Jimtac.com

Apple got hacked a little while ago… Well not so much hacked as much as was exploited as the ultimate target of a likely spearfishing/brute-force password guessing attack. The purpose of this attack was to have a single individual’s app-store offerings take up 42 of the top 50 paid apps in the ebook category. While this in and of itself is fairly significant, especially since it involved so many people having their iTunes accounts compromised, and their money being used to fraudulently prop up a criminal’s attempt to get on top of a list.

So while this sucks all around… It has caused Apple to do what corporations do best, overreact.

This particular overreaction takes the form of having to sign in to download an app/song/video/book via iTunes, then get pulled out of the process to a page that has you once again sign in to re-verify your account information (specifically your credit card’s CCV2 number) then you get to go back to iTunes and restart your downloads, the whole process taking around 30-45 seconds. Oh, and you have to do this for updates, and FREE content as well. OH… Aaaaaand you have to do this EVERY time that you try to purchase anything on a different device. So far the only things that I have been able to download without this ridiculous dance have been podcasts.

Now I’m the prototypical media consumer/over-user and I have grown to love the polished Apple-bred super-consistent user experience that makes it waaaay too easy to get the apps/content you want, when you want it, wherever you are, and on whatever iTunes platform you happen to be carrying with you. While nearly all of my music/videos are from my CD collection or free video sources, (notably excepting the free tracks at Starbucks, and digital copies from DVD/Blu-Ray discs), it’s things like apps that take my fancy over-priced shiny toys and turn them into useful tools that do what I want, which are what I really want to be able to get at the moment when a particular need arises.

Since I use an iPhone, an iPad, and sync them both to a MacBook, I now find myself thinking “Now which one did I sign in with last?” before I even consider tapping on the store icon/app since this new policy has been implemented. I know that this is just another first-world problem, but I unapologetically live in the first-world, and hate when layers of frustration are added to any workflow, especially when it’s in my personal life; at least at work I get paid to deal with broken processes.

On the upside I have popped into the AppStore FAR less than I did before, only venturing in to check for app updates, or when I hear about an amazing new app. I have no desire to go-in, go-out, go-in, go-over, go out, then finally to wait for the download to complete and install. Those who know me and my recent predilection towards Cupertino designed devices may very well think of me as an Apple fanboy, I’d posit that I’m actually a fanboy for great user experience and few do the experience better than Apple. This is one of the reasons that I’m so disappointed with Apple with this “solution” for a problem that they could have done little to prevent.

What I would liked to have seen is similar to how you can only authorize your iTunes purchases on 5 computers at any given time. Why can’t we associate our IMEIs or WiFi MAC addresses to our accounts as a method to maintain persistent authentication on our mobile devices in order to prevent this? I can’t really say, maybe it will happen in the future, maybe it won’t. I just hope it gets fixed soon.

And this concludes my rant-casting day

Tim

I know about all of the reasons that ISPs don’t want “Net Neutrality”, and some make sense to me, and some really do not.

Any ISP that wants to claim to be a forward thinking company should be looking at the demographic that really cares about issues like “Net Neutrality”, and the kind of money that they spend on internet services. These people are the kind of people who tend to not want any services other than internet access itself, but are willing to spend more for faster access.

I never truly liked the tern “Net Neutrality”, since it’s only those few geeks that live in technology [like me] that can define what that means. For most non-techie people that I speak to, if they’ve even heard of the term, they think that it means that there is less government involvement, or that the internet is not being restricted to a few certain users. My thought is that the argument should be renamed to something more along the lines of “internet Service Discrimination”, in order to speak to what the issue is, rather than the desired outcome.

What I would like to see ISPs adopt is a set of principles rather than block or degrade traffic that is being sent over VOIP protocols such as skype, or even the much maligned bittorrent protocol as a couple of examples. I personally would choose an ISP that decided to not filter any traffic, but instead adopted three network management policies, and be very transparent about how those policies are administered.

Your traffic will not be restricted unless you violate one or more these policies:
1. Traffic is not detrimental to the capacity/connectivity of others on the network.
2. Traffic is not detrimental to the network itself.
3. Traffic is not in violation of any laws.

These three principles are simple enough to provide direction to the consumer in language that allows a lay-person to understand, but also broad enough to allow for the required network management that any responsible network provider needs to do.

I have a few friends and acquaintances that come down on my wanting to have neutrality legislation to allow for “network management” at all, but without that management ability, networks are likely to be quickly overwhelmed by those who would choose to abuse it. As much as we would all like to think that people who use the internet are all adults and would act as such, we all know that is just not the case.

[Disclaimer: I work for a company that (amongst other things) is an ISP, and my personal views do not in any way reflect those of my employer or my coworkers]

Earlier today there was a great post from Ars Technica about the necessity of advertising on the internet, or rather the harm done by ad-blocking software. Now over the years I’ve been doing personal websites, business, and at one point even a podcast with my good friend Neil; all for myself, and all out of my own pocket. This  is pretty much how any of these sites that become ad-supported businesses started themselves. I applaud their ability to be able to quit their “day jobs”, and even grow into something bigger than themselves, which is just amazing to me.

The issue with ad-blocking is one that can be quite polarizing, for instance there is one camp that thinks that ad-blocking is a god given right of the internet, and the other thinks that it’s the tool of the devil. Luckily the Ars article tried to split the difference, though unfortunately it comes across being quite a bit on the latter, and it’s perfectly understandable why as well, since it’s not just one individual relying on that ad revenue. If it was a one person site then they could pack things up and it’s only  really affects themselves, but once you become responsible for others, then he whole world changes.

I personally do use ad blockers in firefox, [though not in chrome which I now primarily use on all of my Macs], but I use a more surgical approach than simply hitting block every time I see an ad. The whole reason that I started using adblock in the first place was because of those distasteful ads that the Ars Technica article spoke of, them and the ones that block my view of the content that I would otherwise prefer to support, and if I have to keep blocking ads when visiting a particular site, I just stop visiting those sites since I’m obviously not the target audience for the ads that they are accepting, and supporting sites that accept ads that I find objectionable [in whatever sense] is not something that I’ll be doing anytime soon.

I’m not going to stop using ad-blockers to remove content that I don’t want to be subjected to, ads or otherwise, but I will continue to make judicious use of the whitelist, as well as the blacklist features of them, in order to ensure that I contribute to the content that I want to see remains available for me to consume, and I hope that you do to.

Week one of March has come and gone, with some interesting hiccups…

If you were a happy Windows 7 RC1 user, you are now an unhappy Windows 7 RC [occasional] user. I hope that if you do fall into this camp, that you have purchased a full license for your recently narcoleptic PC. I’m of course referring to the March 1st expiry of the release candidate of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which instead of simply refusing to work, MS was gracious enough to give you 2 hours to use the OS to try to back up your files and regress to your previous OS, or install the retail version of 7 [of course you can only actually upgrade to Win7 Ultimate Edition without doing some hacking of an install disk]. Unfortunately, if you are one of those people who actually used a copy of RC1 as a functional PC trying to use it as a “real” PC in order to try and break things, 2 hours at a time, may not be enough. But either way, it’s time to pony up or fall back.

The next bit of crazy is that PSN decided to crap all over itself this past week, and it turns out that it was a bit of math that tripped those guys up. On the bright side, if you would have just bought the PS3 Slim, then you would have been fine; on the down side, most PS3 owners [myself included] do not have the Slim. When this first happened, you would turn on your PS3, and it would tell you that is cannot connect to the PSN, and would not play most games, or network, or … Well it turns out that it’s not just that the PSN was inaccessible, it turns out that the internal clock of all the pre-Slim PS3′s thought that 2010 was a leap year, and added the extra day to February. Good job Sony, at least I can take solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who hasn’t bought a 2010 calendar yet. At least it didn’t affect me, since now I’m about 52 hours into Mass Effect 2, which has completely negated my use of any other gaming system [or any other media]… So sorry WoW, but I think you can live without me for a bit longer since you’ve sucked months, and not just days of real time from me so far.

Oh, and I REALLY want an Iron Man TV!!!

Though I wish it was that hotrod red, with the arc reactor as the logo in the centre [like my LG Scarlet]

I may be getting a hold of the sequel to one of my all time favorite games a bit late, [see my Canada Post Sucks post], but now that I have, and am still trying to get the damn game running, I kind of wish that I had just ignored the game altogether!

I’m one of those gamers that simply must complete EVERY bit of a game, and will usually go back several times through to do so, [which is probably why I like WoW so much...] So when I heard that Mass Effect was getting a sequel, and that BioWare [one of my favorite dev's] was doing something crazy like ACTUALLY listening to the people who played the first game, and address the issues that we were running into. This made these last couple of days all the more frustrating!

When I tore open the box from Amazon, I carefully sliced open the clear tape, slid the tin from it’s slip cover, got angry with Canada Post for denting the metal art case, then carefully sliced the “Authentic Xbox” sticker, and after admiring the included code for the collector’s armour/rifle, I pried [and I mean almost snapped in two] disc 1 from it’s polycarb resting place… Ah… The anticipation…

I mash my thumb into the jewel on my controller, firing up the massive jet engines powering my Xbox 360, and walk over to remove the copy of Street Fighter IV that has been resident in the tray for a few weeks. As I press the eject button to close the tray, I turn to walk back  to my couch, pick up my controller, apply the update, and as I sit down for a night in which I get no sleep before work the next day… IT happened… I got the launch screen telling me that I need to:

Get the card from inside the companion box

Go to my computer

Fire up a browser

Navigate to www.masseffect.com

Register with EA by giving them all of my personal information

Create a BioWare identity

Redeem a code TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE GAME [and to redeem the collector's armour & rifle]

This is one of the most frustrating things that I have EVER experienced in a video game. I played Assassin’s Creed 2 earlier [and LOVED it], where there is a component to the game which ties into a website based experience, however THAT experience was completely OPTIONAL… Which means it was done correctly. When I saw an image of the card which contains the code to redeem the collector’s stuff, I incorrectly assumed that it was an XBL Marketplace redemption. It also never entered my realm of possibilities that I would be sitting here 2 days later, not able to play the game due to issues with creating an account with EA/BioWare [BioWare's account creation for their "Beta" site is down until 4am tomorrow]. On an aside; Why the hell would you have a game rely on a site that you still call Beta AFTER the game’s release??? Aaaaaand… Doing maintenance in the evening… Don’t they realize people play games in the evening?

One of many reasons that I got into console gaming was that I didn’t have to deal with all of the crap that comes along with PC gaming; site registrations, game keys, usernames/passwords, spreading my information all over the internet. I’ve traded all of the headaches that come with PC Gaming for paying extra for console gaming, and I’m perfectly OK with that, because console gaming just works… Until now…

After day 2 of not being able to play my new game, which by the way is a legit copy sitting in my silent, still, cold, powered down, 360 as yet un-played; I now feel like this game is far less of a “Must-Play”, and more like a wasted $85. Thanks to EA/BioWare one of my few forms of escapist entertainment, which gives me some enjoyment in an otherwise banal, frozen north, has transformed from a fantastic, simple to use “appliance”, to just another unnecessarily complex system. Xbox 360, and Xbox Live have been almost perfect in their implementation; they have a secure system, where piracy, and hacking/modding are kept as close to non-existent as is humanly possible, and every other game has gotten along just fine without requiring you to go outside of this fantastic ecosystem in order to allow you to even play a game that you paid a decent chunk of your paycheque for.

In short… EA/BioWare… Why? You may be thinking that it provides a better, more interactive experience by requiring people to fork over personal data that XBL may, or may not, provide to you; but if a user really wants to expand their gaming experience THEY will seek YOU out. If it’s simply a grab for data that can be sold to to advertisers, or other “interested parties”, then all I have to sat to that is: Shame on you!

One more try tomorrow, and if it fails again, it will be the LAST time I buy an EA/BioWare game.

Tim

Edit: Feb 25

I finally managed to get logged in, and in the game… sort of… I’m finally able to get into the game, and redeem my “Cerberus Network” code, that luckily came with my game, so I don’t have to buy something else on top of the extra that I paid for this game… However I’ve been trying for nearly 30 minutes now to redeem my collector’s edition armour and gun code… Seriously, what ridiculous crap is this… NOT pleased!

Too much buzz goin’round these days… Last week we had the iPad in all it’s unibody fanciness. I [of course] will be getting one, though wether I spring for the 3G or just stick to the WiFi-only version really comes down to how much it’ll actually cost here in the land of the Canuck, and if we can get the same sweet “pay-as-you-go” 3G service as was shown off for the stateside crowd. At the moment I’m looking at the 32GB WiFi only, but if we get the 3G I’ll be rockin’ the 16 (or 32) w/ 3G…

This week it’s Google Buzz!!! All I’ll say is… Remember Google Wave??? Didn’t think so. If Twitter and Facebook weren’t so entrenched in the current collective internet consciousness this would be a bigger thing. I could see this become a widely used thing if it is completely open, and becomes fully interoperable with pretty much everything else out there. Which would drive people to use Google buzz as a single place to update their other social status updates, and I hope that eventually you can use “gBuzz” to update different social networks by checking off the networks that you want each status to go to. By having each status be selectable would allow for updates to be limited to 140 characters if you select Twitter (or other SMS rooted service), and if Twitter is deselected then it limits the length to the next shortest text limit.

The next buzz (or rather buzz-kill) is that even though it’s nice to have a job to keep me busy, I do find that it’s even more frustrating that I work for a company that’s an ISP, a Telco, and a Cable TV provider, which means that there are so many things that I just can’t discuss in a public forum, lest I be accused from within or without the company that I am acting as a mouthpiece of the company, and speaking on their behalf. BTW… I would never speak on behalf of my company [unless they decided to pay me tons of cash to do it, of course]. Throughout the 5 1/2 years that I was with TELUS I never spoke about the company, it’s business or anything related to the industry both for ethical, and for job-security [a.k.a legal] reasons. Why does this particularly frustrate me now, when it was simply par for the course before? Well to be honest, it’s because I see a company that preaches it’s open-ness with customers, but in the same breath attempts to force as closed an environment for it’s employees as possible.

On an aside… I think I may start posting about one of my favorite [non-tech] subjects: management faux-pas. It’s something that I avoided while working at TELUS because I was a manager there… But now I’m not a manager, so I feel like it’s less preachy, and just a bit whiny… we’ll see.

Until then,

Tim

There’s a lot of talk right now about the much rumoured mythical Apple tablet computer, and with all of this talk comes the rampant speculation. With random speculation people also come out saying that they have all kinds of “leaked information” from “an undisclosed Apple employee”. Well I don’t have any of that, but I do have my wish-list for what I want this device to be/do… Here goes:

1. A high quality remote desktop client. I want it to be able to smoothly control my Mac mini/MBP/PCs running VNC, even over back to my mac.

2. The keyboard should take advantage of the Apple patent filed which makes uses the whole hand for text input on touchscreens. I want it to bring up a small keyboard when one palm is on the screen, and a larger split keyboard when both hands are placed on the screen. I can’t stand not having a backlit screen when in a low-light environment, which is why I have one of my MBP’s as my couch computer, instead of one of my less pricey computers. A glowing OLED screen would solve it like my iPhone does.

3. I want it to have an iPhone-esque home button that when pressed once brings up the rear facing camera, once more the front facing camera. Aaaaaaand… when it’s held down for 3 seconds it launches the iPhone OS to run apps and the home button works like it does on the iPhone, until held down for 3 seconds again.

4. Total connectivity: USB, bluetooth, Wireless N, The MB Air’s remote drive, 3G SIM slot (not locked to a carrier), an SDXC slot, a dock connector for syncing/charging/using iPhone accessories [I said wish-list, not spec sheet]

5. A 10 hour battery…

6. An AMOLED screen.

7. The ability to control my AppleTV/Front Row by using their native interfaces while still watching content on them.

8. Essentially a 10.1″ MacBook Air with a touchscreen where the keyboard and trackpad are, minus the clamshell.

9. A 32/64GB SSD option

I know why I want one, and it’s the same reason that I wanted  a netbook, and an iPhone before that, and even a laptop before that. I want a device that will allow me to do all of the tasks that I want to do while mobile, but that I don’t need a massively powerful computer for. I have a desktop PC for my work-horse type things like video editing, or gaming. What I want is something that I can carry and not have to open up, set on a surface, angle the screen, position myself to type, and then get down to launching a browser and pulling up a website, when [like on my iPhone], I press a button, slide to unlock, open the browser and pull up the website. Sure, sure… I know, I know… It’s very much a “first-world problem” but hey, I live in the first-world, and anything that helps me maximize what little down time I have anymore, is something that I crave.

I use my iPhone for just about everything, but even with mobile safari being as amazing as it is, it’s just not the same experience as a larger screen… Plus, it can’t do flash… [fail]

Since my phone goes everywhere with me, and my computer does not, especially with the iPhone being “good enough” 75% of the time for most casual computing tasks, I have less of a NEED to buy this device, but if it hit’s a fair number of my wish-list, I’ll certainly buy one, and enjoy it.

Here’s hoping,

Tim

TweetDeck even with it’s reliance on AIR is hands-down my favorite desktop client, and I’ve used [and paid for], but I keep going to TweetDeck on the iPhone only to be disappointed time after time. It crashed 4 times while trying to set it up, and at varying steps in the process which made it hard to blame one step that I could skip in order to proceed, one of which was that unlike the desktop app, you are required to allow TweetDeck to update Facebook [if you so choose to add FB access at all], or not be allowed to continue, which was also one of my crashes…

Once set up, I did like that there were decent options, and the ability to finally add multiple twitter accounts, though the MySpace account in the desktop version is not included, admittedly not a huge deal, but notable nonetheless. The look of the Light UI option was nice, but it does feel to me like it was tossed in as an option after other twitter apps included it. In the end I find that it’s with reservations added to my roster of twitter apps for the iPhone that will actually remain on my iPhone [if it remains crash free]. If TweetDeck adds push notifications, It’ll be my primary twitter app for the iPhone too. [I've also posted this to the related TUAW article]

I HATE the made up term “mashup”!!!!!!!!

That is all.

Tim

I very much understand the need to advertise on podcasts, especially video podcasts, they’re expensive to make, and moreso to host and serve. That being said I do take a bit of an issue to short podcasts inserting long ads into their shows. To me I have a personal annoyance level of 1.5:1 content:ads, which seems high to most, but to me if the content is good I’ll sit through ads to ensure I can keep getting my free entertainment.

This week I was glad to see that one of my favorite comic strips turned video podcast ‘Dilbert’ got a sponsor, and with it being the perennial Audible, one that I use myself. The problem, as you may have surmised, is that ‘Dilbert’ has a normal runtime (including credit plates) of ~20 seconds, however with the pre- AND post-roll ads works out to be ~59 seconds. As such the math works out to be much more than 1.5:1 favoring the ads, which means that I’ll probably be unsubscribing by the end of the week, since the content just isn’t worth the waste in my time.

I’m sure that ‘Dilbert’ is not the only only one who does this, Revision3′s ‘Film Riot’ had come close a couple of times in their shorter episodes. I get that advertisers like buying specific chunks of ad time, (30/60/90/120 seconds), and buy sponsorship deals for a period of episodes, or time. This means that whether your episode is 30 minutes, or 3 minutes, your 3 sponsors still want their full 30 second spots.

I do believe that if you are going to accepting advertising, you should be giving both your advertisers, and more importantly, your audience more value. When you’re in your garage with your friends doing something on your own, it’s acceptable to vary length and quality. Once you accept that money, there is an expectation on the part of the advertiser that the quality will go up in order to show that thier money is worth it. However on the part of the viewing audience, the annoyance/intrusions of inserting ads is something that should not impinge on the viewing experience.

If done correctly, it will feel like a minor bump in the flow of the show; the aforementioned ‘Film Riot’ does an amazing job at this, to the point of actually making the ads enjoyable to watch. Unfortunately even this can break the creator/consumer relationship if it exceeds the new content that the viewer/listener tuned in to get, the very content that made the show successful enough to garner the attention of advertisers.

I hope that they will figure out that it’s bad to have more advertising than content, but if not, it will at least help me thin out my podcast subscriptions.

Tim