Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 59

The Smartphone Wars: The iPhone Design Was Inspired by Sony

Wired magazine brings us a fascinating revelation from the Apple-vs.-Samsung brouhaha.

Think Apple’s iconic iPhone design was born deep within the catacombs of Apple’s Cupertino campus? Think again.

According to Samsung’s unredacted trial brief (.pdf), the inspiration for the look of Apple’s original iPhone actually came from an idea for a Sony smartphone.

“In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, a Sony designer discussed Sony designs for portable electronic devices that lacked buttons and other ‘excessive ornamentation,’ fit in the hand, were ‘square with a screen’ and had ‘corners [which] have been rounded out,’” the document explains. An Apple industrial designer, Shin Nishibori, then mocked up the design, even using Sony’s logo on the back of the CAD drawing.

According to Nishibori’s testimony, his design changed the course of the iPhone project, and pointed it toward the iPhone of today.

This isn’t speculation – an Apple employee copied Sony’s design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court.

From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple’s design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples’ ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof.

The strategy behind the Nexus 7

The Nexus 7 I ordered for my wife last week arrived two days ago. That’s been enough time for Cathy and me to look it over closely and get a good feel for its capabilities. It’s a very interesting device not just for what it does but what it doesn’t do. There’s a strategy here, and as usual I think Google is playing a longer game than people looking at this product in isolation understand.

The Nexus 7 seems to me to be very obviously designed to be an inexpensive web terminal for use with home and small-business WiFi networks. Look at what’s missing: cellular modem, rear-facing camera, SD card. These are exactly the things you’d want in a road-warrior device intended to compete both at the high end of the cellphone market and against notebook/netbook PCs at their low end,

That having been said, the Nexus 7 does the limited job it’s designed for extremely well. It’s easy to configure, easy to use, and the audiovisual presentation is slick without being gratuitously flashy. We found the voice-search capability particularly effective and well integrated. We were able to watch a movie at our kitchen table (The Black Shield of Falworth, a classic piece of 1950s swashbuckler cheese) without lag, artifacts, or dropouts.

The device is selling like crazy and has spectacular buzz. After I had already privately decided to get Cathy one, Linus Torvalds gave it a public thumbs-up and I got completely unsolicited “buy one now!” raves from two friends of mine not previously noted for anything but jaded cynicism about the consumer-electronics gadget of the week. It is clear that Google and Asus have a mega-hit on their hands – analysts are already describing it as the Kindle-killer and I think there’s no hype at all in that assessment.

The really interesting question about the Nexus 7 is why it’s not a more ambitious device. It’s clear from looking at the components that Asus could have built a full-featured tablet that could compete head-to-head with the iPad 3, had Google wanted that; the obvious inference is that Google didn’t want it. Which is interesting and revealing.

What the Nexus 7 looks like to me is that it was designed to meet a specified price point rather than a specified feature set. It’s what you’d come up with if you told the engineering team “It’s gotta retail under $250 with tax and shipping – start with your dream tablet, cut out features that won’t fit that budget, and give me the best device that fits a plausible use case. Then we’ll design the marketing around that.”

What kind of product and market strategy does this fit? I don’t think that’s complicated. This is also exactly what you’d do if your goal were to disrupt the iPad’s market from the low end. You’d identify a large class of potential iPad customers and target their use case (home and small-business web terminal) with a device that’s a substantially better value for the dollar. The goal would be to play for the highest-volume segment of the market in order to put downward pressure on the iPad’s growth rate without challenging it directly, the latter being something Asus/Google may not be able to do yet.

Thus: IPS display nearly as good as the iPad’s (216ppi to 264pp). A replaceable battery, and a case with clip closures rather than glue. Google wants any random PC shop to be able to service this thing; it’s part of the value proposition. That aspect of the design also says to me that it’s aimed at low-cost fleet deployments. Certainly if I were a Fortune 500 IT manager I’d look hard at it as a way to lower my whole-lifecycle costs.

My prediction is testable. If it’s correct, the Nexus 7 won’t be a one-off. Within four months or so we’ll see a followon that ramps up the pressure – probably a 9-inch screen, possibly SD card support, and (crucially) price point no higher. I don’t think, along this line of attack, we’ll see a cellular modem being added any time soon; it’s in Google’s interest to avoid conflict with its smartphone partners, who have been doing a good job of pushing Android – that is, as opposed to its tablet partners who’ve been doing a relatively crappy one.

Remember Google’s long game. For Google’s advertising and content businesses to flourish, Google needs web access (and especially mobile web access) to be thoroughly commoditized, with nobody else in a position to collect rent on the path to your eyeballs. This is why they don’t need to make a dime of licensing income on Android – it’s a strategic play to prevent rent-seeking.

The design and positioning of the Nexus 7 is perfectly consistent with this goal. It’s a patient, well-thought-out play that will amortize fixed costs for other firms in Google’s partner network (Asus, Tegra, whoever’s ODMing the display) so that follow-on devices can issue at the same or a lower price point.

That result will be good for everybody. I don’t think I really need to tell the open-source community to get behind this product and push it, because the buzz says that’s already happening. It’s not the iPad-killer, but the road forward to something that will be is not difficult to discern.

UPDATE: Cathy’s thoughts on the device

UPDATE2: Contrary to myth, Tony Curtis does not at any point in The Black Shield of Falworth say “Yonder lies the castle of my fadda da king.” His New York accent is, however, hilariously obtrusive throughout the movie.

Gun-free fantasy zones

After the Aurora theater shooting, it was of course inevitable that the jackals at the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy vendor would be trying to make a political meal from the victims’ corpses before they had even had time to cool to room temperature. The usual round of inane honking about “common-sense gun control” ensued just as if this psycho (like most others) hadn’t cheerfully violated several laws well before he pulled the trigger.

But enough about the usual idiots; let’s talk about “Gun-free zones”. We’re told the movie theater had a sign up announcing its “gun-free” policy. Yeah, and how well did that work out for ya?

Try as I might, I am unable to comprehend the thinking of people who put “gun-free zone” signs in theaters, or on homes, or anywhere. How do they not get that criminals and madmen will read this as “Get your tasty defenseless victims, right here?”

At least “gun-free” signs on homes generally only jeopardize people stupid enough to put them up. “Gun-free” signs and policies in public spaces are another matter; whatever gibbering moron at Cinemark studios mandated this one painted bull’s-eyes on a theater-full of innocents.

Two fantasies caused that massacre. The obvious one was James Holmes’s delusional identification with the Joker. The less obvious one was the pious belief that wishing firearms out of sight will keep bad people from doing bad things. Holmes is an obvious psychotic who’s still trapped in the first fantasy; to prevent needless deaths, the rest of us must get free of the second.

For myself, from now on I plan to willfully violate every “gun-free zone” policy I run across. If enough sane people do likewise, perhaps the next massacre can be prevented.

Feline health update

This one is for the surprisingly large number of my blog readers who have sent inquiries about the health of Sugar, Cathy’s and my cat, following her near-death experience late last year. The rest of you can proceed about your business…

Sugar bounced back amazingly after the acute kidney infection was treated and seemed like she’d shed a few years off her age. But it’s clear from her blood work that she has compromised kidney function and we were advised to do regular subcutaneous hydration if we wanted to keep her alive.

It took us a while to work out an M.O. for this, and at first our frequency was spotty. But hydrations about twice a week are now part of the routine, and Sugar tolerates them very well. She’s still eager to jump onto Cathy’s lap in her office chair and become a relaxed cat-puddle there, despite the fact that every few days or so this results in a whacking big hydration needle being poked through the loose skin behind her neck. (Cathy does the insertion with her right hand, holding the cat in place with her left; I work the valve below the hydration bag.)

Sugar will squawk indignantly when the needle goes in, but is then pretty compliant for about 7 or 8 minutes after, which typically allows us to get about a unit and a half of fluid into her. Eventually she decides she’s had enough, at which point she starts seriously squirming to get out from under Cathy’s hand and I know it’s time to shut the valve. Cathy lets go, she jumps off Cathy’s lap in a huff…and ten minutes later she’s back to purring at us as per normal.

It would still be hard for anyone who didn’t know it to guess that Sugar is an ancient with kidney trouble. She’s still bright-eyed, active, curious, and very outgoing to our guests. She seemed to be gradually losing weight for a while, which is a bad sign in an elderly cat, but that’s reversed in the last couple weeks – she’s gained a pound or two, maybe, and has a healthier layer of fat over her ribs and spine than she did in late spring. Our vet thought she was looking fine at her last examination.

Sugar is now about 6 months shy of being 20 years old. It looks like she’ll make it to 20 in style. Every day is a blessing – she was curled up against my bare right foot in my desk pigeonhole while I wrote most of this, half-asleep and tribbling contentedly to herself.

We know the clock can’t be turned back. If heart failure or a stroke doesn’t kill her, the day will come when Sugar has deteriorated so much that the last gift we can give her is a painless death. But that day is not today, and doesn’t look like it’s coming soon. Sugar continues to amaze us with her fortitude and delight us with a heart as big as all outdoors.

Saga Iceland and “thar”

In the comments on my previous post, someone linked to Steven Dutch’s essay The World’s Most Toxic Value System, in which he discusses the many evils that flow from a complex of values that he labels with the Arabic word “thar” (blood vengeance).

Dutch’s essay is in many ways insightful, and a welcome corrective to the mush-minded notion that all cultures have equally valid ethical claims. But it suffers a bit from the author’s lack of anthropological breadth – while he is commendably clear-eyed about what he has seen, there is much he has not seen that bears on and could be used to improve his thesis.

I think it is particularly instructive to apply Dutch’s criteria to the culture of saga Iceland, which we may take as a literate representative of the pre-Christian Norse and more generally of old tribal Germanic culture. This tradition should be especially interesting to English-speakers, as the Anglo-Saxon version of it was foundational to Anglo-American common law and notions of liberty.

To see what makes the saga Icelanders so interesting in this context, let’s first test them against both Dutch’s criteria for a “thar” culture and the consequences he expects from “thar”:

Extreme importance of personal status and sensitivity to insult. Yes, this is well attested by the sagas.

Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing. This also. So far, the Icelanders seem to be fitting the “thar” pattern.

Obsessive male dominance. But here we swerve off the track. The sagas are full of strong female characters who are primary actors. Icelandic women were far from subjugated; indeed, they sometimes commanded ships and armed bodies of men, and it is clear that they enjoyed more equality in custom than they did under formal Icelandic law.

Paranoia over female sexual infidelity. There is barely even a detectable trace of this in the sagas – in fact saga Icelanders seemed less concerned about it than their modern descendants are.

Primacy of family rights over individual rights. No. While honor was a concern of families and blood feuds tended to be among familial lines, rights and obligations definitely attached to individuals in both law and custom. Family authority over individuals was correspondingly weak.

I think it’s also instructive to follow Dutch and apply Ralph Peters’s additional criteria for “loser” cultures, which Dutch correctly notes are strongly correlated with his “thar” complex.

Restrictions on the free flow of information. I believe if you had proposed this to a saga Icelander as a mechanism of cultural control that was even possible, let alone appropriate, he (or she) would have thought you were barmy.

Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. Absolutely not. One of the most marked traits of saga Icelanders in adverse situations was a sort of stoic responsibility, and a mental toughness about failure that accepted it as a datum and moved on. It is difficult for Americans and Britons to see how exceptional this made the saga Icelanders among preindustrial cultures precisely because we inherited this stance and are ourselves exceptional among modern cultures in exactly the same way.

The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. This one is interesting. Peters says “Where blood ties rule, you cannot trust the contract, let alone the handshake.” and it is very clear what he is reacting to in the culture of (for example) Arabs and Sicilians. But, while the extended family was the basic unit of social organization in saga Iceland, there was an equally strong ethos of reciprocal individual contract that was basic to law and the chieftainship system. The saga Icelanders were one of the few pre-modern societies in which you could trust a handshake – indeed, blood feuds seem to have ended that way as often as they were resolved by formal legal process.

Domination by a restrictive religion. Early saga Icelanders didn’t have this problem. Later ones did as Christianity became more important. The scale and intensity of intercommunal violence increased accordingly.

A low valuation of education. Again, no. The saga Icelanders clearly respected the sorts of education they had available to them. They had a strong sense of cultural patrimony, and there is direct evidence in the spoken boasts of saga characters that the cultivation of intelligence through media including poetry and board games was considered a desirable trait even in high-status warrior males. Exceptionally for a pre-modern society, even female intelligence was valued: one of the Icelandic praise-names that comes down to us was of an early female settler called “Aud the Deep-Minded”

Low prestige assigned to work. And again, no. Saga Icelanders are famous to us as fighters and explorers, but their economic base was as smallholding farmers. They worked hard and valued hard work.

Now I will note some other respects in which the saga Icelanders (and their Norse and Anglo-Saxon kin) diverged from the “thar” pattern. They didn’t disdain trade or have sharp notions of low-status work to be done only by women, thralls and foreigners. They didn’t suffer from technological stagnation – indeed, the recorded evolution of ships and weapons over the entire Norse cultural complex shows these people to have been flexible, innovative and highly pragmatic in their technological choices.

So. We have seen that saga Icelanders (representing the Norse/Anglo-Saxon/old-Germanic culture complex) had what Dutch considers the central traits of the “thar” complex – notably, (1) touchiness about personal honor and status, (2) institutionalized blood feud, and (3) family-centered social organization. Yet they, like the other Norse and the Anglo-Saxons, evaded the poverty and stagnation that Dutch correctly describes as typical of “thar” cultures; they got better.

In fact, they got so much better that their memetic descendants in the modern Anglosphere evolved the wealthiest and most forward-looking cultures in human history. Here’s a telling fact about that continuity: England and the U.S. kept the Norse/old-Germanic pattern of agricultural land use – individual family farms on their own land – long after continental Germans, Frisians, and Dutch adopted village-centered agriculture with complicated collective-ownership structures. (This is interesting not least because it tells us that genetics and “race” are probably not important causes here.)

So, what is this evidence trying to tell us?

I think one lesson is that Dutch has mistaken essence for accident. There is a very real pathology that he’s pointing at – having lived in Italy I can certify, for example, that his comparison of Northern with Southern Italians is both telling and correct. But I think the high incidence of blood feud and personal violence in these sick cultures is a consequence of the pathology, not its actual cause. Dutch’s “thar” is thus a mislabeling, there is something deeper in play.

If we compare Arabs, Sicilians, or Albanians to saga Norse, a couple of psychological differences stand out. One is impulse control. The Norse highly valued self-command; it was thought supremely manly to be master of one’s passions, and to seek violent revenge with forethought and methodical planning. In Dutch’s “thar” cultures, on the other hand, men expect to be overwhelmed by their emotions. They have, by Norse and modern Western standards, deficient impulse control – in fact, they tend to consider impulse control effete. Thus, they plan poorly and are brittle and panicky under adversity.

Another marked difference is the level of social trust. I have already noted that saga Iceland appears to have been one of the few pre-modern cultures in which you could generally count on a handshake deal to hold. Honesty and keeping one’s sworn oath were considered bedrock virtues, trade transactions with strangers were normal, and loyalties were readily formed across kin-group lines. These are marks of a high-trust society. Indeed, the most perplexing and fascinating thing about the Norse to modern eyes is how they combined high trust with what to moderns seem shockingly high violence levels.

By contrast, Dutch’s “thar” societies are tragically low-trust. They have the violence, touchiness, and feuding families of the Norse, but the ability of the Norse to cultivate reciprocity across kin-group lines is lacking. It is difficult for modern Westerners to understand how crippling this is. One observable consequence in the 21st-century Arab world is that military command structures have to be organized so that superiors are either of the same clan as inferiors or can apply immediate and overwhelming coercion – otherwise orders will be subverted as often as they are followed.

What I think the example of saga Iceland tells us is that these holes in cultural capital – low trust and low valuation of impulse control – are more fundamental to the “thar” pathology than blood feud and personal vengeance. Low trust and poor impulse control imply blood-feud and revenge, but the Norse show us that the reverse does not seem to be true.

How the subjugation of women and sexual paranoia fit into this – whether as causes or consequences – is less clear to me. It may be as simple as this: if you can’t trust your neighbor to control his impulses to seduce or rape your wife, and you can’t directly coerce him, isolating and controlling your wife may be the only way to keep the peace (and secure her scarce reproductive capacity).

To sum up this level of explanation, blood-feud and honor aren’t the trap. Low trust is the trap; stagnation and endemic blood-feud (“thar”) are the consequence. Exhibit A is the Arab world and the portions of the Mediterranean and Balkans long under Arab dominance (Sicily being a notable example).

Is there a level of explanation below this? I’m not sure, though I’m strongly tempted to believe that population differences in average intelligence are causative. It’s been observed that average IQ in a population varies directly with the latitude of its genetic homeland, and convincingly speculated that this is because colder climates require more cooperative behavior and a more elaborate technological toolkit than warmer ones do. The Norse may have been just bright enough…

It may not even take thousands of miles of latitude to make a noticeable selective difference. Northern Italians think they’re brighter on average than southern Italians, and on the evidence they’re probably not wrong. But guesses about population genetics aren’t really necessary to the main point; Dutch has it slightly wrong, the problem with “thar” is not actually “thar” itself.

Napier’s Lesson

In the 1840s, Hindu priests complained to Charles James Napier (then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India) about the prohibition of suttee by British authorities. Suttee was the custom of burning widows alive on the funeral pyre of their husbands. According to Napier’s brother William, this is how he replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

This incident, perhaps the finest single moment in the history of Britain’s relatively benign imperialism, teaches two lessons still profoundly relevant today.

The first lesson is for the various sorts who call themselves “multiculturalists” and “moral relativists”. Napier showed us that these ostensibly liberating doctrines actually translate into “might makes right” – that, in the absence of a common normative ethical framework, disputes about “custom” will be won by the tribe with the most ability and will to use force.

The second lesson is for people who, having noticed than relativism and multiculturism are a road to ruination and blood, then argue that we must fall back on religion as the only possible source of truly universal ethical norms (If God is dead, is anything permissible?). Notice that the would-be widow-burners are priests? The “custom” they are arguing for is exactly their bid in the game of if-you-accept-my-religious-premises.

Napier, in promising those priests a hanging, says nothing of any religious counter-conviction of his own. And it would make no difference to the lesson if he had – except, perhaps, to underline the point that religion is just another form of tribal particularism and thus fundamentally unable to lift us away from the bloody muck of might-makes-right.

Those Hindu priests, being polytheists, are at least better equipped to understand this inability than a Christian or Muslim would be – they don’t pretend to a universal normative ethic, just one that is binding on those who live within their tribal custom. Monotheists, on the other hand, miss the point – they think everyone else’s religion is mere tribal particularism, while their own is uniquely and miraculously true. In this monotheists are essentially similar to any occupant of a hospital ward for delusional psychotics, and it is thus unsurprising that their capacity for consequential ethical reasoning is badly damaged.

Napier’s lesson doesn’t tell us where to find a universal normative ethic that isn’t dependent on religion. But it does tell us that until we do, the only “solution” to conflicts of custom will be this: rules get made by those with the most power to threaten and murder and the will to use that power.

And here is where the irony of Napier’s last sentence really stings. “Let us all act according to national customs.” Illusions about the logic of these conflicts can only lead to more bloodshed, not less.

The Smartphone Wars: Tomi Ahonen carpet-bombs Stephen Elop

The best strategic analysis of Nokia’s parlous position I’ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia. It’s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.

It’s long and really can’t be summarized well – you need to plow through Ahonen’s detailed analyses of things like the impact of Microsoft’s Skype purchase on Nokia’s carrier relationships to understand how royally Elop has screwed the pooch.

I see only one thing that I think Ahonen gets wrong. I think he is too complacent about what the actual medium-term prospects for Symbian were at the time Elop took the helm at Nokia; he understimates the speed of transition to smartphones and overestimates the stickiness of Symbian as a platform under that pressure.

Thus, I think Ahonen’s evaluation that Elop’s “Burning Platforms” memo wasn’t diagnosing a real problem is incorrect. On everything else, though, his indictment of Elop seems dead on target. He persuades me that Elop’s later blunders (beginning with tying Nokia to the Windows phone) were even larger and stupider than I thought at the time.

This essay changes my mind about something significant. I thought at the time of the Burning Platforms memo that Nokia’s best move would have been to ride the Android tide, that MeeGo was a noble but doomed effort that could never have gained any traction. Ahonen does a good job of arguing that Nokia had the marketing reach and good carrier relationships needed to make MeeGo seriously competitive. This, in retrospect, makes Nokia’s cancellation of MeeGo seem like even more of a tragic blunder than it did at the time.

Yes, I know that some Nokia alumni have just launched a MeeGo startup aimed at making it competitive on smartphones. I wish them every bit of luck, but they don’t have the co-factors for success that Ahonen ably describes, so I cannot think much of their chances.

Finally…who knew Ahonen was so well-versed in military history? That’s something I know more than a little about myself, and I’m here to certify that where my knowledge overlaps with his I find his command of facts excellent, and his judgment sound and incisive. Thus, I’m going to go read up on the Battle of Suomussalmi sometime soon.

Cisco provides a lesson

In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom, which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom. Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers. ”

That’s wrong. Open systems are better, always. Cisco has just provided us with a perfect lesson in why that sentence is completely backwards, and why we can never trust closed-source software vendors not to do evil under the cover of their code secrecy.

For those of you who have missed the news, last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service. To sign up, you had to agree to the following restrictions:

When you use the Service, we may keep track of certain information related to your use of the Service, including but not limited to the status and health of your network and networked products; which apps relating to the Service you are using; which features you are using within the Service infrastructure; network traffic (e.g., megabytes per hour); internet history; how frequently you encounter errors on the Service system and other related information (“Other Information”).

So in order to continue using the hardware you bought and paid for and own, you have to agree to let Cisco snoop your browser history and monitor your traffic – a clickstream they would of course instantly turn around and sell to advertising agencies and other snoops. Those terms are so loose (“including but not limited to”) that they could legally read your email and sell that data too.

Disgusted enough yet? Wait, it gets better. The cloud terms of service also includes this gem:

You agree not to use or permit the use of the Service: (i) to invade another’s privacy; (ii) for obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes; (iii) to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights; (iv) to upload, email or otherwise transmit or make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, spam, junk mail or any other form of solicitation; (v) to transmit or otherwise make available any code or virus, or perform any activity, that could harm or interfere with any device, software, network or service (including this Service); or (vi) to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.

Translated out of lawyerese, this gives Cisco the right to brick your router if you use it to view anything Cisco considers pornography, or do anything that it might consider IP theft – like, say, bit-torrenting a movie. Or even if you send anything it considers unsolicited advertising – which doesn’t have to mean bulk spam, see “any other form of solicitation”?

The sum of these paragraphs is: “We control your digital life. We can spy on you, we can filter your traffic, we can cut off your net access unilaterally if you do anything we don’t like, and you have no recourse.”

And why can they do that? Because there’s a blob of closed-source software in that router that you can’t modify, that only Cisco can modify. You don’t own it, it owns you.

When I wrote yesterday of closed source trapping users at the wrong end of an asymmetrical power relationship, that was abstract. This is concrete – this is the shit getting real. This is why anyone who makes excuses for closed source in network-facing software is not just a fool deluded by shiny marketing but a malignant idiot whose complicity with what those vendors do will injure his neighbors as well as himself.

Now, if you have been following the news, maybe you’ve heard that Cisco backed off from the most egregious language in these terms of service under public pressure. Reassured? Don’t be – because Cisco keeps its control of the software and reserves the right to change the terms of service whenever it likes.

Cisco could change the terms of its service to give it even more sweeping and arbitrary privileges at any time. Or Apple could do that, or Microsoft could. The power relationship remains dangerously asymmetrical; the closed source remains their instrument of control over you.

This is why you should demand open source in your router, open source in your operating system, and open source in any application software that is important to your life. Because if you don’t own it, it will surely own you.

This is also why people who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I’m looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.

Why I won’t be signing the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as it is

There’s been some buzz in the last few days about the Declaration of Internet Freedom penned by some prominent libertarians.

I wish I could sign on to this document. Actually, considering who appears on the list of signatories, I consider the fact that the composers didn’t involve me in drafting it to be a surprising mistake that I can only ascribe to a collective fit of absent-mindedness.

But, because neither I nor anyone else from the hacker tribe was involved, it has one very serious flaw.

Humility, yes, Rule of Law yes, Free Expression, yes, Innovation, Competition, Privacy…most of this document is good stuff, with exactly the sort of lucidity and bedrock concern for individual freedom that I expect from libertarians.

But it all goes pear-shaped on one sentence: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers.” This is a dreadful failure of vision and reasoning, one that is less forgivable here because libertarians – who understand why asymmetries of power and information are in general bad things – have very particular reasons to know better than this.

In the long run, open systems and networks are always better for consumers. Because, whatever other flaws they may have, they have one overriding virtue – they don’t create an asymmetrical power relationship in which the consumer is ever more controlled by the network provider. Statists, who accept and even love asymmetrical power relationships as long as the right sort of people are doing the oppressing, have some excuse within their terms of reference for failing to grasp the nasty second, third, and nth-order consequences of closed-system lock-in. Libertarians have no such excuse.

In the context of this Declaration, this defect is particularly sad because the composers could have avoided it without damage to any one of the other pro-market positions they wanted set forth. I actually agree that, as proposed in their next sentence, closed systems such as iOS should be free to compete against open systems such as Android; as the Declaration says, “let technologies evolve and intervene, if at all, only when an abuse of market power clearly harms consumers”. The proper libertarian stance in these contests is to tell government to butt out and then vote with your dollars for openness.

I am disappointed in the Declaration’s failure to get this crucial issue right. I hope there is still the option to amend it; and if not, that my objection and correction will reach as many people as the Declaration itself, and the two together will convey important lessons about what we must do to preserve and extend liberty.

The Smartphone Wars: comScore loses the plot?

I’ve come to the depressing conclusion that I can’t trust comScore’s share numbers any more.

The problem isn’t that they’re showing a second month of effectively no change in userbase share for Android. That, in isolation, I could manage to believe (though I would find it very puzzling). The problem is that I can’t reconcile that with other lines of evidence.

One of my commenters has pointed out that Android activation numbers are up to 900K a day. That’s 27 million devices a month, and I can’t imagine any plausible percentage of tablet activations to discount that by that would leave Android smartphone activations unable to swing the needle in a market that comScore estimates at just 110M users.

Other market-research outfits were already quoting Android global market-share figures ranging from 56% to 60% two months ago. Yes, global market share isn’t the same as U.S. share, but historically those trendlines have been distinguished by timelag rather than having different slopes. And just to drive that point home, NPD already had Android at 61% of U.S. share in May.

Finally, there’s the curious fact that when you multiply out comScore’s own numbers it looks like Android is still gaining smartphone users a little faster than iOS (though not by a statistically significant amount.)

I don’t know what’s going on here. I trusted comScore’s numbers for a long time because they showed a continuous and regular set of measurements that was in sync with more sporadic indications from other sources. Overall it made a coherent picture. Now the other sources are still suggesting rapid Android growth, but comScore thinks it ain’t happening.

This is a bummer. It means I’m going to have to be a lot more skeptical of comScore’s numbers in the future even supposing they turn happy for Android again.