A lot of the value in Apple has come from the ineptitude of other companies and the passion and willingness of early adopters to spend huge money. There are inherent limits to growth fueled by those two factors. For example, the early adopters with the greatest willingness to pay for smartphones (and associated service) have already purchased smartphones. Now the big market is from people in emerging countries, such as China, and the average consumer in developed countries. The record companies were so poorly managed that they gave up 30 percent of their digital music revenue because they were too lazy to run their own Web site. What other industry is going to give Apple 30 percent of its revenue in exchange for Apple running a server?
Philip Greenspun–Apple will decline after Steve Jobs…
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone
“I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.”
— Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup
via.
CLARIFICATION: Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of the C++ programming language. Doonsbury refers to him as a “Danish computer scientist” and Wikipedia describes him the same way. However he has spent almost his entire professional career in the United States.
When Ethicists Steal
A bizarre crime story with interesting computer security implications was revealed today when Aaron Swartz, a co-founder of the online news site Reddit and a Fellow at the Harvard University Ethics Center, was indicted for a massive data theft.
As reported in The Register, Swartz allegedly broke into a MIT wiring closet and installed a hidden laptop with multiple external hard drives. He used this to download over 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive of academic journals.
MIT’s network administrators detected the intrusion but were unable to locate the physical access point. When they tried to halt the data theft by blocking first Swartz’s IP address, then his MAC address, he easily evaded these measures by changing them.
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Circle Privacy in Google+
i just started playing with Google+ and I noticed that by default the list of members of your Circles is visible to everyone on the web. This is similar to Facebook making your Friends list visible–in both cases it gives away much more information about you than you might wish to random strangers to know.
It took several tries to figure out how to change this:
- Click your name in the black menu bar and select Privacy
- Press the “Edit visibility on profile” button
- You now have to click on the part of your profile whose visibility you want to change. Click on “In [your name]‘s circles”
- Change the selection from “Everyone on the Web” to “Your circles.” Or if you are super paranoid, uncheck “Show people in” to hide this from everybody.
- Press “Save”
- Press “Done editing” at the top of the page
What Happens When an Air Traffic Controller is Asleep?
Philip Greenspun on the Federal Budget Deal:
“We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.”
Sony Pushes the Envelope
Orin Kerr eviscerates Sony’s legal maneuvers against the people who broke the PS3′s encryption:
I realize the complaint characterizes the defendants as hackers, and the CFAA is supposed to be about hacking. But think for a moment about the nature of this claim. You bought the computer. You own it. You can sell it. You can light it on fire. You can bring it to the ocean, put it on a life raft, and push it out to sea. But if you dare do anything that violates the fine print of the license that the manufacturer is trying to impose, then you’re guilty of trespassing onto your own property. And it’s not just a civil wrong, it’s a crime. And according to the motion for a TRO, it’s not just a crime, it’s a serious felony crime.
Evil Password Change
..or at least an extremely secure password change method. (Actual production code.)
UPDATE: It’s hard to believe that this code isn’t malicious, but it’s just possible that it was put in as a placeholder and the developer never got around to actually implementing it. If so it’s a pretty malicious placeholder since it reports a user error instead of “not implemented.”
What’s more interesting is that this follows a pretty common security anti-pattern. Many sites seem to think that it somehow enhances security to keep their password rules secret and force the user to guess what they are.
aLinks with WordPress 3.0
I have updated my original aLinks post with a version that works with WP 3.0.
Parsing ISO 8601 Date Format in Java
These are dates in a format like “2010-05-17T09:30:47-04:00″ optionally including date, time and time zone, which are commonly found in XML documents.
In .NET you can just use DateTime.Parse(), but in Java the answer is not as obvious.
Assuming that you are using the Apache libraries, the simplest approach is probably to just use org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlCalendar:
Calendar c = new XmlCalendar("2010-05-17T09:30:47-04:00");
If that isn’t an option, try this.