An Open Letter To Apple/Steve Jobs Regarding Closed iPods (Encrypted Firmware, etc.)

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Sep 212007
 

Well this is not so much a letter as just a rant because I’m very doubtful that anyone from Apple never mind Steve Jobs is likely to read this. But it is good to get a good rant off your chest and out there (which basically explains this whole site … it is not for you … it is for me). Especially after a few glasses of port!

I currently own an iPod video and have been thinking about buying a Macbook, but I have been doing some rethinking after the announcment of the iPod Classic. It seems that Apple have encrypted the iPod Classic firmware again (the Nano 2g firmware is also encrypted) and have added a hash to iTunes just to make things a little more difficult for those who like to do “unusual” things with their iPods.

I am a Rockbox user (I haven’t even used the normal firmware on my iPod except when I’ve booted it by mistake) mostly because most of my CDs have been encoded in OGG format and I really did not want to re-encode them in any other format because of how long it would take. So Apple have made money out of me because I purchased an iPod; I’m beginning to regret that because Apple seems to be determined to be the kind of business that I don’t want to fund.

First of all there is the encryption of the firmware. I am sure that Apple is aware that hackers have produced not only alternative firmwares but also a utility to patch the default firmware to make interesting changes. So why the encryption ? Obviously to make things difficult for the hackers. In some situations smaller companies may be forced to do something similar because larger companies want to “protect their intellectual property rights”, but Apple is in a dominant position in the portable music player music market … they are the ones who will be dictating the contract terms.

Secondly Apple changed iTunes in an attempt to lock out other music managers. The fact that this protection has been hacked and is no longer a problem is irrelevant … Apple showed their colours by making it difficult to use anything other than iTunes.

A few years ago when it was trendy, Apple embraced the open source model by releasing some of their operating system as open source. Despite apparently trying to improve their operating system by incorporating a open source filesystem (ZFS), they seem to be rapidly retreating from this position. Or at least giving the appearance of doing so. So perhaps their earlier embracement of open source was just a marketing move … something you might expect from Microsoft.

Apple is giving the impression of trying to become a company as user-hostile as Microsoft.

What’s Wrong With The Apple Ipod Touch

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Sep 092007
 

Rather than look at what is right about the new iPod Touch as everyone else seems to be doing, what about looking at what is wrong with the new device ? There is apparently plenty to like about it, but there are a few problems. Some of which only apply to certain kinds of possible customer of course.

Where Are The Higher Capacity iTouches ?

8Gbytes and 16Gbytes are quite large for a flash-based device, but this is Apple’s flagship media player … compare the price with the iPod classic! So what options are there for something a bit more usable for those who like to carry all (or nearly all) of their music with them ? Obviously making a 32Gb or 128Gb model would require more flash chips than the single-chip based iTouch, and would cost a bit more. But why not give consumers the choice ?

Several years ago I said that the lowest capacity flash-player I would be interested in would be 32Gbytes or more. With an appropriate choice of encoding format I could still fit my full CD collection into a 32Gbyte player; not much chance of getting it into a 16Gbyte player!

What About SDHC Slot(s) ?

Apple seems to concentrate on the market segment who replaces their media player every couple of years, and their products show this … no easily replaceable battery, and no expandable storage. Now there are plenty of people who will buy new iPods as soon as they are announced, but there are also plenty of people who are more inclined to buy a player and stick with it until it breaks. This includes the poor who cannot afford to replace their player every two years.

Adding a bit of ‘future proofing’ to the iTouch is hardly going to stop the gadget freaks from replacing their player regularly, but will make things a bit better for those who do not (or cannot). Why not have a screw fastened case that allows the user to get at 2-4 SDHC slots (perhaps one or two already filled with the standard flash memory) so that they can grow the player themselves ?

Where Are The Audio Codecs?

Apple’s firmware for the iPods (and presumably iTouches) supports a very limited set of audio codecs; just compare with the list of codecs supported by Rockbox (an opensource firmware that runs on many Apple iPod players and many others as well). If a bunch of hackers working part-time can produce software that can support so many audio codecs, why can’t Apple?

Most people do not care (or even know) about audio codecs, but some do. As an example, I usually use the OGG format which is widely believed by audiophiles to offer the best quality at the lowest bitrate. In non-geek terms, that means I can fit more tracks on my iBox (a rockboxed-ipod) without compromising on quality. If I were to switch to an iTouch I would have to re-encode all my audio files to MP3 (or AAC) which would take an age and I would be able to fit even less on the player.

IT: Linux, ZFS and Open-Source Licenses

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Aug 252007
 

If you’re hoping to read about Linux finally getting ZFS (except as a FUSE module) then you are going to be disappointed … this is merely a rant about the foolishness shown by the open-source world. It seems that the reason we won’t see ZFS in the Linux kernel is not because of technical issues but because of licensing issues … the two open-source licenses (GPL and CDDL) are allegedly incompatible!

Now some may wonder why ZFS is so great given that most of the features are available in other storage/filesystem solutions. Well as an old Unix systems administrator, I have seen many different storage and filesystem solutions over time … Veritas, Solaris Volume Manager, the AIX logical volume manager, Linux software RAID, Linux LVM, …, and none come as close to perfection as ZFS. In particular ZFS is insanely simple to manage, and those who have never managed a server with hundreds of disks may not appreciate just how desireable this simplicity is.

Lets take a relatively common example from Linux; we have two disks and no RAID controller so it makes sense to use Linux software RAID to create a virtual disk that is a mirror of the two physical disks. Not a difficult task. Now we want to split that disk up into seperate virtual disks to put filesystems on; we don’t know how large the different filesystems will become so we need to have some facility to grow and shrink those virtual disks. So we use LVM and make that software RAID virtual disk into an LVM “physical volume”, add the “physical volume” to a volume group, and finally create “logical volumes” for each filesystem we want. Then of course we need to put a filesystem on each “logical volume”. None of these steps are particularly difficult, but there are 5 seperate steps, and the separate software components are isolated from each other … which imposes some limitations.

Now imagine doing the same thing with ZFS … we create a storage pool consisting of two mirrored physical disks with a single command. This storage pool is automatically mounted as a filesystem ready for immediate use. If we need separate filesystems, we can create each with a single command. Now we come to the advantages … filesystem ‘snapshots’ are almost instantaneous and do not consume additional disk space until changes are made to the original filesystem at which point the increase in size is directly proportional to the changes made. Each ZFS filesystem shares the storage pool with the size being totally dynamic (by default) so that you do not have a set size reserved for each filesystem … essentially the free space on every single filesystem is available to all filesystems.

So what is the reason for not having ZFS under Linux ? It is open-source so it is technically possible to add to the Linux kernel. It has already been added to the FreeBSD kernel (in “-CURRENT”) and will shortly be added to the released version of OSX. Allegedly because the license is incompatible. The ZFS code from Sun is licensed under the CDDL license and the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL license. I’m not sure how they are incompatible because frankly I have better things to do with my time than read license small-print and try to determine the effects.

But Linux (reluctantly admittedly) allows binary kernel modules to be loaded into the kernel and the license on those certainly isn’t the GPL! So why is not possible to allow GPLed code and CDDLed code to co-exist peacefully ? After all it seems that if ZFS were compiled as a kernel module and released as a binary blob, it could then be used … which is insane!

The suspicion I have is that there is a certain amount of “not invented here” going on.

Computer Security

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Aug 102007
 

The UK news this morning (and last night) had an item on about plans to tackle the problem of phishing with various suggestions (most of which make sense). Similar stories about phishing and how people are being ripped off by fraudsters regularly come up on the news. One thing that rarely gets a mention except in passing with a suggestion to run a ‘protected computer’ is how regular computer users who ignore security are contributing to the problem.

Almost all spammers (and phishers) these days use botnets to spew out their sewage; as someone who runs a mail server for a large organisation I regularly take a look at where spams entered the Internet mail system. In the vast majority of cases it has entered via a location that is obviously a client machine operated by an ‘innocent’ person ignorant of what their computer is being used for.

There are plenty of places to point the finger of blame …

  • The companies who produce operating systems that are so vulnerable to being compromised when connected to the Internet.
  • Those who use viruses and worms to create ‘botnets’ of vulnerable machines to be used for a variety of purposes.
  • The ISPs who irresponsibly fail to block outgoing mail not going through their mail servers. Whilst some (me!) should be able to opt out of such a block because we (I) run our own mailserver it should not be open by default.

Finally, the person who runs a computer irresponsibly is also to blame. Obviously not everyone wants to become a security expert, but there are a few easy steps to make it more difficult for your computer to be broken into. And they should accept that if they get infected they could get slung into a ‘quarantine’ … ISPs can and should be able to detect infected machines being used by spammers and sling them into a ‘quarantine’ network with limited functionality. This ‘quarantine’ is dead simple to setup, as I’ve done it myself.

To reduce it to an analogy, if you were to leave a car parked with the handbrake left off are you totally blameless if someone leans against the car and it rolls down a hill and kills someone ? People tend to regard leaving an infected computer online as being a trivial matter; it is not.

Bill Gates, OLPC Project, Educational Content

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Jul 292007
 

Just seen part of an interview with Bill Gates on News24 where Microsoft’s educational projects were being discussed, and the One Laptop Per Child project was brought up. Bill sort of avoided trying to talk about it by claiming that hardware costs will continue to come down and the real problem is about educational content.

It is true that hardware costs tend to come down … to a point where prices stay fairly static but specifications increase. He has also glossed over the fact that the OLPC laptop is semi-ruggedised with features specifically intended to help with its use as a learning tool rather than a working tool; including the special display which has a special low-power black and white mode intended for reading eBooks. Not something found in a typical laptop!

The other thing that was totally ignored is that the Sugar user interface (running on a stripped down RedHat) is designed to be easy to use for children rather than rely on some conventional approach to desktop computing. For instance there is an easy way to see your local “neighbourhood” (press F1) … the local mesh of internetworked OLPCs.

However Bill hit the nail on the head by bringing up the content issue. It is the real problem and in fact the OLPC project highlights this and has a prominent area on their Wiki to deal with content. Perhaps Bill should put his money where his mouth is and help fund the content projects … it may not help Microsoft directly (although given that the content is intended to be “open-source” there is no reason why a Microsoft operating system could not use it as well as the OLPC laptops) but it would help education.

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