Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have been having a lot of fun watching Apple-related lawsuits.

Apple sues HTC. HTC sues Apple.

Nokia sues Apple. Apple sues Nokia.

Kodak sues Apple. Apple sues Kodak.

Apple seems to be behind search warrant served against Gizmodo blogger.

We were wondering how to appropriately make fun of this trend, in which Apple is involved in a new legal action each and every week.

Then we were beaten to it, by an absolutely fantastic fake news story, in which Apple sues David Copperfield over the use of the word “magic”.

Apple’s press release explains, “David Copperfield has every right to entertain, but no right to confuse. In the public eye, magic equals Apple. Mr. Copperfield dilutes the Apple brand and profits by his use of an Apple asset.”

We present to you: the incredible shrinking moon!

(via Things Organized Neatly.)

Now that jailbreaking is legal, Apple is working on ways to disable your jail-broken phone. The Big Bad Blog is starting to think that Apple does not think very highly of its customers — they seem to be out to break our shit.

Stats-heads: Here is an interactive graph about Lonodn’s cycle-hire scheme, looking at the time, weather, and number of bicycles in use.

One of the big news stories in the tech world this past week are the plans that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have to shut down the data transfer services on Blackberries in their country.

In short, it would be a Blackberry ban — after all, what good is the device if it only makes calls?

The United Arab Emirates argue that the phone does not comply with their laws, because the data coming in cannot be monitored (and thereby appropriately censored). Various news sites around the web site “security concerns”, but never seem to have a quote from an authority or industry expert to back that up, giving us pause to make the same claim here.

That said, if the authorities are experiencing difficulty in monitoring phone traffic, it could conceivably cause consternation for their security agencies.

Not alone

Back in 2007, India was contemplating a similar ban — thoughts that seem to be heating up again, now that there are others in their corner. At issue then is the central issue that is present now: the Indian government wanted a back door to the system that would allow them to monitor traffic.

The problem was that Blackberry does not have such a back door, and was not willing to create one. Research In Motion’s official statement on the matter is that such a thing does not exist and will not exist:

The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates their own key and only the customer ever possesses a copy of their encryption key. RIM does not possess a ‘master key’, nor does any ‘back door’ exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or corporate data.

Is this free advertising?

Research In Motion has had a tough time of it recently. Google Android has recently become the top selling smartphone platform in the United States, ousting Blackberry from the top of the list for the first time. It’s next closest rival — the iPhone — is not far behind despite severe competitive limitations (it is only available in two models, and on one network).

In the battle of Application Stores, Blackberry is a distant third, well behind the second-place Android store, which itself it light years behind Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.

And when it comes for the battle for hearts and minds, RIM’s device is even further behind — people are genuinely excited about new Android phones, or the iPhone 4. When was the last time you heard someone daydreaming about owning a Blackberry?

In the midst of all these developments, a ban in Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates might look like one more blow, but looking closer, one has to wonder if that is really the case.

Why only Blackberry? Why not the iPhone, too? Why not my phone?

Why, indeed. When the concern of the authorities is that they cannot monitor incoming and outgoing data well enough to know what it is, one has little choice but to wonder how secure your data transfers truly are through other devices.

When a government says “iPhone? Go ahead, use e-mail!”, and “Blackberry? No e-mail — we cannot identify the content, so it is not allowed”, can any conclusion other than the government is reading my e-mail be reached?

This applies domestically, too, for those who are not in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. While the government might not be reading your e-mail, we cannot say the same about hackers. These bans demonstrate the relative ease of breaking into systems that we think are safeguarding our privacy.

Research in Motion should be trumpeting this “defeat” as a measure of how secure their devices truly are. While they are slumping in the consumer market, this event could be enough to maintain their huge advantage in the business market for years.

Sources
Al Jazeera
Apple Insider
The Australian
BBC News
International Business Times
The New York Times
PC Magazine

Photo credit: Newsbiscuit, The Blackberry Burqa

I read a lot of blogs, and follow a lot of people on Twitter. While the vast majority of these defy easy classification, for some the taxonomy is easy — they are friends, skeptics, comedians (whether they know it or not), science bloggers … and social media/technology “gurus”.

There is a reason why I follow this last group — while social media gurus spout no end of bullshit, as a group they are very tuned in to new technologies and have an excellent nose for finding interesting new technologies and news stories involving current technologies. This sometimes (but sadly not always) outweighs their tendency to be blowhards — they are too often self-proclaimed experts who lack any particular expertise. The requirements for being a social media guru are to be plugged into new technology (and its jargon) and to talk a good game.

So I was a little shocked when one of these gurus — “a consulting firm specialising in emerging technology & digital media” — wrote the following:

Apparently the fact that you can legal break your phone in the US is a cause for much jubilation, well at least for US geeks. How strange.

This particular guru is interesting, as they have a tendency not to take the popular viewpoint — for instance, they think that the Times paywall is a good idea. Because of this, they make for an interesting counterpoint to the constant wall of alleged gurus who do not appear to think for themselves.

Still, not understanding the importance of the decision allowing jailbreaking seemed quite odd to me — it was a tacit admission from this guru that they do not understand the issues involved.

As we are nothing if not kind and understanding know-it-all smartypantses here at the Big Bad Blog, we have decided to explain this geeky jubilation in three steps.

A criminal provision

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes circumventing a digital lock a criminal act. Until last week, the generally accepted interpretation was that any digital lock picking, from the use of a felt tip marker to a complicated hack was a violation of this law.

The penalty? Up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine for the first offense. Double that for repeat offenders.

Just to be clear: If you chain your bicycle to a fence and lost the key, you can cut the chain. Your chain. Your bicycle. Not a crime.

However, under the DMCA (and the above interpretation), if you locked your mobile phone, forgot the code, and hacked it — up to five years in prison. That’s a digital lock you broke.

While it should have clearly delineated the difference between breaking a digital lock in the commission of another offense and breaking a digital lock to get at something you own, it did not.

Perversion of the law

We can see already that a law (however flawed) designed to enforce copyright online — the DMCA — actually applies outside the realms of copyright, and prevents the removal of digital locks for any reason.

With this in mind, several businesses made an ingenious move — they built a business model using the DMCA’s protection of digital locks as their basis.

Phones are locked into a particular provider of phone services, and it is against the law for the owner of the phone to unlock that phone so it can operate under other providers. This increases the cost of switching providers (as law-abiding users need new phones) and creates an artificial financial barrier locking customers in with their current provider.

But Apple is the master of this strategy. Their devices are digitally locked — phones, music players and tablet computers — but not just to a service provider. They are locked into a software package, and require the use of Apple’s iTunes software to operate. They are designed that new software applications can be loaded to them, but locked so that those applications can only be bought in one place.

Apple profits tremendously from this artificially limited competitive landscape, but a large portion of their customer base loses out, as Apple heavily censors what is available from their store.

These tactics appear to have the backing of copyright-protection legislation, despite the locks being ineffectual and there being no copyright to violate in this situation. Circumventing the locks was considered a crime in the United States, and still is considered a crime elsewhere.

The business strategy, however, is rooted in perverting a law meant to protect copyright owners.

Ownership

Finally, as in the bicycle example above, it comes down to ownership.

If I lose the key to my bicycle lock, I am perfectly entitled to saw the lock of my bike. If I lock myself out of my car, I am perfectly free to call somebody to pick the lock on my door, break the window, or use some other means at my disposal to get into the car.

My bike. My car. My stuff.

I can break it, break into it, and use it how I see fit — so long as I am not committing some other crime by doing so. It might look suspicious, and result in a question or two from a police officer — at least, I hope it would — but it’s all perfectly legal.

Applying that same logic in the digital world, the question becomes who owns my iPhone?

If the answer is Apple owns my iPhone, then fair enough — I should not be allowed to break the locks within the device. I should also have to pay them if I put it in a blender. I would be destroying their stuff, after all.

But if I own my iPhone, then I should be able to do what I want with it, including downloading an alternate Operating System, or unapproved applications. So long as all this software is legally obtained, it should not be anybody’s business but my own. And I should not have to worry about going to prison for it.

This change is good

An all-out, take-no-prisoners digital lock rule was wrong. And rules that are wrong should be changed — this change simply makes breaking locks illegal only when the lock was protecting somebody else’s stuff. Which is how it is with analog locks.

It is hard to see this as a bad thing.

But this is not why the decision makes people happy — courts were not, after all, clogged with bizarre prosecutions under this law.

The decision makes people happy because it tears away the basis of the business practices of companies like Apple, and puts the right to decide what to do with hardware back in the hands of the consumer.

It allows jailbreaking to be something other than the domain of activists protesting against the status quo, and opens up a world of possibility to those who were willing to respect a law, even if it did not make sense.

In short, the jailbreaking geeks were not just geeks — many were making a conscious act of defiance (and risking prison, however faint that risk might have been) in response to a business practice based upon a perversion of law. And they won — this battle, anyways — and winning tends to bring happiness.