Apple: the "evil fruit"

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There’s finally been a lot more people – influential people – waking up to the reality of what Apple has become: more evil, monopolistic and selfish than almost anyone else in the technology business. The fact their products are pretty and the company was once the underdog is no longer enough to cover over the fact that their behaviour unfairly screws their users time and time again for the benefit of Apple’s bottom line.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for many people was the news the Apple had rejected the official Google Voice application from the App Store, and it then proceeded to remove two other applications for using Google Voice that had been previously approved. There was – finally – uproar, and I’m really glad to see it.

I was interested to read Jason Calacanis’ strongly worded “calling out” of Apple in “The Case Against Apple – in Five Parts” from earlier today. Instead of just ranting at Apple for their very very bad behaviour, Jason also tries to justify the business case for Apple changing their ways and not screwing and controlling their customers so much. I’m not sure the case needs a whole lot of justification, but you’ve got to admire his efforts.

A few days before Jason’s post, my friend Michael Arrington announced he was Qutting the iPhone. In explaining his reasons, Mike says “…I choose to work with the company that isn’t forcing me to do things their way”, and he chooses Google over Apple. His approach is entirely pragmatic, but it also helps that he’s on the right side of the moral and emotional debate on all of this.

One thing that has always bothered me is the number of Mac Fan-boys in the technology industry. They like to beat up Microsoft as the evil empire, and see purchasing a Mac as an act of defiance. Many of these people are also passionate about open-source, and see Microsoft as the enemy in this regard. Now, I’m no Microsoft defender, but don’t these bone-heads appreciate that the Mac and the iPhone use a lot of open source software under the hood, and then proceed to wrap the products – particularly the iPhone/iPod and iTunes stack – into a walled garden which is more monopolistic than Microsoft and Windows have ever been? Surely this is the definition of “closed”?

As if to demonstrate just how one-eyed many in technology circles are, when news of the rejection and deletion were first announced, people assumed it was AT&T who were at fault: surely Apple, the perfect dictatorship, would never do this? It might turn out that it was AT&T – thankfully, the FCC is investigating – but regardless of whether it was Apple or AT&T calling the shots, I think the real problem is Apple being able to tell users what they can and can’t do with a piece of hardware they’ve purchased and own.

Apple should have the right to choose which applications to ‘stock’ in its store, and they should have the right to decide that almost without recourse, just like a vendor at the corner store should be able to choose what products to carry. The problem isn’t the approval process: the problem is that users should have the right to install applications on products they’ve purchased without needing to hack in, something Apple is trying to have made into a crime based on bullshit reasoning they should be ashamed of.

My moment of “wow, you guys really, really suck” was crystalised when I was travelling with my girlfriend in New York last year. I was using my laptop to charge her iPhone, and it asked if I wanted to upgrade to the newest firmware. I said OK, but then it didn’t work, and the phone needed a hard reset. My girl was pretty understanding considering she’s just lost all of her contacts and SMS messages, but the frustrating bit was that the apps she’d previously bought were wiped. By doing the hard reset while being attached to my computer, the iPhone had associated itself with my iTunes account. No problem, I thought: when we first got the iPhone, we signed into the iTunes store via the iPhone (no laptop or iTunes). I just needed to find that screen again, sign out from  my account, and she could sign in as hers. After searching for ages, and having a trip to see the very pretty Apple store near Central Park on our walking tourist agenda anyway, I figured we’d ask one of the geniuses for help. When we got there, I was amazed to be told the menu option I couldn’t find is deliberately hidden from the user, and the only way to change the iPhone to her account was to plug it into her laptop: which was at home, back in Australia, where we wouldn’t be returning for 2 more weeks! And the reason for deliberately hiding a menu/feature that I knew existed on the phone? It’s a “security feature”. Bullshit. It’s there so Apple can continue to screw and control its users and wring out every last cent from them.

Still, even a week ago and just after the Google Voice debacle broke, when I was doing some training with people from a company brave enough to make their motto “Don’t be Evil”, the topic of Apple came up, and I mentioned that I thought they were “evil”. The person I was speaking to couldn’t believe what I was saying, and that surely I meant the other guy, and that Apple is beyond reproach. Unfortunately, this attitude is all too prevalent in technology circles, but then it takes time for people’s attitudes to change.

Even so, there are people out there deliberately and consciously doing the ostrich. I read a post tonight (via Techmeme) from a guy who argued against Jason Calacanis’ post after proudly disclosing he hadn’t even read the post. Weird: you normally only see that kind of deliberate ignorance on matters of religion.

So, what’s my problem with these fan-boys, choosing to stay ignorant and fighting the battles of the early 1990’s? If it were people just choosing to remain ignorant fan-boys I wouldn’t care as much, but these are often the people who family members and friends turn to for technology advice. That’s the real problem, and until the mainstream press start paying attention and asking questions – like why can’t I sync my music I’ve paid for to a Palm Pre from iTunes – people are just going to get more and more screwed by an increasingly more powerful and despotic Apple.

The political power of the digerati?

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I’ve been planning to write a post on this for ages, but time has gotten away. Seriously. Since March the 26th. That’s the day I felt politics in Australia be changed by the internet.

It was the day Senator Conroy went on Q&A, the ABC”s live question and answer show, where he was inundated with questions – apparently over 2000 of them – from members of the public raising serious concerns about the proposed compulsory, national filtering scheme that Conroy – whether by choice or hospital pass – is the front man on.

My objection to a compulsory filter is on the record, so I really enjoyed hearing from the Senator – someone I’ve met since – try and defend his policy. From my perspective, it seemed like the Senator really didn’t want to defend it on its (lack of) merits; any time a Government in power invokes the names, acts and policies of their predecesssors, it is pretty clear they’re trying to avoid responsibility for the current state of play.

But this post isn’t just some rehashing of some persons opinion on a political matter – God knows there’s enough of that already.

No, the thing that really struck me during this experience back in March was how real time contributions, combined with the unique Twitter backchannel, opened my eyes to the noise, if not influence, of the digerati.

The speed of posts, quality of insight, and general ability to shape and resolve community sentiment online was truly breathtaking. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it will forever remain with me as a memory, something I’ll either look back on as a start of something, or as a glimpse of what might have been.

After the interview on Q&A and the extensive level of real time participation I shared with others involved in the debate, I started to wonder about what it all meant for our society, and the political process that for a century or two has been forming policy, laws, regulations and getting on with governing based on a representative system.

As I see it, there are three potential scenarios.

Option 1: The Digerati and Representational Politics

The first scenario is that we’re going to continue with a representative political process, but influence will move towards messages that are facilitated by the digerati. In this model, a small number of individuals are going to be elected/empowered to represent us citizens. They’ll be responsible for voting on laws and approving regulation, they’ll promise to consult with us and our general levels of apathy will ensure only a minority will engage with the political process beyond the ballot box. The positive thing about this scenario, however, is that more direct interaction, feedback, campaigning and consultation will happen using interactive technologies, today represented by websites, email and Twitter. It will be much easier for members of the public to make some noise and be noticed through the online environment, but at the end of the day you’ll still be trying to convince a person with 46 chromosomes to make decisions you agree with, with the option every 3-4 years of expressing your displeasure and voting them out.

To see this form of political interaction really take effect, more and more of us will need to become political animals. Our social networks, our digital interactions, our posts on Twitter, and more, will become influences on the perspectives, opinions and voting intentions in a more tangible and effective way than the media currently does. If Channel 9 tell me a movie is good, I’m going to take it with a very large grain of salt. If a good friend makes an impassioned plea that a policy is going to hurt their family or the environment, I’m going to give it a lot more credibility because of the shorter social distance. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. Many of the reforms that have our country in a much better place than most of Europe today – surrounding labour markets, trade, and to a (depressingly) lesser extent, welfare, aren’t popular and even though they’re right, perhaps a digerati backed political process wouldn’t have supported/allowed them…

Option 2: The Digital Revolution & Legislative Democracy

This situation is potentially the most revolutionary of all, and involves us, as citizens, voting directly on legislation, regulation, and the policy that frames these decisions. While the consequence of this sort of change wouldn’t mean the abolition of representative politics, it would change the dynamic; instead of voting for chair fillers who make up the numbers, we’d vote for politicians who are then charged with the responsibility of ‘selling’ their policies (or alternative policies) to their electorates. Their approach will need to be interactive and engaging – a bit shock for a number of politicians who are just making up numbers as pay-back from their party machines until they can make it to their generous pension scheme entry ages and retire – but in principle it could work quite nicely.

Of course, there are many potential problems with this model. While you’d be hard pressed to find an impartial citizen who’d vote down a 90% punitive tax on finance executive & worker bonuses for people who just deal in other people’s money without wearing any of the risk if things go pear shaped (as they did last year), there are numerous bills that are pretty dry and boring, and more disurbingly, you’d probably get pretty good support for a nut-job bill that promoted protectionism and increased tariffs, or, even worse, foolish and frankly racist immigration controls. This model certainly isn’t perfect, but then the current system (below) is hardly a pretty picture.

Option 3: Unrepresentative, 1901 Issue Myopia

More than a few of the 3 of you who read this post are probably thinking, “Hey, not everyone is online, not everyone is going to try and get involved. This digerati participation concept is really unrepresentative”. And you’re be right. But I’d argue, with more than 80% of Australian households now having the internet, the options above are a lot less unrepresentative and skewed than the status quo.

The third option I see is a continuation of a myopia where our political representatives remain wrapped in some of the most unrepresentative systems and irrelevant issues than ever, and we continue to be affected and held back by it.

Our current government is the Labor party, an organisation that until recently had it enshrined that at least half of their voting delegates to their national policy setting conference were appointed/sent by Unions. As demonstrated so dramatically in NSW in 2008, when the Labour Government of Day disagrees with these conferences, the results can be dramatic: effectively, the Union movement in NSW took down a Premier and a Treasurer, and put a multi-billion dollar hole in the State’s finances to protect the parochial interests of their members who like the idea of continuing to be employed by a benign employer who wouldn’t make sure things ran efficiently.

To look at what this means for our democracy, it is important to realise that only 60% of our population are in the labour force  (lets say 12.6m out of 21m in Australia). Of that 12.6m, about 650K are currently unemployed, so we’re dealing with closer to 12m workers. Last time I checked, about 15% of these workers were part of Unions (it has been on a downhill slide for a long time now), which means we’re dealing with about 1.8m Australians, a bit over 8% of the overall population, who control more than half of the Government. If you look at the heritage of many of the members of our Government, you’ll see a a long history in labour relations, focused on a 20th Century fixation on industrial relations and a preference in having all people equal, but of course some more equal than others.

The current prevailing model is where around 8% of the community have a dramatic level of control, and only a small fraction of that 8% actually care two hoots; they are just paid up members who have to vote for someone, and they let others run their political campaigns, often without a lot of consideration for the wishes of their broader constituents (I’ve seen this first hand more than once, and it isn’t pretty to see employees left unemployed by their representatives happy because they managed to estabilsh a precendent for others).

The digerati, through either influence and replacing the media function, or through direct participation, certainly isn’t perfect. There are many potential issues to address, and it isn’t like the current gerrymander enjoyed by groups who think industrial relations is actually the business of government – news flash: its the economy, defence, social issues, and not controlling the minute details of employment relationships that matter the most to our nation – are going to give up their narrow ideology easily.

But on the 26th of March, as thousands had their say, and even more participated online, I saw a glimse of the future where we could actually play a bigger part in shaping the country we live in, and the sooner we move beyond being governed by the narrow interests and ideologies of union hacks and lawyers, and instead harness the participatory power and intelligence of our citizens, the better!

Facebook's 'Quiz' App: When horrible spam is backed by the FbFund

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I’ve been getting into using Facebook a lot more in the last week, spurred on by the need to prepare for my presentation during CeBIT’s Webciety event about what enterprise software can learn from Facebook’s incredible level of user adoption and engagement.

With its recent relaunch the “news feed” is now the most important part of the site. Reading through the feeds lately, I’ve seen a massive, massive amount of these crap quiz applications. Each of the quiz’es is a little different, but after setting a couple of dozen over a day or two, I started to see a trend and did a little digging.

Common thread: all these apps are running back to quiz.applatform.com

While the Apps all have different names, and none of them have an “about” page to tell you who’s actually behind them, there’s a common thread; they make the user click through via the quiz.applatform.com web address to track your visit, before they then send you back to Facebook and the request to allow the application to access your account details.

Trying to go to www.applatform.com didn’t get my anywhere, and going to quiz.applatform.com without the tracking ID’s just redirects me to Facebook’s homepage. Looked pretty dodgy to me…

Naturally, I then had a look at the domain’s WHOIS records, and these guys have gone to some extra effort and cost to obscure who’s really behind it.

Application Developers and many users are up in arms

After getting no love there, I did a simple Google search, and the results were damning: in the developer forums, people are up in arms. Some of them are clearly biased because these pernicious quiz applications are flooding the news feeds and using up all the “oxygen”, and are pointing out repeatedly – with interaction from Facebook staff – that these applications are breaking the rules.

I’m no expert on Facebook’s rules, so I’ll leave them to duke it out.

These app’s are user-generated applications

One of the interesting things about these applications and the crap that spews from them is that they’re user-created applications. The tool allows you to create your own Facebook quiz, chosing your own images, questions and answers.

As a result, every application is different, none of them have any checking by anyone, a situation that recently got one of the applications into trouble, in this case with the over sensitive Jewish lobby. (Side note: I wonder if there will be a powerful Palestinian lobby in 50 years since they’ve been the next people’s subject to a holocaust).

… but Facebook is protecting them; because they’re funding them?

One thing that came out in the Developer forums is who’s really running these horrible apps: HotBerry Entertainment Inc. Another more interesting revelation is that HotBerry is a Facebook Fund (FbFund) recipient, meaning Facebook liked what they were doing enough to issue grants to promising Application Developers. You can see the reference to funding HotBerry in the first round of funding back in July 2008.

With so many up in arms, the business/people behind the applications going to a lot of lengths to hide their true identies, you’ve got to wonder why Facebook isn’t disabling the tool that keeps spewing these things out. Is there a conflict of interest because they’re a FbFund recipient, or don’t they realize the damage these things are doing to the experience of users on the platform?

Do Apps have a future in Facebook?

In my opinion, one of the key benefits of Facebook over MySpace is the increased usability of Facebook’s cleaner interface. With MySpace, every page you went to (last time I looked) would start shouting some song at you as soon as the page loaded. Beyond this, the pages were almost impossible to read after users ‘decorated’ them.

Unfortunately, in most cases, the Apps developed for Facebook have detracted from this benefit of easy of use and lack of clutter, and have instead deliberately tried to get your attention and clutter your experience.

Then there’s the spam. Even more reputable applications like the TripAdvisor one where you list the Cities you’ve been to sent out two spam invitations yesterday to people I would regard as acquaintences, completely without my permission. These Quiz applications are nuts, jaming up news feeds and

What’s missing: the ability to stop Apps from ever appearing in the News feed

While Facebook has tried to deal with apps behaving badly through their changes to policies around invitations, the real answer is to give users the power to never ever see an application appear in their news feed, and to provide an option when the user clicks on the X to hide the message in the feed to be able to choose to block all apps; currently you can only block feeds from users or from a particular application; this new trend of having thousands of user generated applications makes this later preference ineffective.

So, Facebook, when are you going to make it possible for me to scrub every application notification from my user experience? I come to Facebook to interact with my friends, and applications have NEVER added value to that experience for me: can you please just give me an option to cut them out completely?

Embracing stalking with Latitude's public feed

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Well, I’m not really embracing stalking, but as a user of Google Maps on my mobile, I’ve been pretty intrigued by the concept of Latitude. One of my biggest frustrations when it first came out was they the only way to use it – through iGoogle – was pretty poor.

In addition, while restricting the list to your friends list via Google Talk made sense if all your friends are GTalkers, most of my friends aren’t (I certainly don’t use it much).

Now, however, Google has announced that they are supporting the display of your location through Google Latitude to the public. You can choose how much detail to display (ie, not enough detail for someone to really stalk you, since this info is available to every anonymous freak who visits this blog, all 4 of you), and if you are that way inclined, you can use more programmy ways like a JSON feed to get this information out in ways that you can do something with it (I’m thinking of all the startup camp mashup ideas now…)

I’ve embedded my status on the right. What do you think? Is this going too far, or a really useful tool that’s just scratching the surface of what the social web, combined with geography, can do for us to make our lives more enriched?

Research: what makes Facebook so engaging?

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I’m writing a talk for the Enterprise conference at CeBIT, which tries to unpack what makes people spend hours and hours a week interacting with and updating Facebook, and what enterprise applications – particularly those that benefit from collaboration and which are often “higher level” tools rather than lower level tools necessary for a narrow job function – can learn from them.

I’ll be sure to share my thesis for what companies and enterprise applications can take away from Facebook – and the things they should make sure they leave behind – back here on my blog, but until then I’d really love to hear from you: what do you think makes Facebook so very compelling that keeps users “hooked” on it? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

What if your work is your hobby?

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After spending yesterday afternoon in the office in a hack-a-thon – hat tip to Glenn for joining me – and much of today getting a plan together for CeBIT this year, I was feeling pretty amped about the month and a half ahead and the challenges therein.

So it was funny to have my girlfriend, who’s feeling a bit under the weather at the moment, ask me how I know I’m happy, and ask me to break down how I spend my week. She was basically saying “you work a lot – don’t you need some time that isn’t working, reading the paper, watching interesting stuff on TV, studying and the like to know you’re happy?”

It got me thinking. Am I lucky because my work is my hobby and the challenges of every day are (mostly) exciting? Or am I just deluded: I’m nothing more than a work-a-holic.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

Get your product/service into CeBIT's Webciety Showcase – FREE!

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CeBIT is happening in a month and a bit in Sydney, and this year they’ve decided to focus the eyes of the tens of thousands of show visitors on a new showcase section, called Webciety. Webciety is going to showcase a dozen of Australia’s hottest web-software companies, and if you think your company deserves to be there, you can enter a competition to win the wildcard Webciety spot.

CeBIT is Australia’s biggest technology trade show, and it is on for its 10th year in Australia this May, between the 12th and the 14th. I’ve been involved in CeBIT in Sydney for a number of years now, and I even managed to squeeze in a visit to the original big-daddy CeBIT in Hannover, Germany in 2006.

As a tradeshow, CeBIT has a pretty broad range. While checking out the latest gadgets and marvelling at the ever-increasing size of flat panels each year has been pretty impressive, I’ve sometimes felt like software – particularly the web software space where I’ve always played – is a little bit scattered and doesn’t pack the punch it should.

This year, however, things are going to be different with the Webciety showcase.

The Webciety part of the show is designed to showcase how web-based technologies, products and services play an increasingly important part in our lives. After debuting in Hannover in March this year to an incredible response from visitors, the Australian organisers have decided to make the Webciety feature a centrepiece of the Australian show.

CeBIT is a pretty incredible event, with around 35,000 people attending Sydney’s show last year. In these tougher economic times, people are hungrier to find better ways to work, and if the experience at the 2009 show in Hannover last month is a guide, there should be a large number of high quality and very interested attendees heading down to Darling Harbour in May for this year’s show.

If you’re keen to get your company and its product/service included in the showcase, the good news is that CeBIT has set aside one of the Webciety spots as a “wildcard” entry. By nominating your company, you could find yourself included in this prestigious showcase, completely free! Entries close on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2009, so get in quick!

Warning: .cn domains lost within 72hrs of expiry

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My company, Internetrix, has been expanding into the Chinese market gradually over the last year or so. Part of this has led us to register a couple of .cn domain names.

As a result of some plans we made a year ago, we registered a .cn domain name, in this case through GoDaddy. The domain name expired at around 11am on the 5th of March, so depending on the time zone, which would be only 30 and 54 hours ago.

Unfortunately, by the time I logged onto GoDaddy to renew the domain, it was too late. While domains I have decided not to renew from back in February were there asking for me to renew them, the .cn domain wasn’t.

It looks like when domains in .cn expire, they expire almost immediately. There is no way to renew them, and getting the domain back just now – around 2 days after expiry – cost me an additional US$50 in a redemption fee on top of the registration cost.

The very helpful operator from GoDaddy also told me that if I’d waited until tomorrow to call, they wouldn’t have been able to get it back for me. This means a domain could be irretrievably lost to squatters less than 72 hours after expiry.

This might be different for different registrars, and whoever GoDaddy use is particularly fierce with their suspension, but either way, I’d strongly recommend anyone starting to dabble in the .cn namespace be very, very careful and dilligent about their renewal handling processes.

Mike Arrington's Time Out and the decloaking the mob with Torches & Pitchforks

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I wasn’t that surprised to read Mike’s post today about some really bad stuff happening over the last 6 months.

I didn’t know the details until I read them on TechCrunch, but I knew something was up when I messaged him to let him know I was going to be in the Valley for a couple of weeks in November. To my surprise, he told me he was going to be out of the state, at his parents place, and this was with months of advance warning. The Mike Arrington I know doesn’t make many plans that far in advance, and he’ll the first to admit that being right in the middle of Silicon Valley has as much to do with Techcrunch’s success as the many other factors. Being out of town – and the state – for months didn’t seem right.

I thought it might have been family stuff – I knew where he told me he was going to be was his parent’s place – and was hoping it wasn’t bad news or health stuff with him or his folks, and instead that he just needed to get out of the Valley to get out of the echo chamber for a while.

Of course, little did I know it was work related, and he was trying to get away from it, but instead of another Vulture piece from ValleyWag or a hatched job from the clearly jealous and much less talented writer, Betsy Schiffman, it turns out someone with a felony, and gun and an axe to grind was stalking Mike and his staff.

I’ve lived as a house-guest of Mike’s on a number of occasions, initially for 3 month stint in early 2006, when TechCrunch was less than 6 months old, and during that time I felt like I got to know the guy really well. We chatted about times before Techcrunch, women and relationships, lessons from previous business ventures and more. Those were personal conversations, and they’re going to stay that way.

My point is, however, that I got to get to know a person, a man I regard as my friend, thankfully for me at a time when he still “assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise”. I saw someone who’d always take a contrarian position and get you to justify it. I’d watch – and cop – him taking the piss out of people, but we’d give as good as we got. I reckon he’s got more than a small potential to become an honourary Aussie: he didn’t care for status/authority, is direct, and loved to stick it to the man, which in his industry, is the incumbent media outlets. Pure Aussie in my books.

I also saw up close just some of the untrustworthy people, the types who lie even when the truth will do just as good a job, who’ve tainted his perspective. I’ve been frankly stunned that such an insightful and intelligent guy could be so trusting of people who’ve since screwed him over. And still he didn’t raise a finger in anger or retribution using his extensive online influence.

I’ve watched from afar as one storm or another has erupted online as people struggle to realise that just because its easier to click a mouse button, it doesn’t make it any less of a fight, and reflected that, with the exception of the stouch with DEMO, none of those fights were of his making. Sure, he’s no shrinking violet – he’s an attorney who loves a fight as much as the next lawyer, but more for the challenge than for the desire to stand upon the head of a lifeless opponent – but frankly, the vast, vast majority of the attacks and abuse levelled at Mike over the last couple of years have been way off base.

So, what’s the deal with these attacks? Given we’re talking about real world threats and attacks, its really worth having a look at them, and potentially shining a bit of light on the attackers. I believe they fall into one of three categories:

  1. Jelousy and Self-Interest – this one is the de rigueur attack motivation for the journalists out there covering tech. Many of them represent old-media, who see the competitive pressure of TechCrunch to be more than a little intimidating. The story I read on SMH today over lunch almost made me choke: headlined “Tony Soprano of Bloggers Faces Death Threats“, and in a piece that characteristically didn’t link to its sources, feature quotes taking shots at Arrington, including the one used in the headline, from other traditional, dead-tree media, who’ve got a pretty clear self-interest in taking him down. I thought this was a bit rich given most tech stories I’ve seen in SMH Tech News lately have been rehashes of TechCrunch pieces with a 12 hour delay and no links to sources. Moving away from traditional media to the other tech bloggers, a decent amount of the attacks are motivated by jealousy. And in the cases where they’re really legitimate differences of opinion, rather than just hit jobs, things are resolved amicably, and mostly in person. I enjoyed lunch with Mike and Dave Winer not two months after this comment’s little dust up, and there were no hard feelings at all around the table in Palo Alto.
  2. Bitterness of Rejection – there’s been a few recent posts about how stupid it is for startups to pin all their hopes on success, interest from VC’s and the implicit legitimacy of a positive review on Techcrunch. I can see how a want-re-preneur might get angry and upset about getting passed over, but if their key to success was a favourable Techcrunch post, I’d argue they don’t really have a business, just a fantasy of rock-star success and a Tesla in every garage. This sort of bitterness is just sour grapes (ok, enough taste metaphors already). The guy who did the spitting might have been responding to the bitterness of rejection, or he could have just be someone acting out the next point…
  3. Tall Poppy Syndrome – anyone who’s spent any time with Mike knows he isn’t a geek, programmer or deep technologist. To my knowledge, he’s never pretended to be. He does business analysis of businesses that just happen to be in the tech scene. Most of the flames I see posted in comments are either from people bitter after being rejected, or just pissed off that some guy who doesn’t know Perl from Python commands so much attention in the tech world. If you’re some random hater who’s rejoycing that Arrington is ‘out’ because you don’t think he knows tech enough, my suggestion is to think about what you’re going to do when you get pink-slipped because the business bit that pays for your lifestyle doesn’t work out, and hope that XKCD remains free so you can at least have some humour.

Anyway, the key point I’m trying to make here is that Mike’s a great guy: within 10 mins of meeting me and my business partner in Palo Alto, he offered us his house for as long as we needed it. All this stuff about Tony Soprano is just plain bullshit peddled by people with their own agenda, and if we let the bitter, jealous and tall poppy types continue with their baseless tirades without any accountability, we’re going to loose more and more good people.

Lets hope the serious stuff of the stalking ends, and for personally, I hope those enjoying the specatle of watching one of their biggest competitive threats bow out (hopefully temporarily) wake up with a nasty hangover tomorrow when they realise their rehashed and late stories, with little analysis, depth, opinion and conviction, supported by a business model more conflicted that Arrington’s ever was, is crumbling around them.

My chat about #nocleanfeed with Sharon Bird, MP

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A month or so ago I was prodded by @pat on Twitter to take some direct action on the #nocleanfeed issue.

For those wondering what the hell #nocleanfeed is all about, check out http://nocleanfeed.com. From their website:

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

What started as an election promise by the ALP during the 2007 election campaign to make a voluntary “clean feed” managed by the ISP available to households (as a counter the Howard Government’s initiative of funding the licence cost of software managed on your home computer) expanded into a proposal for a national, compulsory filter that no internet user would be able to opt out of.

While the compulsory list would be less of a nanny and would filter less content out, it would still mean every Australian would be subject to a filter, the likes of which is only found in places like China and Saudi Arabia. Worse, the super-evil list wouldn’t ever be made public (for fairly understandable reasons) so as a free country, we’d be being censored without any transparency; thoughts like 1984 and Big Brother then come to mind: after all, who watches the watchers?

Anyway, taking @pat’s prod, I emailed my local member, Sharon Bird, Member for Cunningham (ALP), and asked if she’d be prepared to meet me for a chat about it. Thankfully she was very open to a chat and keen to learn more, and we had an hour long discussion today.

My approach was to try and put aside the discussion about censorship, and I think it worked pretty well. In fact, trying to separate the merits of censoring some of the dark corners of the internet – since people have a range of views along – and declaring that the censorship debate right and appropriate, but putting it aside and talking about the problems with the filtering proposal, is a good approach for everyone interested in stopping the compulsory filtering of Australian internet access.

Instead, having defused the debate about whether it was right or wrong to restrict access to some material, I turned my attention to the two big problems with the compulsory filtering, which I saw as:

  1. Filtering web traffic will slow things down; for a new government that stood and won on a broadband enhancement platform, this seemed like a strange thing; and,
  2. Filtering web traffic won’t achieve their censorship or child protection objectives; it’s impossible to create a definitive list of dodgy stuff, filters are easy to get around with Proxies and VPNs, most of the dodgy stuff getting around the net travels via P2P or Email, and lastly, I’d be more worried about a kid being groomed by a real world paedophile in a chat room or on a social network, than I’d be about them searching out porn.

So, how did it go you’re probably wondering?

Overall, I was really impressed with Sharon’s grasp of the way the internet works. She’d been briefed to an extent before Christmas, but that was more about where the pilot was up to. She had read the Crikey article from this week about the Filter and appreciated that internet != web browsing, and that Peer-to-Peer plays a big part in how content gets around the world.

We talked in general terms about the objectives of the proposal to filter the internet, and boiled the motivations down into three groups:

  1. The government is trying to make it harder for baddies to get up to no good, such as browse kiddie porn;
  2. Parents want to make protecting their children from online nasties the government’s responsibility; and/or,
  3. The government made a political pledge in a campaign where they needed to court traditionally conservative voters, and being seen to do something about unsavoury content on the net was a necessary part of getting elected.

We then talked about how these three motivations were (mis)served by the concept of a compulsory national internet filter, and I pointed out:

  1. People doing nasty stuff don’t use websites. They use private P2P networks, they use VPNs and they do a range of other things to cover their tracks. If this was really the Government’s priority, take the hundred million plus they’re committing to the filter and give it to the AFP instead; they can then pose as kiddie porn traders and take the creeps down in a sting (like they do quite well from time to time already)
  2. The most dangerous thing for a kid isn’t looking at some porn; its being groomed in an online forum, social network or other place where people interact virtually, and for them to be manipulated to the point where they give out details like addresses, phone numbers, or God forbid, agree to meet someone in person without telling their parents. Sure, parents don’t like the idea their kids are looking at porn, but I reckon they’d be much more scared of them being physically or psychologically abused. The filter isn’t going to make any of this less likely, and if parents build a false sense of security that the government has made the internet safe for kids, so they don’t bother supervising, then the filter makes the internet a more, not less, dangerous place for kids.
  3. This motivation makes the most sense, but I pointed out that the ALP went to the election promising an opt-in clean feed for households, funded by the government. While many people think any sort of filtering is a bad thing, I really just object to it being compulsory. When it’s compulsory, my internet connection slows down. My business is less competitive. And then the government – perhaps a future government – has a tool to stifle free speech. If the Federal Government wants to waste hundreds of millions on a project of negligible use, I’m not going to start a movement: us Aussies are too laid back and we’re used to our Government’s wasting money – don’t get me started on the $10B bogan cash bonus fiscal stimulus package to prop up retail sales for products we just imported anyway – to get upset about them funding a voluntary feed.

All in all, Sharon was very interested, quite informed on the basics, and appreciative of our arguments and where we’re coming from. While remaining appropriately uncommittal, at the end of our chat I felt like she had a good understanding of the issues and consequences of putting in compulsory filtering technology.

This government has been very very strict on not breaking promises so far, and asking them to abandon the concept of a clean feed at an ISP level, funded by taxpayers is going to be an uphill battle. The solution looked pretty obvious to Sharon and I at the end of our chat: for the Federal Government to fund an optional clean feed for people to opt into, possibly supplied by a subset of ISPs who will take on additional technical complexity in return for government largesse, and to return the idea of a compulsory nation-wide feed to the “that was a stupid idea, wasn’t it” bin.

Other noteworthy parts of our chat included:

  • Sharon suggesting that a better interface between the Minister and Industry might be a good thing; given the ALP have put on the record how important the feel internet infrastructure is to our economic future, the idea of a specific internet subcommittee in Infrastructure Australia could have merit
  • When we talked about what it would take to filter P2P traffic, and we discussed Deep Packet Inspection, Sharon grasped the concept quickly and remarked “that would be like the Government filtering every single phone call people make”, with the obvious inference that that sort of thing would not stand.
  • In Sharon’s office at least, they’re getting about an even 50/50 split between people who support the filter vs those who object to it; when we talked further though, those who support it are really arguing the merits of censorship, where those arguing against it are taking more of the line above – arguing the specific weaknesses, failings and collateral damage of a mandatory filter.

So, in summary, I came away from my chat with Sharon more impressed than I expected to be; those of us in technology fields are used to politicians who don’t have a background in them trying to make decisions and laws about them: and generally making the wrong decisions. On the contrary, Sharon was cognizant of the fundamentals, and was willing to learn more and explore the consequences of the proposed plans.

I’d encourage anyone reading this to get in touch with their own local members. Feel free to use the approach above as a template if you’re interested. If you have success, please post a note in the comments explaining who you got a positive/negative hearing from. Before legislation goes before Parliament, it has to be discussed and voted on in Caucus, so if we can build a list of MPs who understand the issue, and support the principle of the ALP delivering an optional, opt-in filtered feed, if they’re going to waste our money on filtering at all, then we stand a much better chance.