Big Brother IS watching you

When I wrote about Google’s Culture of Theft just a few days ago, little did I realize how soon my suspicions would be confirmed.

From MacWorld.com

Dear reader, you do not collect this data by accident. It’s a switch in the system. You either decide to collect it or you do not. No accidents involved.

So when you next see your private data right next to your photographs in the public domain, you know where to go.

You like the ‘cloud’? Sure. So do I. Just go elsewhere than Google Docs. ‘Free’ ain’t everything you think it is.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Kindly take a leak elsewhere.

In addition to containing some of the best writing on the planet on all aspects of Photography, this site is totally commercial free and enjoys high and growing readership.

That’s a win-win for both the readers and this author. You enjoy, or not, what I write and I get the satisfaction of sharing my views with anyone who cares to check in. And if you don’t enjoy it, well, why are you coming here? Go elsewhere.

Further, the software running this site provides an extraordinary level of protection against comment spam wherein some crook tries to question your manhood and sell you pharmaceutical products guaranteed to cure all that ails you. Yet to leave a comment you don’t even have to complete arithmetical questions or enter cryptic codes. It’s as simple as can be, all the protection mechanisms invisible to the user.

None of that, however, protects me from the occasional Comment written by a real live person who falls straight into the category of Troll or Loser. Distinguishing facts about this miserable class member include, but are not limited to:

• Often still lives with his parents in the basement
• Has no job and blames the government
• Walks around with a vacant stare, arm outstretched, palm up, looking for a handout
• Has never done a single constructive or original thing in his miserable life
• Bathes infrequently and blames the world for shunning him
• And, yeah, it’s always a guy. They’re the ones with too much time on their hands.

So when I get a comment as asinine as the one below – I mean here we really have a guy who just does not get it – I check the above list and, sure enough, it’s from a guy, his thinking stinks, (he may also, but I’m not about to find out), he’s probably on the dole and you can be assured he has never had an original or constructive thought in his life.

Typical troll Comment, received today.

So, trolls and losers, if you expect to get away with this sort of leg lifting on my site, you should know that your comments WILL be published, right here for all to see.

But I was not brought up to take abuse and keep mum about it. You piss on my site and I’ll be pleased to reply in kind. Unknown to the grammatically challenged Anders Holt, I actually managed to get a picture of him – at least I’m pretty sure it’s him – and I publish it here for the first time as a service to my readers. Should you see this wretch do the right thing – hold your nose and cross the street.

On Market Street, San Francisco. G1 @ 17mm, 1/2000, f/4.5, ISO 320. Smell not included.

Meanwhile, off he goes to the global spam list, never to be heard from again.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Doing Evil.

For profit companies exist for one reason only. To make as much money as quickly as possible for the owners. That means making products as cheaply as possible and paying employees as little as possible. Nothing wrong with that. It’s called capitalism. It has nothing to do with morality. A company has none. It is, by definition, amoral.

So when a company grandly rolls out a corporate mantra that enshrines the very basics of morality, I tend to smell a giant rat. Google’s mantra is “Do No Evil” which suggests we should watch them the way a hawk watches a field mouse.

Let’s look at some of the behaviors of the Do No Evil company which are all over the press recently.

The China debacle: Having done Evil for years in China by tacitly permitting the dictators to censor web searches, suddenly Google co-founder Sergey Brin wakes up one day, recalls his poor Russian upbringing and decides Chinese censorship is wrong. “That’s what they did to us in the mother country”, he cries in anguish. Now this epiphany just happens to coincide with competitor Baidu’s market share peaking at 70% with Google’s dipping below 20%. Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The Net Neutrality scam: Net neutrality is an awful idea. Simply stated, the concept dictates that everyone should have equal access at the same price to broadband. This naturally leads to crooks and abusers being subsidized by honest users. Take a look at some of the peer-to-peer networks out there, like Pirate Bay. (Mercifully a Swedish court has fined and sentenced the owners to gaol) Their sole reason for existence is to facilitate the theft of intellectual property – software, movies and so on. The thief dials up the network and merrily downloads the latest movie and, in doing so, makes massive demands on the cable or telco provider of broadband. Yet he considers it his divine rightf to pay the same as you and I do for that access. Google, unsurprisingly, is a strong proponent of net neutrality. It guarantees more hits on their search engine and more advertising revenues. Plus they get to deliver trashy YouTube content at no premium cost to the user. (Google owns YouTube – arguably one of the dumbest acquisitions of the decade). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

The HTC scandal: Google’s CEO, one Eric Schmidt, who may be the luckiest person alive having accidentally walked into a $3bn fortune when he joined Google, was recently fired form the Apple board. All his acquisitions of truly garbage businesses like YouTube (pretty much impossible to monetize) have added nothing to the bottom line of a company which derives all its revenues from click-through advertising. No one said ‘fired’ because companies never fire board members. They always leave because of time pressures or to pursue other interests. But right after Schmidt left the Apple board, Apple brought a suit against one of Google’s primary cell phone hardware providers, HTC, for theft of a variety of patents, not least the ones relating to touchscreen use. Schmidt will have known more than most and earlier than most what Apple was up to with the iPhone when it was still an idea in Jobs’s skull and, wonder of wonders, who comes out with the first Android-capable touchscreen? Why HTC of course. (Android is Google’s mobile OS). Coincidence? Maybe. But it smells.

Making information available: Every photographer and writer should be up in arms about this one. Such is Google’s public posturing as a democratizer of information availability that it’s common to find your work available for anyone to steal. Just do a search using Google->Images and there are your pictures. No permission, no copyright, no payment for their use. Available for one and all to take as they please. Well, now they are at it with books as well, as the following from Reuters attests:

The courts can decide that one but it smells to high heaven. It’s a bit like eBay fronting for the sale of counterfeit goods and claiming innocence. “We are just providing a service and cannot be responsible” they say. Uh huh. How else is the thief to ‘fence’ his goods to a global audience then?

China lies? One of Google’s attempts at extricating itself from the decision to quit China was that its servers had been penetrated and code stolen. Wait a minute here. Your code was stolen? What about all the books, images and movies your servers store, Google? You are facilitating freedom but the Chinese stole from you? It doesn’t solve.

So Google, have you Done Any Good recently?

Update May 17, 2010: Google continues to do good.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Where not to go

It’s no great secret that newsprint is dead. Within a decade even the most powerful print media – WSJ, NYT, etc. – will have ceased publication using forests of trees. eInk technology (like in the Kindle) will add color and someone will design a two button interface almost as simple as a book. All those enviroloonies should be required to help capitalize the related R&D as they do want to save trees, no? And the advent of color will also dramatically reduce the price of art books – when the screen is transilluminated and has superior definition to traditional printing on reflective materials – what’s not to like?

Which brings me to the curious case of MacWorld magazine. ‘Curious’ because it begs the question why this trashy publication survives. When I got our first Mac a decade ago a relative gave me a subscription to this rag and it helped get me into the Mac ecosystem. That was ages ago and, like a fool, I still pay for a print subscription. At least until this one expires, that is.

This is simply the very worst place to go for objective advice about Macs. The magazine started life 25 years ago with funding from Apple. If you are not already holding your nose, you should be. Now purportedly independent, it is a sycophant’s dream for anyone getting a paycheck from 1 Infinite Loop. You see, they have yet to see an Apple product they do not like. Read any of their reviews and you will quickly realize that these are little more than regurgitated press releases.

Two cases in point. The other day they had a laudatory piece on Apple’s Time Capsule back-up hardware. Only thing they forgot to mention is that you cannot boot from the TC. So what are you going to do when your Mac’s drive crashes? Pull out the original OS X discs? Try and access TC that way? Do you even know how risky and time consuming this is? It’s not called Time Capsule for nothing. As a disaster recovery tool it is almost completely useless. But it ranks a rave review from MacWorld. No mention of the booting issue, of course.

Or their piece today on external hard drives. Without so much as opening the box they laud the overpriced LaCie Rugged. I own one and yes, I have dismantled it. Not from idle curiosity but because the bottom-of-the-line Western Digital drive inside failed just after the warranty expired (good business design, if you ask me). The full scope of the ‘rugged’ moniker was then exposed. The ‘ruggedness’ is comprised of four rubber strips inside, purportedly cushioning the drive from the case. Laugh – I did when I opened the case. And, of course, a 2mm thick jolly colored rubber covering on the case. Did MacWorld open the case? Did MacWorld try dropping the drive on a hard floor? Did MacWorld refuse advertising dollars from LaCie? Well, you can figure out the answers to those questions. (Hint: Not a ‘Yes’ in sight). So for a 2mm thick casing of rubber and four rubber bumpers (aggregate cost: 2 cents) LaCie gets $160 for something you can build yourself for $85; $70 for the drive and $15 for a self-powered USB enclosure. The assembly skill is especially low – even a GM production line worker could do it, although it will take you 2 minutes, while his union will make sure it takes an hour.

Let me illustrate. The drive is a 2.5″ SATA notebook drive – available for $70 in a 320gB size. The enclosure is a $15 2.5″ SATA enclosure from Tiger Direct. That price includes a leatherette case and a nice long USB connection cable with a pass-through connector to permit ganging. Why, they even provide the two screws and the screwdriver you will use to secure the drive in the case.

Detailed assembly instructions. Free screwdriver not shown.

Did you get that?

Oh! you want to add the ‘Rugged’ feature? Heck, blow $5 on some foam rubber and do 10 drives while you are at it.

MacWorld is a great place if you want to read Apple advertising and pay for it.

However, for objective comment just check in with the Apple Discussions section of Apple.com and see just how flawed many of Apple’s much hyped products are – like Time Capsule (worthless if your internal drive fails), Back To My Mac (terminally faulty), Airport Extreme wireless routing (the signal fluctuates for unknown reasons at anything over 10 feet from the router), glossy screens (useless for real users), dying Firewire (too bad about all those FW drives you bought), perennially ‘new’ connectors which obsolete your peripherals – and this is from Apple’s own site, for goodness sake.

Skeptical? Here’s today’s front page from just the Time Capsule ‘Discussion’ – a lot of comments and views for a device that ‘just works’, no?

It just works, right?

And that’s after Apple’s (very active) censorship of its Discussions forum.

Before you even think about any major software upgrade (OS X upgrades and security upgrades have been the worst in this regard), wait a month, read Apple’s Discussions, then decide whether to risk it. I have long adopted this approach and it has saved me countless hours of repair otherwise caused by Apple’s policy of releasing buggy software and having unpaid users test it for them – a practice Microsoft perfected years ago. You have already paid a 30% premium for the Mac; it’s nice that critical user feedback is free and that you don’t have to pay advertisers posing as journalists at MacWorld for it. Just let the first implementers serve as your reviewer of choice.

MacWorld magazine and its staff of shills is a much overdue entrant to this journal’s Hall of Shame.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!