Lex Ferenda

Via this month’s issue of MacFormat comes an intriguing bit of software, Undercover.  It’s designed to catch your friendly neighbourhood thief.  It does some obvious things, like track and try to communicate information (IP address, router address, etc).  However, it also does some more unusual tricks, like take screenshots of what the tea-leaf is doing, and even on enabled machines (like the new MacBook Pro), takes photographs with the built-in iSight digital camera and sends them on too!  Finally, if none of that works, it develops a fake hardware fault in the hope that it will provoke the new ‘owner’ to bring it to an Apple shop, where it then magicall repairs and gives a notice of the true owner to the (presumably baffled) technician.  In fact, it will even start TALKING at that stage.  Which is just freaky.

The makers are pretty confident - they offer money back if they don’t get your Mac back.  It seems that the system works by you notifiying them when the machine has been stolen, at which point the monitoring kicks in (incidentally, unless the machine goes online, it won’t work at all).  One thing that could concern users, though, is that your machine does communicate constantly with the company, although they assert that they do nothing until you’ve notified a theft.

It’s basically voluntary benevolent spyware.  But perhaps a worthwhile tradeoff - a positive use of what is normally negative technology? Would you use this software?

The excellent cyberlaw blogs at Stanford draw my attention (and thus now yours) to this interesting kerfuffle over iPods. Gorge Dubya Bush was doing one of those marvelously fluffy interviews about what he has on his iPod - and said that he had the Beatles.

So, what’s wrong with that? Well, quite famously, Beatles tracks are not available on the iTunes music store. In fact, Apple v Apple (that’s Apple Records and Apple Computers, just for the, um, record) is still in progress in the British courts (trademarks). So, as is being pointed now, that means that Bush (or one of his flunkies):

a) ripped the track off a CD,
b) downloaded it from a file-sharing service of some sort, or
c) purchased it elsewhere and cracked the encryption.

C is a bit fanciful….and B, while it would be hilarious, is also a bit of a stretch. So we’ll presume that it’s A - an act that, in an illustration of the follies of copyright-law-catching-up-with-technology-when?, is (probably) technically illegal - in the US and in Ireland and in other jurisdictions.

I’ve had some fun with this point in the recent past. I had a meeting with IRMA(the trade association for Irish record labels), who were trying to promote some God-awful software for mammies, daddies and schoolteachers to protect their computers from Illegal Files! which could then be made safe (translation: it was a glorified search engine that found all audio files and gave you a big delete button. Riiiight). I tried to get them to admit that this bit of the law was stupid and should be changed, which they declined. Then just a few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to sit next to the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, one Mr. Charles McCreevy (former minister of finance in Ireland) who was full of questions about iPods and how they worked. So I explained, and also pointed out how silly it was that the law was badly written in a way that mode-shifting of legitimately purchased CDs was even legally dubious. If there’s a European directive on this, iPod users, you can send your appreciation in the form of iTMS gift certificates.

I should create a separate categories for the times when I’m an Apple partisan! Oh wait, I already have..

Anyway, get a Mac.

So, a friend (who will remain nameless, to protect the oh-so-innocent) called over earlier this weekend to show off his newly-installed copy of Windows Vista, which of course is due for release in … well, quite a while ago, actually. The new official dates are November 2005 for some editions and January 2006 for others. Anyway, various versions have been circulating, and this was a reasonably recent limited release.

So, he fired it up and showed off some features. Like switching between applications at the touch of a key, with an ability to see all the applications in minature versions. And a full, powerful, speedy search of the hard disk. And floating little applications. And an application for sorting and managing photos. And…

Of course, the Mac users out among you will be wondering why this sounds so familiar. It turns out that virtually every feature of note is something that’s already implemented on OS X. Now this isn’t a case where Apple are going to go off and sue Microsoft, as they unsuccessfully did in the 80s over the concept of using ‘windows’ etc - some of the features are already available in third-party apps anyway - but there is a certain amusement in seeing features that are taken for granted on one platform being part of the Great Leap Forward on another.

Anyway, I return to my computer and network connection after a short absence, and find this useful heads up from John Naughten’s blog. By odd coincidence, I was browsing some of his past Observer columns on a current topic of side interest, Chinese web censorship (one of his useful and very prescient articles is at the end of the preceding link; do click on it). And so, I came across his link to this video spoof. Basically, it’s the audio from a Microsoft presentation on Vista, with all the various ‘upcoming features’ acted out on an existing Mac system. It’s long, but still a useful illustration.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Wow.

Apple has released an unusual iPod software update:

The new 1.1.1 software update for iPod nano and Fifth Generation iPod provides an easy way for you to set a maximum volume limit to prevent the volume from exceeding a certain level. You can also assign a combination to prevent the setting from being changed which is ideal for parental control.

Seems like a much more efficient use would be to steal your friend’s iPod (mine is immune, being 3G not 5G…) and to set a low volume limit, with an odd combination, and watch them struggle.