádraig’s iPhone Backup Extractor.

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Big record labels can fuck with us in many ways, and lately they seem to corrupt our governments and get their work done through tax payers’ money. There is irony in that, getting abused with your own money, and only a devious mind can come up with such an elegant way of screwing the people over. It does not work as foolproof as they would have liked, but it is working well enough it seems. We are sitting here, taking it for the most part. I hardly see an appropriate response from consumers, except for piracy itself (which some use to make a point about how irrelevant the labels have become), and I have yet to see one of the big four shut down because of lack of sales. Let them blame piracy if they want, I pray that sharing is the reason said label folds. If they call it a “War on Piracy”, well, we should come with the biggest guns we have.

So go out there and download all the music you want. Avoid buying from labels. Share it with friends, family, with strangers. You need to do a bit of research, yes, but it is not much to ask. After all, music is art, and art enriches us, so we may go the extra mile. Find out if your artist has a label; if their music on iTunes or Amazon is through that label, or not. Let your favourite artists know how much you love their music, and that you wish you did not have to get it from a torrent site—but that you will be there at their next show, and you love the tee-shirt you just got from their store.

And maybe we should all band together and pick a date when we could mail nice envelopes with the words “Fuck You” printed on them to all the major labels, their lackeys, and their respective peons in the government. It seems all the intelligent talk that many have engaged in has not taught anybody anything, and I have to assume record label executives are too dumb to get it.

So I think it is time to put them out of business. For good, put the whole model to rest. We thank them for their time, could they all cash out and go buy islands and disappear already? We will take it from here. Because we can, I think we are ready.

Power to the people.

Despite what various cartels have been trying to show, an IP address is not the equivalent of a phone number, in that it is assigned to and will always return the same person. This is not merely a distinction between dynamic and static IP-addressing. And while the ISPs are likely to have logs and details about who leased a given IP for some period of time, we would be assuming that these logs are tamper-proof, which is obviously not the case. It does not matter why an ISP might fudge the logs—if Police officers are susceptible of corruption, why would an IT Junior Admin be less inclined?

There is no equivalent for WiFi in the phone analogy. I guess I could try to go by my neighbour’s window with a wireless handset and see if it pairs up with their phone base station and call from their house, but there is now standard protocol for that kind of thing. Not, say, having a Toshiba, a Dell and a Mac all hooked to the same DLink wifi base-station, where they just work, courtesy of 802.11 a/b/g/n. So phones do not suffer from the same kind of danger that WiFi exposes, in terms of others using your connection for their illicit (or not) reasons.

I agree more needs to be done to educate and ‘force’ the average consumer to properly secure their WiFi connection and reduce the risk of drive-by users, but from that to Police-like intervention by private companies there is a BIG JUMP (Jesper from Sweden has a lot more to say about this.) I mean, why put the pressure and the onus on consumers? If TJX can lose my credit card information and have only cursory responsibility for it I would think I should be able to lose control of my Internet connection, that I pay for, any damn time I so please. But can I profess innocence as easily as some of these companies and their thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers? Unlikely. Because, after all, it is only a $3000 fine to get rid of an otherwise nasty and cumbersome affair in court. Much like a monthly payment would be a way to make sure that your store does not get vandalized. I know how this is happening, but it is not an excuse.

Do I have to become an ISP, now? Will I have to monitor the friends I let use my WiFi and the rest of my family and make sure they do not do anything someone, somewhere, might have a problem with? Do I keep logs, so when they come knocking, I can tell them who was doing what and when?

Is this deserving of anything else but being called a complete steaming pile of bullshit?

What could Google do?

I was thinking a nearly obvious evolution for Google, at some point, is to take in all the 411 information it can—addresses, phone numbers etc—and store that information as they do business listings. Googling someone’s name could, then, give some location results as to where they live. As an added bonus, people that wanted to own their information could do so, complete with listing their email address (or just a simple contact form that could forward to their real email address, without disclosing it to the person performing the query) and other services. Think instant chat, think finding friends online etc.

It would definitely raise quite a few privacy concerns, quite possibly intractable. Maybe that is why Google has not done this already. On the other hand, we are also talking about a ton of information that Google needs to compile, and there are some technical challenges in developing and providing a safe system for users to claim their identities.

At the end of the day, it would become really easy to find and get (back) in touch with people. It could also enable people to take their privacy to another level, as Google could permit more fine-grained controls over what information is displayed. And I could use my iPhone to easily find where my friend lives, using Google Maps, anytime I wanted to.

EDIT: I know services like Canada411 do something similar, complete with map overlay and whatnot, but it is not a perfect solution. The reason I look at Google for something like this is in their size and resources.

Thanks to the greatest invention in the world – the Internet – we have almost countless ways of communicating with others. Email, IM, Facebook, Twitter etcetera. Most user-centred services out there have a way that enables you to communicate with other users (whether you should or not is a different matter altogether.) And all these Internet-powered mechanisms are in addition to more traditional ones, such as the phone.

But not all of these means are created equal, and some are more annoying than others. This little analysis henceforth is done through the eyes of a somewhat busy university student that has worked a few internships at reputable companies, deals with clients for a number of freelance affairs, and is often involved with peers in group projects and such. So I am not the CEO of a fortune 5 company, and maybe I am not too close to any of Merlin Mann’s personas, but I always have stuff to do. Well, so maybe I might fit with Merlin.

Please keep in mind that most of these thoughts apply to communication in work/business scenarios. When it comes to friends or family, it is easy to ask for a call to be postponed for a more convenient time, but that is not quite so with clients, bosses or colleagues.

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