Android Intended to Drive Fragmentation?

According to Sanjay Jha, COO of Qualcomm's chipset division, as quoted in this article in The Register, it was Google's goal from the outset to create, not reduce, fragmentation in the mobile software space with its introduction of Android. Qualcomm is, of course, a member of the Open Handset Alliance.

"Google wants fragmentation in the industry," according to Jha.

Why? Not too hard to figure out.

Google's Robert Love presented at GUADEC in Birmingham last year on the notion of a web-based desktop, where all your data lived on servers out "in the cloud" and was accessed pretty strictly via web browsers and web-based applications. This idea raised lots of criticisms, notably on the grounds of security and privacy (an area where Google's record is less than sterling), as well as accessibility. Love had no real response to the former criticisms other than "Trust us", and suggested that Google Gears could be used to address the latter, which kind of begs the question of why one should base everything on the web in the first place.

Google's shown that an area where they can succeed is in providing cross-platform tools for their properties such as Google Maps and the like, via precisely the sorts of web-based mechanisms that Love was proposing at GUADEC.

Why does Google want fragmentation in the industry? If the easiest way to make mobile applications is by falling back to the web, then that's a win for Google: they can cover a broad swath of devices while keeping platform-based competitors isolated to their own individual islands. This approach has the cynical side effect of marginalizing the work of the real open source community (y' know, the one whose source is actually open...?) with spurious claims that it "wasn't good enough" for Google's needs.

Google's approach to the mobile space has been deeply cynical from the outset: it's an open source project whose source isn't open, it's based on standards (live the Java language) while simultaneously ignoring the communities around those standards (like JCP), and it seems as though it's explicitly intended to hamper the development of a core mainstream Linux-based mobile stack by distracting the attention of potential developers.

I dunno, seems reasonably evil to me.

Linux-Based Systems Found to Be "Hacker Proof"!

At this year's CanSecWest, they mounted the second PWN to OWN challenge: given a Sony Vaio running Linux, a MacBook Air running Leopard and a Fujitsu U810 running Vista, the first hacker to exploit the system of their choice would take the device home; in addition, the first to exploit any of the devices would get a check for ten grand.

The MacBook Air went down first in a surprisingly (disturbingly, really) three minutes, thanks to an exploit in the latest version of Safari, v3.1. Disturbing, since Safari 3.1 is the version on the beta 2.0 iPhones as well. Given the lack of a real security model on the iPhone, and the fact that most things run as root, this raises some concerns about the safety of putting third-party software onto that device. No doubt this exploit will be fixed, but this and the similar speed with which the iPhone 2.0 update was jailbroken underscore the fragility of the iPhone.

The Vista device went next, taking a more impressive 55 hours, before it finally fell to a Flash exploit.

The VAIO running Ubuntu was the only device standing at the end of the third day.

Want real security on your mobile device? You want Linux.

The Shiny Report (and Nine-Inch Nails in the iTunes Coffin...?)

One of the things that I seem to value in my friends is their taste and design sense. My good friend in Vancouver, Jonathan "Squink" Blake, has started up The Shiny Report, an excellent blog showcasing some equally excellent examples of form transcending function and function coming to life through form. In other words, a lot of neat, well-designed things. This blog definitely lives up to its name: it's extremely shiny.

I see an awful lot of stuff I'd like to have, or at least play with. Check it out.

Following up on the possible disintegration of the iTunes Music Store's business model over the next year or so, Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails just released the new album, Ghosts I-IV, 36 instrumental tracks in all, and is offering free downloads of the first nine tracks. Well, trying to offer:

Unfortunately, the Ghosts I-IV site is down for the next few hours for maintenance. We quietly released this album last night without any warning, and without any press. Because we know how devoted our fans are, we planned for an overwhelming response, and expected heavy traffic. To our surprise, the traffic was more than three times what we anticipated, and has only been getting heavier throughout the day. The response has been absolutely phenomenal, and we couldn't be happier, but our servers have taken a beating, causing numerous problems with the download site. Our developers, who have been working non-stop to combat the surge of traffic, feel that taking the site down for a few hours to fix some crucial issues is the best way to get things running smoothly again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

However, they helpfully point out:

While the site is down, you can still purchase the complete Ghosts I-IV here from Amazon's MP3 store for only $5. The MP3s are high quality and DRM-free.

Five bucks, thirty-six tracks, no DRM. That's under fourteen cents a track. You can't get it from the iTunes Store, NIN fans. I expect Amazon to sell a bunch of these (one to me, certainly), and I expect to see more of this sort of thing, and more of the business in general going to Amazon, eMusic, and the like.

If you want to scope out the first quarter of the album before you buy, it's on the torrents...

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Steve's Phone

Back in Apple's Good Old Days (and I'd always said that the corporate motto should be "Not what it used to be since 1990"), Mac OS was a pretty open development environment. Apple put a lot of work into MPW and decent tools, and--even with abortive efforts like MacApp, now resurrected in zombie-like spirit as Android--there were lots of possibilities for developers. You could pretty much write what you liked, distribute it as you could, and--largely--do what you wanted.

Those days came to an end a good while ago, and they're apparently receding further if the report from iLounge on the imminent "iPhone SDK road map" is accurate. For my part, it seems not only believable, but in character, to me.

First, the only mechanism available for the distribution of applications is going to be the iTunes music store, and the only mechanism for installation of applications is going to be the iTunes desktop. (Is this sounding at all familiar...?)

Second, Apple is going to be guarding the Pearly Gates. You'll have to submit your application to Apple for its "Officially Steve-worthy" seal of approval in order to get it onto the iTunes store. Anyone who's ever tried to get their podcast into the iTunes directory can see the flaws in this notion.

Third, no access to "accessories", which if I understand it, means pretty much no actual access to the hardware. This makes an awful lot of interesting applications pretty much impossible.

Clearly, Apple is strongly motivated to tightly control what people can get on their iPhone, to the point of (in effect) voiding your warranty for installing "unapproved" stuff on the device. The main reason for that would likely be the apparent total lack of anything like a security model on the iPhone. Pretty much everything has, so far, run as root (!), so any sort of mayhem is potentially possible. It's kind of amazing that some level of meaningful security (other than gluing the case shut) wouldn't have been designed in from the beginning on this sort of device.

This will unquestionably hamper development for the iPhone. Good news for the partisans of more open systems, bad news for the early-adopting line-standers. Good news for developers, ultimately, I think they'll be looking around for greener pastures for their efforts. Happily, greener pastures should be coming onto the market shortly.

As for you iPhone owners, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Did you think that was your phone? Not at all: it's Steve's phone, he just lets you use it. And pay for the privilege.

Steve is good. Steve is wise. Drink your Kool-Aid.

ResourceSpace: An Excellent Open Source Digital Asset Management Package

I keep saying to people that the problem with a lot of open source software is that it's 80% as good as the last guy who worked on it needed it to be. Every once in a while, though, you stumble across an open source project that's just incredibly awesome.

I do a lot of presentations, so I deal with a lot of stock photos, graphs, templates and so forth. Managing these, especially across a globally-distributed organization is no small feat, and things have gotten to the point where we clear need a real digital asset management package. We'd been looking at Canto's Cumulus--proprietary, and in my opinion, the web interface is quite unattractive and inconvenient to use--and then I stumbled across ResourceSpace.

ResourceSpace is written in PHP and requires a single MySQL database. It was originally developed by OXFAM International to manage their own digital assets, and it's available under a BSD license for free use.

It allows users to upload resources of any number of custom-defined types individually via direct http or batched using ftp; image assets are automatically resized to a variety of form factors, and can be distributed either by direct download or via email. There's also a decent facility for defining collections of assets, public, private or shared, as well as "themes" (groups of public collections).

Types of resources, with both global and specific attributes, can be defined, and access can be controlled with high granularity. Users can be freely classified and the access controls are similarly pretty fine-grained.

Tagging and keywords are supported, and the standard keywords and fields can be easily customized, without knowledge of PHP, from the administrative interface. Search capabilities are very good, and, while I haven't loaded my test installation down with pictures, it seems as though it's capable--thanks to reliance on MySQL--with managing extremely large libraries of assets efficiently.

The user interface is clean, easy to use and modern-looking, quite a bit nicer than some of the competing proprietary products. It's also--since the full source code is, of course, provided--completely customizable. Strings can be customized and localized from the administrative interface (which is cleanly integrated into the rest of the site), and the overall look can be modified from the css files.

The biggest missing feature I'd like to see in here is version control, but that's a bit of a side issue to the one I wanted to solve: ensuring that we didn't buy the same stock photos over and over because we didn't know we'd already licensed them and making it possible for our users to access those stock images through a web-based interface, without having to deal with the vagaries of multiple VPNs, etc. For the security-minded, the site requires log-in by default to access resources, has a full supporting facility and can be easily configured to run over https on sites with a usable certificate. Documentation is a little on the sketchy side, but bring-up was dead easy and required a minimum of PHP and MySQL savvy.

If you're looking for a DAM package, I'd definitely check out ResourceSpace before you went out and spent money on anything.

In Which I'm Not Actually in Brussels This Weekend

Things got busy for me here—if you look at the last week's press announcements coming out of MWC, you may be able to deduce why—but the long and short of it is that I'm not going to be in Brussels for FOSDEM as I'd planned.

I'm bereft, if that's any consolation. Looks like I'll be in Rome next month, though. Photos to follow, no doubt.