אני לא חושב שהשימוש הזה מתנגש עם חוק מניעת דואר זבל (תיקון מס’ 40 לחוק התקשורת), אפילו לא תחת תיקון 47 לחוק התקשורת הידוע כחוק נגד “צינתוק” (ראו גם את התביעה היצוגית בנושא) מכיוון שאני לקוח של 012 ותחת חוק התקשורת מותר להם לשלוח לי דברי פרסום, אבל עדיין מדובר בחוצפה ממדרגה ראשונה – לצפות שאני אשלם עבור משלוח דבר פרסומת אלי.

אז כל מה שיש לי לעשות הוא להמליץ לקוראי להזהר ולא לחזור לשיחות טלפון שלא נענו מחברת -012 סמייל.

So everyone copies from everyone else – that’s how a market should behave: if one product comes up with a better idea, then it is only expected that other products can build on that idea – and sometimes do it better. And don’t get me started on the patent thing – patents allow an inventor to protect the technology and implementation of a specific idea, it does not give one a monopoly on ideas (even though many today try to use the patent system like that).

The question that, I think, is more interesting to ask is – who is more willing to play this game and who treats idea as their sole domain and exclusive property?

The answer, not coming as a surprise to anyone, can be found in Apple’s founder new biography: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, as reported by AP review of the book set to be available tomorrow, here are some choice quotes (taken from AP’s review):

Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google’s actions amounted to “grand theft.”

“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

Jobs told Schmidt [Google's CEO at the time] … ” I want you to stop using our ideas in Android”

While I haven’t seen anyone from Google complaining about Apple “stealing ideas” from Android, apparently Steve Jobs really feels very strongly that no one is allowed to “steal” his ideas (while there is no problem for his devices to be inspired by others’ ideas – says the cynical Android fan-boy in me).

So it is clearly the case that while Android designers believe in an open arena where everyone is free to innovate without limitations, Apple believes in a one-way street style of innovation – ideas cannot be used without permission, unless they are not Apple’s ideas, in which case they are free for all.

BTW, as just another perfect example of how Apple treats other people’s innovations, compare this story about how Apple’s newly introduced Wi-Fi Sync feature “rips off” a third-party developer’s iOS application that was rejected from the Apple’s application store, up to and including the icon, while a third-party developer (working on iOS applications) is not allowed to use the string “todo” in its icon because Apple has a trademark on the word.

Related articles

• Steve Jobs Was Willing To ‘Rip Off’ Everyone Else… But Was Pissed About Android Copying iPhone? (techdirt.com)
• Jobs vowed to ‘destroy’ Android (bbc.co.uk)
• Early View: iOS 5 vs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (techradar.com)

This deal is very good for me, as a consumer of high-end smart phones, for several reasons: one reason is the more obvious patent issue: the Google smart phone OS has come under fire from competitors (mostly Apple) in a host of patent lawsuits, though none of them actually targeted Google itself: the main advantage of Android is its availability to any small manufacturer – which enabled the amazingly rich ecosystem that is the Android world, but its also its main disadvantage as competitors can target “small fish” for their patent extortion, companies that are too small to afford a real legal battle. Google wasn’t in a good position to help defend their OEMs or developers, and I believe this is what they were trying to do with their Nortel patents bids, that didn’t come through – but they had an ace in their sleeve: even as the Nortel business was going on, Google was probably already deep in negotiation with Motorola Mobility that hold a portfolio of around 18,000 patents and patent applications – compared with Nortel’s paltry 6,000 patents. With this arsenal, and once the deal comes through, expect Google to come out swinging.

But as I mentioned – this is only part of why I’m happy about this deal. The second, and likely more important reason as I will be looking for a new phone at about early 2012, is that I think Motorola Mobility is one of the best makers of Android running hardware – if not the best. They definitely have the market in keyboard slider phones, which is the kind I’m using. The problem is, I’m a power user – I like to use the latests and best software available and the whole point of having a small computer (read: user programmable device) in your pocket – is the ability to install and upgrade whenever something new comes out (about every couple of months). And this is where Motorola devices fail me: Motorola like to keep a lock down on any user modifications to the phone’s operating system and their devices are notoriously hard to mod – installing a new firmware on a Motorola phone is a dangerous game of “will it brick?”.

Motorola has come out with promises of freeing up the phone “bootloader” (the part of the phone’s firmware that makes sure you don’t install “unauthorized” software) but so far we haven’t see any results. I have hope that under the new ownership, Motorola Mobility developers will find it easier to keep to this promise and allow us power users to buy hardware on which we can run whatever Android-based operating system we want.

Lets forget, for the sake of the discussion, the technical attacks as these are relatively easy to handle and Linux operating systems are already pretty well protected against such. The main vector of attack for malware these days is Social Engineering anyway – this is how Mac OS-X users get attacked by malware: you browse a web site, and an image that looks like a a blinking dialog box notifies you that your computer has been infected by a virus and prompts you to download this “fix”.

Most of us, technically inclined users, sneer at this type of “threat”, but most people aren’t technically inclined and there are enough people out there that will be fooled by this practice time and time again. Click the image and a binary gets downloaded to your computer and if it is in the correct format it will get executed.

This is where the Linux side of business starts (and where the “Mandatory Access Control” part of the title comes to play) – a binary that you just downloaded and executed cannot just go and do anything. Most Linux operating systems these days (at least the more popular ones) employ some sort of “Mandatory Access Control” – be it SELinux or AppArmor – which means that unless you specifically say, ahead of time, that some program can do something – then it can’t. This applies to all access including access to user files.

The thing is – Linux users are already well protected against the user of “downloading an executable file” and running it: You have to download the file and save it somewhere that you can find, then double click it. At which point a dialog box pops up and tells you that you can’t execute files with out the “execute bit”, so you have to open the file properties, go to permissions, figure out what the “execute bit” is and set it, click OK and try to run the file again. That is on Ubuntu – other OSs have even a worse user experience. So you see – no worries there: if a user is gullible enough to download just any file of the internet and try to run it – there’s no way they’re going to be able to do it.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that if you can target Mac users and get them to download a Mac specific binary file (vs. a Windows specific executable for Windows users), then you can easily target specific (and popular) Linux distributions by getting their users binary files formatted with the appropriate software installation package format (“.deb” for Ubuntu, Debian and related OSs and “.rpm” for Fedora, SuSE and related OSs). All these operating systems, when you start downloading a file with the appropriate format, helpfully pop up a dialog that allows you to easily type in your password and install the “helpful software” right into your operating system!

Unlike getting a user to just execute a program, which will run with the user’s access level and at worst will trash the user’s files, this procedure lets loose an unverified piece of software into your operating system with full administration privileges. With that kind of access, such software can easily install its own “Mandatory Access Policy” that lets itself do whatever it wants.

And how does your operating system protect you from this vector? Very little if at all. At least in Ubuntu you get the very detailed “dpkg UI” dialog which presents a lot of information on the software you are going to install before you click OK – which may also expose you to additional social engineering. Fedora on the other hand does very little except show you the file name and allow you to click OK.

At no point there are warning to help the user decide what is the right thing to do – not that I expect this will do any good: uneducated users are very prone to just click “OK” to any dialog box that pops up without ever reading what it says, let alone considering it.

The Android styled “Mandatory Access Control” that has programs request specific permissions and the user is presented with this list for approval is not any better – for most users this is just another dialog that they don’t have to read if they just want to click OK.

What can be done about it?

Very little I’m afraid. Linux users are currently around 1~2% of total internet traffic and as long as it stays this low it unlikely malware authors will invest the extra effort to target us. But if we want to get more market share – and that means getting more uninformed people to use Linux based operating systems, then this will change.

I think its unhelpful to think that we can educate people to the point that these type of social engineering attacks will fail. If we really want to tackle the problem we have to be pro-active about defense, and as they say – “the best defense is a good offense”

What I propose should be done is that whenever a user tries to install a software using the “single click install” procedure, the confirmation dialog will be much more verbose and ask the user, not for their password, but to fill a simple multiple selection quiz: choose one of the provided reasons you want to install this software (or click “other” and type your own) and a couple of other questions like you get when you try to subscribe to a website – “where did you hear about it” and such. Not something truly drastic, just enough to get the user to think a bit more about what they are about to do.

After completing the dialog, the system will file all this information, along with the URL from which the software was downloaded, to a central repository on the internet (without any personally identifying information of course, not even the IP address) and interested individuals can look at these reports and vote if the software is valid or malware. Whenever an operating system is trying to install a specific piece of software from the internet, it can first look up the target in this database and if the consensus on the internet is that this is malware, then the operating system can refuse to install – very similar to how the website verification process that Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox use.

Advanced users can be spared this process (if they want to) as command line installations will not trigger this behavior and if you are really inclined there would be a checkbox in some system settings dialog that says something like “stop harassing me when I install software off the internet”.

So this is my proposal. What do you think?

A lot of system administrators have been waiting for this (me included) so I thought I’d give a heads up

Microsoft is understandably concerned, as they currently hold a “perpetual, royalty-free” license to all patents (which means that if the buyer doesn’t get to re-license with existing license holders, then they won’t get any more money from Microsoft on these patents), but what I’m ranting about is not their legitimate concern, but their attempt to color this as “unfair” – quips Techcrunch:

Microsoft says that’s unfair. And while they don’t specifically mention Google, it seems pretty clear who they’re thinking about when they write that a termination of existing licensing agreements “would result in considerable disruption in the development and enhancement of various existing technologies and give the prospective purchaser an unfair competitive advantage”.

This may be unfair, but Microsoft has done this exact same thing in the past, including the very near past where immediately after buying Skype, and just a few days after Microsoft promised that Skype will continue to be offered on non-Microsoft platforms, the “Skype for Asterisk” product was terminated disallowing Digium to sell any more Skype integration module for their successful (and open source) VoIP solution.

Obviously this is a move perpetrated to allow Microsoft’s competing VoIP product (Lync) an unfair competitive advantage by offering features that Digium can no longer offer – not because of technical issues but because Microsoft will not allow it.

Taking that into account, Microsoft claiming the sale of this patents to Google is unfair is just the pot calling the  kettle black.

Related articles

• Microsoft wants guarantees if Google buys Nortel patents (zdnet.com)
• Apple gets antitrust OK for Nortel patents bid (news.cnet.com)
• Google’s $900 mln Nortel patent bid OK’d: Report (marketwatch.com)

OK – it sounds worse then it is, but with normal use Firefox is simply way too heavy for my – not too shabby – Thinkpad T61 Core2 Duo T7250 @ 2GHz with 2GB RAM. Its not a stellar machine by today’s standard by its less then 3 years old and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to run a modern browser.

But with both Evolution (that requires a couple hundreds MB of memory) and Eclipse (at ~ 600 MB memory) I can’t also run Firefox which with just a few tabs open takes up close to 1GB of physical memory (and tons of virtual). My system just comes to a standstill, and lets not talk about running – oh, I don’t know – a terminal!

So I’m using Chromium and while its developer tools are not as good as Firebug, at least it doesn’t hog up all my RAM and with a few dozen tabs open my system is still pretty responsive.

It may be the process separation in Chromium that is better, allowing the operating system to swap out completely tabs that are not used. I’ve heard some talk about having the same thing for Firefox (project electrolysis – though at this point it seems to be focused on the Fennec mobile browser) and I do hope they get on with it because Firefox’s memory consumption has grown in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years and unfortunately my computer’s memory has not grown with it .

Its the first annual catholic conference on “Geocentrism”, where you’d find interesting lectures such as “Scientific experiments showing the earth motionless in space” and “Geocentrism: they know it by they’re hiding it”.

Brilliant, and just when you though its safe to walk outside.

Thanks to Skepticality, some brave fools are going to go there, possibly armed with t-shirts proclaiming their heliocentric beliefs. I probably would have put out something like “Galileo was right but all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. Or something.

It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

Here’s what I can do today with my 3 years old Ericsson P1i, my Nokia E-whatever or my fiance’s $20 Nokia (as well as about half of Nokia phones released in the last 8 years or so), and many other phones from other manufacturers:

• Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

Also, apple announced their own video conferencing protocol (the so called “FaceTime”), as discussed in ReadWriteWeb:

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

There is only one problem with that statement: there is already a standard protocol for video calls – as mandated by the cellular industry’s leading standard body, 3GPP: the 3G-324M protocol, was developed jointly with ITU (the telecom industry governing body for standardization) and is implemented in virtually all video call capable cellular telecom devices.

Now here’s a video:

(you can also watch this video on Youtube)

I apologize for the directing instructions in Hebrew (the guy operating the calling phone had trouble locating the “Dial” button on the phone) and for the lousy focus of the camera when closing in on the phone (but you should be able to make out that the calling phone is showing me videoing Sagi – the guy that takes the call).

Thanks to Sagi and Alon for taking a time out of their busy schedule to help me rant about stuff like that.

[Update:]

I still can’t get over how stupid Americans are – here’s a direct quote from Apple’s presentation:

Steve Jobs: “This is amazing, I grew up here in America with Jetsons, Star Trek and communicators — just dreaming about video calling. And it’s real now.”

Yes, but it was real 8 years ago as well – a long time before even the first iPhone came out!

Related articles by Zemanta

• FaceTime video conferencing coming to the iPhone (tuaw.com)
• Will iPhone 4 usher in era of video calls? (cnn.com)

The Linux Action Show review is useful, and good, but its not really fair – Chris and Bryan ranted on a lot of things that do not work well for Fedora, such as not a lot of applications pre-installed and some new and immature applications being introduced, Flash being hard to install, codecs missing and obscure instructions on Fedora’s wiki pages on how to address these issues, and more.

The thing is, is that all those comments are fair when looking at an operating system that is geared towards the general public – like Ubuntu – but Bryan and Chris themselves mentioned that Fedora is not aimed at that crowd but is meant for power users and developers (the debate about what is the target audience for Fedora is raging – I think the best description I heard so far, is from Máirín Duffy – heading Fedora’s design team – where in an interview she said “Fedora is aimed at people who want to work on Fedora).

When taken into the context that Fedora is an operating system for developers and power users, and specifically those that want to work on Fedora, then most of these problems are not important – its like harping on MS-Windows that it doesn’t come with a lot of software out of the box – its not supposed to.

Fedora people are very cautious with everything that is proprietary software and/or patent encumbered – hence the very ambiguous “You can find many interesting things using a search engine like Google” quote Chris mentioned: Fedora does not want to get involved in anything remotely DMCA applicable, and as much as I don’t like it – them being based in the USA and sponsored and hosted by a commercial company, I guess it is understandable.

I would love it if Fedora will put up detailed “follow these easy steps to enable patent-infringing and possibly copyright-violating codecs on your new Fedora system”, but I doubt they can get away with it and there is no point ranting. Chris and Bryan, if you’re listening – I’m not saying its all your fault, but that’s what you get for living in that crazy country you call home .

My Fedora Experience

My impression of Fedora 13 is also about mixed feelings – less about all the stuff that was already mentioned (because I was expecting it) and more because I expected a lot of other (quite advanced stuff) to work properly out of the box (or with-in reasonable tweaking) and it didn’t.

One of the things that works mostly well for me in Fedora 13 is KDE: I really like the KDE implementation in Fedora 13 (based on KDE SC 4.4.3) – it is very very pretty. While the 3D desktop effects are not as polished as Compiz on the GNOME side, they are still very nice (though I had to tweak the wobbly windows effect quite a bit and it still not exactly what I want, but hey – at least I can tweak it!) and the Plasma based desktop itself is extremely nice. I’m a very big fan of the “desktop activity” model, and I really dig the default activity which is a widget board with a single “folder containment” widget showing the desktop icons at the top left corner. I easily added a battery monitor, trash can, quick launcher (which I rotated 90° and put vertically on the right side), a system monitor and a weather applet.

The folder containment has a very useful effect where you can hover on a folder and then the folder will open in a sub-widget and will let you browse the things inside the folder – into whatever depth you want:

Here is a full picture of my current desktop, without any application running – because my laptop has a small 1024×768 resolution, I ran applications on the entire screen without any panels: the bottom panels is set to “windows can cover” so that it is visible only if there is no full size window (though you can bump the mouse cursor on the bottom edge to get it up) and the small top panel I use for status notifications is auto-hiding.

(Also, please don’t mind the background – one of the setting for the desktop activity is to choose a slideshow for the background, so I have several hundreds wallpapers and the desktop keeps changing every 15 minutes).  As usual, a static picture doesn’t do it justice – you have to see how it behaves: all the UI elements have eye-catching transition effects such as sliding and fade, notifications are transparent bubbles that pop up form the bottom and stack on top of each other, windows have transparency effects, menus slide up and down.

What is not to like about the KDE desktop – the integration is not up to par with the current GNOME setup – for example, I use bluetooth a lot and it simply doesn’t work well or at all in KDE: you can’t right click a file and send it to bluetooth and bluetooth pairing is problematic at best and impossible at worse. Don’t even talk to me about dial-up. The bluetooth software isn’t even running unless you run it manually. Another thing which I also like a lot in GNOME is that you can get into any part of the system through GConf or DBus, while in KDE 4.4 – even though they pioneered the message bus with their DCOP bus which was the basis for FreeDesktop.org’s DBus – currently not many services are exposed to that kind of manipulation, specifically Plasma stuff (which is mostly what you have on a KDE desktop today) is very hard to control programatically.

The lack of an SSH agent for KDE is also bothering me that makes using pass-phrase protected SSH keys as annoying as using passwords directly. When you try to access a remote file system over SSH you get a dialog that looks like a password entry dialog – including a username field – but that asks you for your SSH key pass-phrase. This is really easy to miss a few times until you figure out what to type in, and when you ask it to “save it in the wallet”, it will still prompt you for that next time. SMB access has even more problems. As I said – integration is not great, which is why I still pop into GNOME from time to time, though I’m using KDE now more then I ever used it since version 3.5 – I still can’t say its my primary desktop, but its getting really close.

Now about GNOME in Fedora 13: its OK. There’s nothing new and exciting there, and the GNOME experience in Fedora 13 is somewhat worse then what you get in even Ubuntu 9.10, but its useful and works well and they finally got rid of that annoying Nodoka theme – the replacement is the old Clearlooks style which is easy on the eyes, but as the Linux Action Show guys noted – it looks old.

My main gripe with Fedora 13 is that it keeps crashing! The operating system itself is rock solid, and they added a service that monitors for crashes and allows you to easily report them to the developers as bugs (somewhat like Ubuntu’s apport, but works better and doesn’t require you to use a browser to actually submit the bug, although it has the horrible name “abrt”), but I would have like it a lot better if applications wouldn’t keep crashing all the time – to the point that with most crashes I don’t bother reporting on them.

I’ve ranted on Evolution crashing in a previous post, but that is nothing new – with Fedora 13 everything crashes, I even had Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) crash on me multiple times! When has Nautilus ever crashed? – it was probably the most stable GUI application ever created. It is very important that they extended the maximum size for crash reports, because I sure as hell need it.

Interestingly enough – and back to the Linux Action Show review commentary – I don’t miss Mono at all. While on principal I don’t approve with Fedora’s move from Mono (regardless on which basis it was done), I wasn’t horrified by Fedora 13 dropping Mono completely from the default installed. I was expecting that I’d go and install Mono at one point or another, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll probably install it again at one point when I go back to playing with developing in Mono, but at the mean time I don’t need it.

Update:

After using Fedora 13 for about 2 months, I’m basically ready to give up on it and conclude that it is indeed the worst Fedora version ever.

Technology-wise its fine and has many useful and interesting features, but from the stability point of view it is computing hell – I’ve used many alpha versions that were more stable then Fedora 13 GA release. Heck, the beta I’ve been using since December was more stable then the GA release! And it seems to be getting worse, not better – the last update to Evolution (2.30.2) completely destroyed my ability to manage my calendar: ever since the update, whenever I receive a calendar invitation or try to create a new calendar entry, the Evolution data-server process crashes and the calendar access fails.

I’m currently running Fedora 13 on two different machines (a desktop and a laptop), but I’m going to move both to Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2 that was released recently – I’m sure it will be more stable .

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• The Joy of Betas: Fedora 13 Beta Released Today (ostatic.com)
• What Is The best Linux For Beginners? KGB Says It Is Ubuntu or Fedora (techie-buzz.com)
• Fedora 13 – Ubuntu’s smart but less attractive cousin (go.theregister.com)
• The Microsoft/Novell Mono Lobby (techrights.org)
• Bryan Quigley: So.. you want to try out the Alpha version of Fedora on a usb stick? (gquigs.blogspot.com)