MacWorld’s Christopher Breen has written an article pondering whether Apple is now on the wrong track.

I have to say, I agree with many of the points he raises, though I think it’s unfair to blame Apple for the ringtones problem (which I’m fairly certain has been imposed on them by the record companies—the same companies, incidentally, who continue to claim that “ripping” your own CDs is illegal).

And as for the iPhone “bricking” thing, I’m sorry Christopher, but you’re plain wrong about the legalities of it. Sure, in the U.S. the Copyright Office has blocked people from trying to use DMCA to protect against phone unlocking. But that does not mean that you, as an iPhone user, are within your rights to do it. It just means that Apple and AT&T cannot use that particular piece of legislation to sue you. They can still write into your contract terms that you may not unlock your phone, and if they’ve done that then the only way around it would be for you to demonstrate that those terms were illegal somehow. You might conceivably try to bring an anti-trust case, but to be honest I’d expect it to be knocked down on the basis that you were free to buy any other smartphone. Without doing that, you’ve breached the terms of your contract.

I also don’t think that Apple should be forced to spend time ensuring that unsupportable hacks will function correctly with their software updates. Plainly they did do some testing, but when it went wrong, what did you expect them to do? Actively support something that they are almost certainly contractually obliged not to? All they could do is warn customers that it might break their phones.

And yes, they could have displayed a warning up front, but they would probably have had to display it to all iPhone users (consider: how do you tell if an iPhone has been hacked, when you don’t know about or have copies of all available hacks, or the time to analyse them?). Warning everyone would have needlessly frightened lots of customers, and that’s a bad thing to do.

As for whether there is a provision for “undoing the damage”, there is. If you pay Apple, they will provide you with another iPhone. Put another way, the cost of rectifying the damage is the same as the cost of a new iPhone, so buy a new iPhone.

This doesn’t even seem unreasonable. In general, to fix an arbitrary problem on a UNIX-based system (or a Windows-based system, for that matter), you need an expert. Experts cost hundreds of dollars an hour. Buying a new iPhone is cheaper.

On the flip-side, should Apple allow people to write iPhone apps? Yes, but only once they are certain that the iPhone can run third-party apps securely (e.g. by running them in a sandbox). Otherwise there’s a risk of iPhone viruses, and we don’t want those.

MacWorld UK are running a quote from F-Secure’s Jarno Neimela, who says:

“The amount of technical information [available about the iPhone] makes it likely that sooner or later someone will create a worm or some other malware… This will create an interesting problem for the security field as the iPhone is currently a closed system and it’s not feasible to provide anti-virus or other third-party security solutions for it.”

Excuse me for pointing this out, but there is absolutely nothing to stop Apple from dealing with such a problem themselves, if they so desire, including—if necessary—providing their own anti-virus technology. There is simply no need for “third-party security solutions”.

My guess is that in such a circumstance Apple would simply push out updates via iTunes that removed the virus from phones and patched the vulnerability that it used to install itself. Even if an update has to wipe the phone completely to get rid of a virus, since users’ data is stored on their Macs or PCs, it only has to synchronise to return things to the way they were before.¹

Moreover, the same reasoning (about the amount of technical information) could be used about the Mac. Where are the hordes of Mac viruses? Oh, that’s right, there aren’t any.

Sure, some jerk will probably write one sooner or later, but the status quo is that there are none². Zip. Zilch. Nada. And there’s much more technical information available about the Mac than there is about the iPhone.

Apparently, Stephen Fry is proudly powered by WordPress. And here I was thinking it was some mysterious combination of Twinings tea and Trebor Extra Strong Mints.

Still, it’s great to see such a witty and amusing chap starting his own blog… though how long is that first post?! I’ll have to file it and read it later. And, as Fry would say, read it I will. He’s been one of my favourite comedians since I first saw Blackadder II and A Bit of Fry and Laurie back in the 1980s.

MacNN are reporting that Apple wants to charge the same price for iTunes downloads in all European countries.

That, of course, is the last thing any sane individual wants. I don’t want iTunes purchases to cost me some price set in Euros, because that translates to a random price depending on exchange rate fluctuations and the fee(s) my bank want to charge me for spending Euros rather than Sterling. I want to know how much it’s going to cost me before I click the button, not the next time I get a credit card statement!

Of course, the EU are right that it’s illegal for Apple to prevent consumers from buying from other member states’ iTunes stores. But Apple (and, actually, the music companies) have a problem because of the music companies’ prior practice of licensing distribution on a per-country basis. They could easily change the situation for new releases, but existing releases may be licensed to different distributors in different countries on different terms—e.g. maybe some music is licensed to Sony BMG in one country, but Universal in another. In order to achieve pan-European distribution without violating artists copyrights, the music companies themselves would have to re-negotiate with hundreds if not thousands of artists over hundreds of thousands of tracks.

Practical? Well it doesn’t sound it to me. And I don’t think it’s fair blaming anyone for this situation. It isn’t artists faults, because it’s how the industry used to operate. It isn’t the record labels’ faults, because there was no way to know that all of these countries would try to operate a single market when many of these contracts were signed. And it certainly isn’t Apple’s fault; they’re stuck with what the music labels can give them.

Even if it is possible to resolve this, I don’t want to pay for songs in Euros! I want my music priced in Sterling, and I don’t want it to constantly change prices to track the GBP:EUR exchange rate, because I want to know how much I’m going to spend.

And I’m quite happy to pay 11 pence more than (say) the Swedes for the same music if it means that I get stable, easy to understand pricing.

OK, so there’s been much talk about ringtones on the iPhone and the fact that you can’t make them without spending more money (at least, not officially). We’ve had this piece from John Gruber and this one from MacWorld’s Dan Frakes.

For the record, I’m fairly certain that the problem isn’t Apple’s fault, and, moreover, that there isn’t anything they could do about it without landing themselves in court and/or jeopardising their iTunes business and the ecosystem based on it.

Clearly, Apple’s licenses to distribute music on the iTunes store in many cases included terms preventing it from using the music for ringtones. As far as the tracks that can be used for ringtones go, either (a) they were already permitted to make ringtones and decided to charge a small fee in an effort to show the other licensors that they would make money if they allow Apple to use their songs as ringtones, or (b) the licensors they were negotiating with insisted on a charge.

The problem here is really that Apple are stuck; fair use doesn’t cover commercial scale distribution of the kind we’re talking about with iTunes. You as an end-user may have fair-use (though don’t bet on it: not all jurisdictions have fair-use legislation… there’s a lot of mistaken coverage of this issue, particularly in the British media, who often read articles written in the U.S. and assume that the law is the same here—it isn’t). But Apple itself has contractual agreements that it needs to uphold, and the company will also want to negotiate some position on ringtones with other licensors who haven’t signed up yet.

Of course, we all agree that the “ringtones racket” is just one big scam. Originally, the market for ringtones was created because mobile phones used piezoelectric sounders rather than speakers and could only make a variety of (rather raucous) beeping noises. As a result, you needed someone to convert a musical score into a form suitable for the phone. Obviously there is effort involved here and nobody would argue that a charge in such a situation was unreasonable.

But as mobile phones have developed, many of them have gained the ability to play any audio as a ringtone. And therein lies the problem. A “ringtone”, if it exists at all, is really a sequence of notes intended to be played by a piezoelectric buzzer or (if you were lucky) a MIDI instrument built in to your phone. Trying to label a segment of a song you already purchased as a “ringtone” and then telling you that you need to pay again to use it as such is simply unjustifiable.

(And, I might add, I’m a strong supporter of copyright and copyright holders’ ability to license their material under reasonable terms. But, yet again, the telephone industry has been caught ripping people off; only this time, the blame has been focused unfairly on Apple, who, to be frank, are in the same boat as the rest of us on this.)

That’s right, WUXGA. What?!

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed a resurgence in the use of stupid jargon to describe the pixel dimensions of displays. Presumably this is driven by people who think that jargon is cool and that “noobs” should just keep away from computers because they’re “technical”.

It isn’t even as if using these acronyms makes any sense any more. The original acronyms described graphics hardware (and in particular the video display chipset), not the size of the screen; typically there were several display sizes associated with each acronym.

Anyway, let’s put these wretched things to bed. There’s no need to complicate matters by talking about WUXGA or WHSXGA or any of that nonsense. Let’s just use the pixel dimensions… much simpler and much easier for everyone to understand. What’s more, there’s no need to invent more superlatives every time display resolutions increase.

Well, it’s official: iPhone will be here on November 9th, on O₂.

There are already some silly remarks flying about the £269 (inc. VAT) price being higher than the current U.S. $399 price, but of course it isn’t significantly higher once you take account of VAT.

As for the 3G versus EDGE question, we’ll have to wait and see how that pans out, I think. 3G coverage in the U.K. is a whole world better than EDGE right now, so it’s a bit of a shame that they aren’t launching a 3G iPhone, but they’re right about the battery life issue, and O₂ at least has its own WiFi network, which we’re told will be available to iPhone customers without those annoying web forms.

Will I get one? I’ve been pondering that question for some time. I think I’ll wait for the next model, or maybe the one after that. That’ll give Apple a chance to release a 3G model with more storage, and it’ll give the mobile companies a chance to improve their WiFi, EDGE and/or HSDPA coverage.

According to the BBC, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have pulled out of the British Government’s consultation on whether or not the U.K. should build more nuclear power stations, claiming that it is not a “fair and full debate”.

Of course, what they really mean is that they aren’t winning the debate, which I have to say I don’t find terribly surprising (especially as a number of prominent environmentalists are on record as supporting nuclear power). A lot of environmentalists are misinformed or even wilfully ignorant about the issues they wish to “debate”, and when challenged on the subject by someone who does have the facts, they either pull out the “precautionary principle” and claim that the other party cannot be aware of all possible consequences (which is true, but their version of the precautionary principle would have us all confined to underground bunkers for fear of asteroid strikes¹), or—as in this instance—run away from the debate claiming that it “isn’t fair”.

Frankly it’s pathetic.

That last post wasn’t made with MarsEdit (because I wanted to test MovableType itself), but this one is, so here’s “Hello World” as translated by Sherlock into a few different languages.

你好世界
Hello Wereld
Bonjour Monde
Hallo Welt
Γειάσου κόσμος
Ciao Mondo
こんにちは世界
여보세요 세계
Hello Mundo
Здравствулте! Мир
Hola Mundo

I’m sure this will work fine, but if it doesn’t for some reason, it’s probably Perl’s fault :-)

Hopefully I’ve now got UTF-8 support working, after upgrading DBI and DBD::mysql and adding mysql_enable_utf8=1 to the DSN in lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm. However, we’ll see.

Just to make it obvious if it’s broken: åéîøü

Yep, it seems to work. I’ve been struggling with that for ages now, on and off, as it’s been a real pain having to enter ’ every time I want a nice looking apostrophe/close-single-quote. Of course, I’ll now have to adjust to actually typing the “ ’ ” character.