Apple's secrecy kills...literally

In the wake of the leaked iPhone 4 there has been a lot of discussion on the interwebs about Apple's notoriously tight controls on its yet-to-be announced products, and while reading about them I found this fascinating and slightly chilling article published last December about Apple's "Worldwide Loyalty Team," a.k.a. the Apple Gestapo. Here's an excerpt:

The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It's just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.

All cellphones are then taken. Usually, they collect them all at the same time, which means that the process could take a long time. If you need to contact the exterior during the time your cellphone is under examination, you will have to ask for permission, and your call will be monitored.

They don't ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them. If the cellphone is an iPhone, it gets backed up onto a laptop. "In fact, at the beginning they used to say that the iPhones were really their property, since Apple gave every employee a free iPhone," he points out. All the employees are asked to unlock and disable any locking features in their cellphones, and then the special forces will proceed to check them for recent activity.

They back up everything and go through all the other phones' text messages and pictures. If you have porn in your phone, they will see it. If you have text messages to your spouse, lover, or Tiger Woods, they will see them, too. Just like that. No privacy, no limits.

In fact, the pressure to keep secrets is so strong that Foxconn – one of Apple's Chinese supplier who produces the iPhone – once had its "security team" drive an employee to commit suicide after he lost an iPhone prototype. Not Apple per se, but I have a feeling that if he had lost a Palm prototype, he'd still be alive today.

Vindication for the Chinese character system?

The Chinese writing system, with its tens of thousands of characters, is not easy to learn, to say the least. Unlike with nearly every other written language on earth, every character (and most words only contain one or two characters) must be learned individually, and having an excellent knowledge of the language does not mean you will know how to pronounce an obscure word. Literacy rates fluctuate more with age than in other countries, since you have to continuously read in order to be able to read, and continuously write (not just read!) to know how to write. In the era of keyboard-based input, this has created an even bigger handicap for the Chinese writing system: since characters are usually inputted using pinyin, people who type a lot begin to lose the ability to write. Jennifer 8. Lee (8?) of the NYT and Victor H. Mair at UPenn have documented this trend. Prof. Mair sums the dilemma that the Chinese language has with keyboard-based input systems as such:

Such competitors (computers, BlackBerries, and so on) pose far less of a threat to alphabetic scripts than to the characters for the following reasons:

1. Alphabetic scripts require a far smaller initial investment and a fraction of the effort for maintenance.
2. Many of the electronic devices mentioned above actually reinforce or improve writing in alphabetical scripts (spell checkers, grammar checkers, and so on [e-mail style, of course, is another matter altogether] — there are no comparable tools for Chinese).
3. When one forgets how to write a character, one is usually stymied for that particular morpheme, whereas misspelling a word generally presents no obstacle to expression or understanding.

That was written in early 2007, before the era of the iPhone, so the author used BackBerry instead of iPhone. Though the English-language iPhone still utilizes a keyboard, the keyboard is virtual, and the input system is a touch-screen. This is a lot more amenable to inputting Chinese characters in, and Apple itself has slipped Chinese character support into a beta version of its iPhone OS. But unlike most computers which use pinyin or some other input system which doesn't rely on the shape of the characters, the iPhone version allows users to draw the characters onto the screen. Apple also has a few patents (like this one) on touchscreen devices, and some analysts predict that Apple will create a "sprawling mega-platform" around the technology.

If this indeed does catch on, and writing in characters isn't already a lost cause, could touchscreen technology be the savior of the Chinese character system?

Amazon's DRM-free store is #2 online music seller

Only six months after opening, Amazon's MP3 service has become the second-largest online music retailer. To differentiate themselves from iTunes Music Store, they only sell DRM-free music which comes in MP3 form that you can easily share with anyone you'd like. While Apple is moving in that direction, as of yet only about a third of their catalog is DRM-free, and Amazon has more than twice the amount of DRM-free songs available.

Blackboard and software patents

Personally, I think software patents are an absurd idea, and that eventually they will start doing damage to technological innovation (if they haven't already). Just recently, a court decided in Blackboard's favor (you probably know it if you go to an American university), against a company that was essentially providing a similar service. The problem? Blackboard has a patent on software like this! Like what, you ask? Well, essentially a web service that helps teachers and students share information, the key being that a user can be both a student and a teacher, depending on what class it is. Those who have used multi-user operating systems, or online code repositories, will find the idea quite familiar. If anyone isn't convinced that the US patent system has gone absurdly out of control, here is a particularly absurd quote from the Blackboard patent:

However, electronic networks, including the Internet, are complex technological systems requiring the user to have or acquire specialized knowledge in order to use them effectively. Even graphical user interfaces (GUIs) designed to enhance simplicity of use, such as that provided by the World Wide Web, may require specialized knowledge of network terminology and technical aspects. For example, an Internet user's ability to access information using that medium is significantly reduced if the user lacks understanding of how to use Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to traverse (i.e., navigate) web pages. Slow adoption of new technology and lack of technological sophistication have a chilling effect on the widespread use of the medium in general. Applied specifically in an educational context, these chilling factors apply to instructors who, while possessing high expertise in their respective intellectual or educational fields, would be required to further attain technological knowledge necessary to effectively use the Internet to educate non-collocated students.

Furthermore, the complexity of using the Internet for educational purposes is compounded as the number of user choices required at the user interface increases because not only must the instructor and students acquire technological competency in the use of the medium, but they must in addition understand the presentation and consequences of a plethora of choices required by a particular user interface (e.g., a web page). The design of the user interface therefore can be critical in enabling widespread use of the medium in an educational context. Solutions other than the present invention may be characterized as having relatively complicated and confusing user interfaces. Users, including both students and instructors, of these other solutions are confronted with one or more web pages that typically require the user to review and select a subsequent web page or function from among a large array of potential user choices, thereby complicating the user's task of interacting with the system.

This is about par for the course for software and business method patents. The trick to earning one, you see, is just to overwhelm the patent office with extremely long and convoluted descriptions of trivial and common things. You see, no one will give you a patent if you apply for one for "a website that allows users to be either teachers or students in individual classes, and then allows teachers to post links online and students to click on them after they enter some username and password." However, if you make it so long and use language like "traverse web pages" and "chilling effect on the widespread use of the medium in general" (I for one am mortally terrified that people aren't using the internet because they don't know how to type in URLs!), there's a good chance that the overworked, underinformed patent officer reviewing your application is not going to understand the blinding simplicity that they're being shown, and will approve your patent. The US patent office has essentially adopted the attitude that it'll take a couple of years, but it will accept almost any patent, with the real test coming when people sue over it. This is an incredibly warped system, as it essentially forces you to pony up millions of dollars in patent lawyers' fees to get the government to take a dispassionate, careful (if you're lucky) look at the monopoly privileges that they grant by the dozens each day.

For some more software patent idiocy: Apple tries to patent the pinch; Amazon successfully patents one-click checkout (which is later revoked, but only after intimidating other online retailers); Priceline gets patent for...an auction?