CONTENT You shall retain ownership rights in information or other content that you upload, post or otherwise transmit to or via your use of Twidroyd (“Submissions”); however, by making your Submissions through Twidroyd, you grant Licensor a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, edit, translate, reformat, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, publicly display and produce the Submissions in connection with the enhancement of the Twidroyd service or otherwise in connection with Licensor’s business. You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use. Such additional uses by the Company, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Submissions. We may modify or adapt your Submissions in order to transmit, display or distribute it over computer networks and in various media and/or make changes to your Submissions as are necessary to conform and adapt that content to any requirements or limitations of any networks, devices, services or media.

This is a bit like Microsoft saying, “If you use Word to write something then you grant us a license to it.”  Or Bic saying if you use their biros then they get a license.  Or perhaps your paper manufacturer.

It’s also really sneaky.  They don’t do it upfront and tell you that they want this right; they hide it in a EULA and in the Terms and Conditions.

So, this was happened when they were bought by Tweetup?  So let’s look at their Terms. Sure enough, hidden in their Terms is:

You agree that these licenses include the right for the Company to make your Submissions and, if applicable, User Content, available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with the Company for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such content use.

Again they are hiding this.  I guess they want to use all the ‘tweets’ to try and sell them or the intelligence/analysis that they contain.  And they are a commercial company and so want to make money.  I have no problem with that.  My problem is that they aren’t being upfront about it.  And I guess they aren’t being upfront about it because they suspect that most people don’t really like the idea that their stuff (even if it has no individual value) is being sold.

Perhaps we should start paying for these services and really know what is happening to our data, rather than thinking everything is for free, and thus effectively forcing companies to do this type of thing?

Now I just need to find an alternative.  And ideas?

Don’t get me wrong; I think Alexander Hanff does great work campaigning on privacy issues.  I just wonder if, in this case, he’s seeing stuff that simply isn’t there.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Googlegate is about Google collecting un-encrypted WiFi data whilst roaming the streets with their StreetView project. Apparently, according to Privacy International et al., they have been doing this with criminal intent to record the bits of data intentionally so that they can find out more about us.

It appears that, whilst driving along, the software listened for WiFi broadcasts, discarded ALL those that were encrypted, and stored the packets, in entirety, of those that were not encrypted. This, according to conspiracy theory, means they knew that they couldn’t use the encrypted ones, and therefore were intentionally storing the unencrypted ones, even though they could have got the SSID from the encrypted WiFi broadcasts. This is the smoking gun.

Personally, I have no idea what Google were thinking, but I’m going to hazard some guesses.

WiFi access points. What kind are generally encrypted and what kind are generally open? Most home routers supplied by networks to consumers in the last few years are almost always encrypted now. If you buy off the shelf then you have to make a choice on whether to encrypt. Every Starbucks, hotel, cafe, airport, and other public access WiFi is unencrypted. Unencrypted WiFi seems like an invitation to join it, doesn’t it? It’s providing a service that you can connect to.

If I was writing software I’d probably make the decision that if anybody bothers to encrypt their WiFi then they probably don’t want their SSID used either. Hence I’d discard those packets. Also, for my roving software, to keep it simple, I’d probably just store the whole packet and pull out the SSID later during analysis. Storage is cheap. It’s easier to do, and you’d want your 24/7 software to be simple just so that it stands a better chance of not crashing. And, if it’s simpler, then it’s quicker and cheaper to write and test. Particularly if the brief is: “collect the SSIDs and geolocations of unencrypted WiFi stations”.

Why collect the SSIDs in the first place? Android phones and location services. It seems to me that it’s simply about better location services and getting more accuracy. Cell towers + SSIDs helps to place you on the map.

Should Google be collecting all this data in secret? No, I don’t think so. Are they an evil company? No, I doubt that too. Are they a large (huge?) organisation intent on making a profit? Damn right, and that’s something we should worry about. Have they got a good privacy record? Not really, especially after the Buzz debacle. Should we watch them like a hawk? Definitely. Was Google stupid? Without a doubt. But are they criminal?

My wife talks about ‘cock-up or conspiracy’. It’s a bit like ‘never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity’. I think Google cocked up, not that it was some conspiracy to collect our WiFi transmissions and analyse them. Still, paranoid people tend to see conspiracies everywhere.

But then Gmail arrived, in beta, and, for me, changed the game.  And now with spam levels rising ever higher, I’ve finally reached the point where my poor little virtual server isn’t powerful enough to deal with all the spam that comes with mail domains I have since 1999.

These posts are about a journey that I’m going to make in transitioning from my own server to a Google Apps Mail account.  On the way I have to:

• move about 7GB+ of mail that is sorted into lots of different folders
• back up the mail from Google every day using an IMAP sync tool
• migrate 6 different domains so that I can receive and send on those different domains
• move my wife’s accounts and domains as well

And all without losing any mail on the way.  Or at least finding out I’ve lost mail on the way.

Why Google Apps Mail?  I’m driven by the nice user interface, tagging, searching and the fact it will just work on my Android phone.

It’s going to be a three step process:

1. Move spam processing off the server
2. Forward mail to Google from the existing mail mail server
3. Change the MX records to move them to Google.

This still means that I can change back to my own (or other server) at some time in the future.  Probably that move will happen when we can have the ability to easily run email server appliances in the cloud.  Until my decentralised dream becomes a reality I’ll go with Google.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting opinion piece on the iPad recently over at BoingBoing about why you shouldn’t buy and iPad.  I found it via Slashdot, where many of these articles tend to get mentioned.  Many people have already commented on his post, analysing his position, arguments and thoughts;  I’m not going to – just Google and read a selection.  But it did set me thinking about Apple and their impact on how they are guiding consumers to view technology.

Those that know me, know that I avoid Microsoft wherever possible, will never buy from Sony, and I am coming to the same position on Apple.  I’ll kick off by quoting Doc Searls  from his “Prisons vs. Horizons” EOF page in the May 2010 Linux Journal:

“… the iPhone is a silo that stands on one company’s closed OS and hardware. It is equipped with a slick SDK, rules galore about how products should run and developers behave, and a single retail sphincter – the iTunes ‘store’ …”

If you own an iPhone or iPad you have precisely one place where you can get your apps: the iTunes store.  That’s it. There is no where else that you can get an App and install it on your device.  And Apple has absolute control over what goes into that store.  And, it seems, it has a pretty arbitrary decision making process for allowing apps into the store.

Several things are fairly well known:

1. If the App competes with something from Apple, then you won’t find that App.
2. If it is digital content then you can only buy it from Apple.  i.e. music, books or just about anything else.
3. If Apple decides they don’t like it then you aren’t going to find it.  Witness Steve Job’s latest outburst: Want Porn? Buy an Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out an buy porn, but to have Apple dictate that you can’t have it, and shouldn’t have it?  It’s like Disneyland as Ed Felton at Freedom to Tinker wrote about.

It does not matter how good Apple products are if you, as the user, are not free to do what you want with it.  Yes they are nice shiny boxes. Yes, it’s a lovely Disney experience. But there just isn’t enough control left in the hands of me, the user.

To me, Apple with the iPhone and iPad are the AOL, Compuserve, and MSN of the Internet era: walled gardens, silos or prisons where everything is controlled by one entity.

Apple, for the consumer, is about a choice: as a user of the iPhone/iPad/etc., you have Apple dictate what you can do with the device, what apps you can use, where you can buy your content and even whether you can have Flash applications or not.

If that’s the choice, I think I’m going to choose something else.

Well software source control or version control systems.  I tend to use two: subversion and git.  Actually, I tend to use git whenever I can including when I have to use subversion. git svn is, in US terms, awesum.  One debate I have had on and off is whether to:

• Do development on trunk and put releases in branches — OR
• Do development on branches, merge to trunk, and tag releases (or put them in their own branches).

I’ve previously done the former, but I’m rapidly shifting to the latter.  My rather simple reasoning is that I want trunk/master to be, to all intents and purposes, a working copy of the latest software.  i.e. the software that is in trunk/master passes its tests, builds and basically does what it says it should on the tin.  The developing software is done on a branch and only merged back to trunk/master when it passes its tests.  Thus the process is:

1. Branch
2. Develop & test
3. Merge from trunk/master to the branch (i.e. pull any updates)
4. Test, test, test
5. Review code with buddy, senior dev, etc. (depending on your set-up)
6. Merge back into trunk as a finished feature.

Even better, only work on code that is actually described in a ticket, bug, or on something like pivotal.  That way you stay focussed and only spend time on developing features/fixing bugs that the ‘customer’ actually wants.

The only question then is what you do with releases?  My initial guess is to tag them as a release on trunk/master.   Then if you get a bug and have to maintain the old release then to branch at that point and maintain the release as its own ‘master’ release branch.

I also arrived for the GTi breakfast event at 7.30am which I felt was quite an achievement because I didn’t go to bed until 11.30 the night before which brings me back to the first day of TDC.

Day 1 was very good with only a couple of ‘blooper’ presentations.  The highlights for me were:

Harry Drmec, Former CEO of Red Bull.  A drinks company CEO at a digital event?  Yes, and it worked very well.  The guy leaked of leadership and capability and this is of course reflected in his amazing work at Red Bull.  I particularly liked his story of how he stood up to Tesco and won.

Mike Southon, who did an inspirational talk about entrepreneurship using the Beatles (as in the Group) as a metaphor or simile.  It was great and the use of music and old b/w photos of the Beatles helped hammer his points home.

Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) who, after a shaky start, pulled off an amusing and informative talk.

But the outstanding session for me on Day 1 was the final session entitled “Stop Making Sense”:

Dr Michael Shermer took us on a tour of skeptism, gullableness, its biological and evolutionary roots and some techniques to combat the category errors that we all make when faced with the unknown.  Essentially, how to ensure that we address the unknown with “we don’t know” rather than attributing it to some supernatural entity or God.  Preaching to the converted for sure, but still a timely and funny reminder of how our biology and sensing systems can trick our brains into believing things that simply aren’t there.

Then, completely unexpectedly, Chandler Burr, a Perfume critic at the New York Times, gave an exhilerating tour of scent culminating in an exploration of the structure (and smells) of a boutique fragrance called “Silver Mark”.  A simply stunning perfume and a delightful speaker who is clearly massively enthusiastic about scents, the sense of smell, and the way in which they can be manipulated to produce emotional responses to, well, scent.  Who Knew, huh?

But the star of the show was an independent toy designer called Caleb Chung.  He designed the Furby which, we were told, sold 50 Billion.  That’s about 7 Furbys for every single person on the planet!  Who was buying those things.  More to the point, who bought my seven and probably your seven?

Mr Chung then went on to demonstrate his new toy which was the Pleo from Ugobe.  An amazing robotic toy which had real lifelike attributes – basically it is a very cute toy which evokes empathy.  Pleo is a learning robot and reacts to how you treat it – and it’s aimed at kids!

He extols the virtues of using C# and mono (an implementation of .net) whilst disregarding any dissenting voices in the community.  Still, when he comes out with stuff like this:

I find Silverlight incredibly appealing – you get C#, you get a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), you get a fantastic graphics engine with a fantastic animation framework, you get video, you get audio, multi-language compatibility and so on and so forth.

Well, that’s great.  It’s lovely technology.  Shame it comes from a convicted monopolist that has repeatedly called Free and Open Software (FOSS) ‘cancer’ and keeps trotting out patent threats against the free software community.  So what’s the sensible thing to do?  That’s right build technology based on Microsoft ideas and try to get it into as much FOSS as possible.  Perhaps not.  But then he goes on:

The business side explanation is that we want to make sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the web. As websites start using Silverlight we don’t want Linux to be in a position where you can’t access those websites.

Perhaps it would be better to not to use Silverlight in the first place.  This is like the whole ActiveX thing all over again.  This is why we want OPEN web standards not driven by ONE company.

Please read the rest of the article. One thing is very, very clear to me.  Miguel de Icaza seems to be several things:

• In love with all things Microsoft.  He even went for a job there; perhaps he did get it.
• Care’s not one jot about the damage that he might do to the community by validating and pushing Microsoft technologies into the FOSS community.

Still, the above is an ad hominem attack.  But, I have no respect for the man; I personally think that he is doing a very bad thing by developing Mono, by his blind desire to replicate .net, and with his completely naive attitude to Microsoft.  He wants to push mono in GNOME.  Which is a shame, because I like GNOME.  Still there is always KDE. Now, what can I use to replace TomBoy and F-Spot.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Nope, my data is safely locked up in my own mail server, my own web-server, my own backups, etc.  I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about using Gmail for all my mail.  Now I know why.

For example, one hardware bug that has come to light is a problem with the SD card clock signal quietening the GPS receivers sensitivity resulting in very poor performance of the GPS receiver when an SD card is installed. However, within two days of the fault being found, a software and hardware fix has been identified. Two Days! The software fix has already been rolled into the (daily) kernel updates, and the hardware fix has been explained. Even now they are probably working out how to offer the hardware fix to people who have already received their GTA02s. They have noted that new FRs being sent out will have the hardware fix installed. That’s great service. And to those who say “but they shipped it with a hardware fault”; it’s true, but these things happen. It’s a very early release for this phone, but the speed at which they are dealing with the issues as they arise, and the openness with which OpenMoko are being with the community is just breathtaking. Mucho kudos to OpenMoko.

I knew when I bought the phone that there would be problems with the software and that there might be problems with the hardware – it was the risk I was taking by being an early adopter. The measure of the company is how it responds and so far that has been excellent.

The OM2007.2 stack, based on GMAE, is really very good but suffers from performance problems and is (currently) fairly incomplete. It was for this reason that OpenMoko decided to go to the ASU or April Software Update. ASU is also going to be conveniently called the August Software Update when it is updated in August.

The ASU is based on Qtopia phone stack, but converted to work with the X11 server used on the FreeRunner (FR). I’ve downloaded the ASU and found it to be very, very slow. The mix of applications was interesting as it supports both Qtopia and OM2007.2 applications. This is currently where most of the effort at OpenMoko is going at the moment, so its probably the phone stack to use in the near future. However, I found it too slow, and difficult, to use as a day-to-day phone.

The other stack is the FSO, so named because it is being implemented around the FreeSmartPhone.org stack, a set of interfaces that are exposed via dbus. This is what OpenMoko see as the future of the phone system and so is worth keeping an eye on. I’ve not pulled down a copy so I can’t comment on it. Looking at the project on the web it seems to be in its early stages.

So, the OM2007.2 stack is slightly buggy and a bit slow, and the ASU stack is more buggy, very slow, but the near future of the phone. So what can you use on your phone if you actually just want to be able to SMS and make phone calls? That answer, currently, appears to be to Qtopia stack. There is a snapshot at Trolltech’s website which provides a download with a kernel and filesystem for the 4.3.2 edition of Qtopia. And it works very well and is fast. But it only provides a basic phone functionality although you can add packages.

So what I’m going to do is to load the ASU into the SD card, with Qtopia in the main part of the phone and boot into ASU whenever there is an update just to keep an eye on it. The FR makes it very easy to have multiple distributions on the phone at any one time meaning I can have the best of both worlds: a functional phone with Qtopia, and a mobile computer which just happens to have GSM/GPRS/Bluetooth and WiFi communications capabilities.