Rubénerd!

In 2011 I discussed how I was giving Google the benefit of the doubt regarding their harvesting of open WiFi data, and that it was consumer network hardware manufacturers that should be working to protect consumers. I was... at least partly wrong!

Uh-oh

From my Google's non-existent whitelists... exist post I wrote on the 11th of March 2011:

Take the street view controversy. While I think Google engineers were short sighted by not closely studying the source code of the software they put on their trucks and drove around the world, I don't believe they did it maliciously.

Unfortunately, we now know that isn't true. From Stilgherrian:

So, you know when Google’s Street View cars, the ones taking photos down every street, were also accidentally scooping up people’s unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic? Turns out the engineer who wrote the software did it deliberately, and his boss knew he did.

The European Union isn't impressed, and may reopen their case against Google. To quote John Gruber:

Uh-oh.

But the networks were open!

Back when this controversy started and people were blaming Google for stealing people's data, I read an equal number of posts from other bloggers blaming people for having open wireless networks in the first place. I acknowledged this:

These signals were being broadcast in the open, and while the scale of Google's downloading may warrant further scrutiny, it skips the real issue that people are still broadcasting unencrypted data out of their homes for anyone to gain access to.

Still, I didn't go as far as to blame consumers.

Rather than blaming consumers (which is always an easy thing to do) however, I place the blame on network hardware manufacturers for selling devices that didn't make this clearer.

Unfortunately, we now know in hardware manufacturers attempted to make security easier for consumers by implementing WPA2 standards, and in the process introduced a security vulnerability so severe it bypasses the otherwise strong encryption used by them. All of course except Apple, and I remember people chewing me out for having a Airport Extreme base station... heh ;D.

Regardless, there are a lot of issues at play here, not least the ethics of some Google engineers. Any company can/does have rogue players, but the key is transparency. Only disclosing this now rubs me the wrong way, a little.

John Gruber, on Marco Arment's Kindle comments:

His surprising (to me, at least) conclusion: "The low-end, non-touch Kindle 4 is actually my favorite e-reader today."

I've used my old man's iPad to read books, and I've read books on my iPhone and my computers. The lowest end Kindle can't do everything an iPad can (or the Kindle Fire, or those other tablets), but it has the single best form factor, controls, weight and display for long form reading. It's as simple as that.

If you're thinking of buying one, feel free to use my referral code to support the site, or go here if you don't like the idea of referrals. Thanks :)

That Topolsky has no major gripes like this about the Galaxy Nexus makes me think Android 4.0 might really be the first good version of Android. Which in turn makes me think Steve Jobs wasn’t far off at the 2007 iPhone introduction when he claimed the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition. ~ Daring Fireball

Makes sense then why it's taking Microsoft an age to formulate a response with Windows Phone. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board during the iPhone's development and had access to all that inside information, and it still took Google this long to develop a polished competitor.

Still, if all the reviews of Android 4 are as positive, I might give it a look again. My beloved WebOS seems to be sinking fast, and as much as I'd love to have a MeeGo/Tizen phone or tablet, I don't hold out much hope for that either.

John Gruber on a guy who ate 25,000 Big Macs:

Dan Gorske has eaten 25,000 Big Macs over 39 years — close to two per day, every day. My first thought when I heard about him was that he must be either an idiot or an asshole. But now I think not. I think maybe he’s a lucky man — someone who found the perfect food to suit his taste, an obsessive who never tires of it, and it happens to be cheap and readily available almost everywhere in the world.

He's a lucky man because he's still alive.

So let me get this straight, Windows Phone Corporate Mobile Enterprise Personal Home Premium Ultimate Edition With Dynamics 7 Service Pack 1 Release Update 3 is not going to have cut-and-paste or multitasking, it'll have multitouch and finally a compulsory application store, and Microsoft is defending these positions?

For how many years have Apple users have to suffer constant ridicule from Microsoftians for these features (or lack thereof)? Will we be hearing a retraction from Ballmer? Will the "fanboys" (a term I don't personally use except under extenuating circumstances) be apologising or taking back some of what they said about super evil Apple lolz 1!11!one11!?

I'm also interested to see how this gets spun to show Microsoft is delivering anything more than a half baked competitor to the three year old iPhone with an interface that looks like it'd be a gorgeous magazine page but a clumsy phone, but I'd be happy with a "whoops, our bad".

The Android factor

What also remains to be seen is how Microsoft can compete with Android which delivers all the promises of the Windows Mobile platform (freedom to choose hardware manufactures, the mobile web, ooh look shiny without being Evil Apple) without any of the licencing fees.

Unlike Linux on the desktop which is fractured and doesn't run much of the software most people want, Android is cohesive and has an app store of its own, even if the system isn't as open source as some of it's proponents claim. That's okay though, because most consumers don't know or care about free and open source philosophy and won't be modifying their systems anyway.

As a matter of disclosure if you can't ascertain these facts from reading my site here, I have an iPhone, a Palm Centro and my computers run Mac OS X and FreeBSD, with one Fedora box. I don't intend to get a new phone any time soon because my year and a half iPhone 3G still works flawlessly and my Centro is a rock solid trooper. Take from that what you will.

Update

Christopher Grande and John Gruber put it best. They even went one step further and proved the stunning hypocrisy of Thurrott, not a terribly complicated thing to do, but something that takes balls.

At least according to these reports, cut-and-paste is coming, but that's not to say Microsoft won't be using some clever marketing and 1984 Ministry of Truth amnesia to gloss over it.