To all the doubters out there who think that piracy doesn’t hurt the bottom line of small software companies, I say this. Our products have recently been subject to an attempt (albeit a flawed one) to crack the protection. It didn’t work, but that hasn’t stopped the distribution of the broken cracked copies, which are likely to damage peoples’ data.

Nor does the fact that these cracked versions could do serious damage dissuade people from downloading them, apparently. We can see from our daily sales figures a drop of nearly 30% since the illegal copies first appeared. Yes, that’s right, 30%.

The worst thing though, worse even than losing 30% of our business to these jerkoffs, is that because the crack was done by an incompetent, the programs could terminate at any time while they’re working on the users’ disks, leaving them with potentially serious filesystem damage. Filesystem damage for which we will be blamed, though it’s not our fault in the slightest.

The FSF has published an article entitled 5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G. Ironically, given the fuss they made about Microsoft FUDding Linux, this article is a blatant attempt to FUD Apple.

Sure, iPhone developers have to pay a one-off fee to Apple, and Apple does reserve the right to reject applications if they don’t meet the requirements stipulated in the SDK license agreement. And sure, iPhone does support DRM, something the FSF has been campaigning against for some time, but something the FSF is ill qualified to talk about as it does not, in fact, have any problems of its own with software, music or movie piracy.

I think the most objectionable parts are where the article says things like

iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.

which is nothing less than blatant and unjustifiable scaremongering. Yes, the iPhone 3G has GPS. But in order for an application to use it, the user must agree to a message displayed by the phone. That is, the user is explicitly asked whether to allow an application access to their location.

There is also a claim that

[Fairplay] prevents you from installing free software – software whose authors want you to freely share, copy and modify their work.

which is total bunk. If authors of Free Software choose to provide a build for the iPhone (and to do that, only a single developer need pay the license fee), they can submit their application to the App Store and Apple will distribute it for free and allow users to install it.

And sure, anyone who wants to modify the application will need a developer license, which they have to pay for. Why is this suddenly a bad thing? Wasn’t it FSF that made the point that Free Software was free as in speech and not necessarily as in beer? And isn’t it also the case that for many platforms those people who build their own versions of Free Software products require the use of commercial tools of some sort?

The go on to say that

Jobs would have us believe that all of these restrictions are necessary.

and he’s right. They are. Why? Because otherwise the iPhone would be full of viruses and other malware within a few months. The way Apple has chosen to do things does have some disadvantages, but it has the major advantage that it’s significantly harder to publish iPhone malware without getting caught than it is to publish malware for other mobile devices.

And as for the theory that Apple is

a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity

well I think “johns”, whoever he is, needs to grow up. Apple is, of course, a business and is out to make money. That’s what businesses do. But they don’t do it solely for their own benefit; you and I hold shares in businesses, both directly and indirectly (through our bank accounts, our pensions, and a wide range of other investments). If they make a profit, we benefit. Likewise, if we don’t like how they behave, we can turn up at their AGM, or demand that those who represent our interests do so, and demand that they change their behaviour. This modern notion that big business is the Big Bad Wolf is borne out of ignorance, and it’s a great shame that the FSF seems intent on promoting this jaded and inaccurate view of the world.

It’s also a bit rich FUDding someone else and then accusing that other entity of being dishonest.

When I was a student, I used to think I agreed with some of the goals of the FSF. Maybe even most of them. In recent years though, they seem to have become more and more extreme and I now find myself wishing that they would either go back to their roots and forget about all these new things they’re complaining about, many of which have little or nothing to do with the original Free Software idea, or just pack it in and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

I certainly won’t be supporting them in future, and I have no intention of contributing to any of their projects (as I have occasionally in the past).

FSF, you’ve lost my support.

Someone tried to crack iPartition 3. Unfortunately for users of this cack-handed crack, they got it wrong and so the “cracked” version is liable to stuff up your disk.

I don’t understand why anyone would be stupid enough to attempt this, actually. I mean, tampering with the code of a copy protected disk utility is a bit like tampering with a nuclear weapon. The person most likely to get hurt is you.

But hey, dumb-ass cheapskate software pirates, by all means destroy your data with pirated copies. Just don’t come crying to us when it happens… we didn’t give them to you and we didn’t tamper with them.

For those who don’t already know, Marko Karpinnen just had someone steal his Apple ID by sending a message to Apple implying that he’d changed e-mail address and forgotten his password.

Shocking as this may be, it really highlights a serious problem with current methods of identifying people, both off and on-line.

Marko is understandably unhappy about this, and suggests that Apple should have checked that it was him “by comparing the information in their personal profile”. Yet most information about most of us, particularly prominent developers like Marko, is publicly available (for instance via WHOIS or via a variety of other means). I’m quite sure that, even if Apple had done those kinds of checks, they could be readily defeated by someone with the gall to try this kind of thing in the first place.

The fact is that we need an identity system that is not based on people’s personal details, or this kind of thing is going to happen all the time.

Yes folks, I just hit the big three-oh. No longer am I a twentysomething :–(

Seems only yesterday I left primary school…

Chris, who has been working with me at Coriolis for some time now has recently set up a weblog (something which I think is long overdue, frankly), and has posted a short piece about using WebView in a modal dialog, including some code that lets you do just that.

Yet again our software has been posted to various file sharing websites, and yet again we are forced to ask them to remove it.

But many of them still hide behind DMCA even when told that they are hosting a folder full of infringing material. They won’t act on their own account and don’t actually care that their Acceptable Use Policies already prohibit such material and would enable them to remove the files themselves.

How do I know this? Well today’s little irritation involved sending a notice to MediaFire about a folder full of files over which we hold copyright. I also, in the same e-mail, complained about the containing folder, which contains a lot of other peoples’ copyrighted work (though I noted that I had no legal standing to do so). What did I get in reply? Yes, that’s right folks, a demand that I format my request exactly as required by DMCA and a notice that MediaFire would ignore any request that wasn’t formatted that way. Furthermore they tell me that they will ignore any request relating to a folder, since they can’t be bothered to check all the files in a folder (just the ones you list).

Ethical? Like hell.

If this is true, then good for the Irish too.

Our political leadersmasters won’t let us have a vote on membership of the European Union here in the U.K., because they know we’d vote “No”. In fact, they won’t even let us vote on the Lisbon TreatyE.U. Constitution because they know we’d vote “No” and scupper that too—in spite of promising a referendum on that very subject.

Fortunately it sounds like the Irish have scuppered it for us, but it frankly stinks that our government lies to us, fails to represent our views and then won’t let us have our say even when it promised.

In the wake of Parliament’s passing of the bill allowing forty-two days detention without charge for terrorist suspects, David Davis, the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, has resigned as an MP to fight a by-election on the issue of whether or not it is right to curtail our civil liberties in this way.

Good for him I say.

The only reason the public thinks (at least according to the polls it does) that these kinds of illiberal measures are acceptable is that the government of our country has been conning us. The theoretical threat from Islamist terrorism and in particular Al Qaeda—and it remains primarily a theoretical threat, unlike for instance the IRA during the late 70s and 80s—has been used to justify large numbers of illiberal and frankly unpleasant measures which we are promised are “to combat terrorism” and which are then promptly misused to keep pensioners out of the Labour Party conference, to spy on people sending their children to school, to prevent law abiding people from attending legitimate peaceful protests and all kinds of other similar things which have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

The steady creep of authoritarianism into the British state has continued unabated under this Labour government and the problem is that because our civil liberties have been chipped away one piece at a time it has been difficult for the public to notice the impact it is having.

David Davis, it seems, intends to bring all of this to the fore in his constituency and it will hopefully make his constituents—not to mention the rest of the population—realise that something is seriously amiss.

OK, so we’ve yet again been asked not to panic-buy fuel. Well it so happens that this morning I really did need to fill my car up (I’d just about run out of petrol), so as usual I drove to work via the local petrol station.

Chaos.

Not only were there large numbers of vehicles trying to fill up (more than normal, I would say), but a Budgens delivery driver (the local petrol station has a Budgens supermarket attached) was reversing a huge articulated lorry into the station and across the forecourt. In order to do that, he had to spend a considerable amount of time completely blocking the road.

Whether the large queues were caused by the amount of time the road was blocked, or whether this heralds the beginning of yet another round of stupid panic buying, I don’t know, but I did notice that Newgate Lane (along which I have to drive every day) was also clogged up until I got past the ASDA roundabout. ASDA, of course, has a petrol station…