Andreas Fink's blog

Why WWDC will never be like WWDC again...

2011-03-29T12:57:00.003+02:00

WWDC stands for World Wide Developer Conference. An event annually held by Apple in San Francisco. As the name implies, it supposed to be "world wide". However due to the popularity of iOS, the event is being flooded with developers and since 2 years was being sold out. In 2010 however things changed.

Europe received invitations for WWDC at 18:05. By the next morning, WWDC was sold out. In other words, any serious developer who has to organize hotel and long distance international flights to San Francisco has absolutely no chance to get to WWDC. He might not even have seen the invitation before it was sold out because of the timing it was sent. The result of this will be that WWDC will no longer be World Wide anymore. It will be 99.999% US only while more developers who develop for iOS are abroad, while more revenue is being produced with Apple devices outside of USA, I consider this quite a drastic shift.

Airport Security, take 2

2010-12-05T07:55:00.003+01:00

Addendum: I sent the e-mail below a while ago. I sent a reminder but it seems the airport doesn't give a dam'd about its paying customers. Today I was at the same airport again and I refused to take my pants/Belt off and asked politely for a hand search. They refused that option. Well they had no other option than to call the police. After 15 minutes they finally did the handsearch. Something every airport in the world I have encountered is able to do but the Keflavik airport is too stubburn to do it.

To: kefairport@kefairport.is

Dear Keflavik Airport,

You have a very nice country.

You have a very nice looking airport

You have a very clean airport.

Everyone coming to Iceland would go home and report how good his vacations where in Iceland, except, on the way, those visitors will be pissed of so heavily that they will not come again.

I travel like 8 times per year to Iceland due to business. And I never had any issues but since 2010, your security check is just nuts. My way home usually is like this:

- open my bag

- put out my laptop in a box

- put out my ipad in a box

- put my jacket, vallet, keys and phone in a box

- walk through the guard

- hear it beep

- get asked to put my shoes on to the a box which I do for the peace of mind even my shoes are not the issue.

- get asked to put my belt off. Unfortunately my belt is stiched to the pants. I don't want to drop my pants. Explain it to the security guard. twice. Handsearch is ordered

- get my bag back, they can't scan it. Too much electronics.

- Put the bag upside down and put all its content in another box.

- Mood is already ruined

- walk through -BEEP-

- get hand searched extensively

- put all the stuff back in my bag

- feel insulted in my privacy

- go home and never come back

(unfortunately I can't never come back as I have business here)

Usually takes at least 5 minutes. 5 totally wasted minutes.

I travel a lot. I alway fly from Frankfurt to Iceland. In Frankfurt don't beep if I have my shoes and my belt on. And if it beeps they quickly handsearch me without any issues. The personel is nice and not arrogant. They complete their job with the security in mind in a professional way. So if I compare Iceland to Frankfurt, I must say your machines are probably detecting a one euro coin and think its an atomic reactor or such. This was all not the case in 2007-2009. Only in 2010 this nonsense started.

I don't know if you really fear terrorism to blow up an airplane but it's a waste of time. If a terrorist would want to blow up a plane, he would 100% sure not choose Iceland. You have not been to Iraq, nor to Agfanistan. Nor are you an "important size" country. Blowing up a plane from Iceland would have like no impact on the world. Almost nobody would care. So why this insulting security checks? Just because your employees wants to show off? Show off in a sense that they have the power and the traveler coming there has none? You're wrong. That's the wrong signal sent to tourists who just had a wonderful time. Passengers have the same rights as every human. Privacy. And at the end of the day, they are the ones which pay the salaries of all the airport employees.

See also my experiences from last April....

http://a-fink.blogspot.com/2010/04/airport-security.html

By the way I also find it quite annoying to have to pay 490 ISK to send off this e-mail from the business class lounge. Why you have no free wi-fi in a business class lounge?

And its quite amusing that the helpdesk of the business class lounge doesn't even have instructions or forms for feedback or complaints.

Integrated SIM in iPhone?

2010-11-21T16:35:00.002+01:00

Some rumors floating around say that Apple thinks of integrating the SIM card into the phone. Unfortunately the entities distributing this rumor have no clue how GSM works. The SIM card is a vital element in the GSM network. The SIM card represents the subscription. A phone which connects to the network uses the SIM card for authentication. It is thus the key to your phone number and subscription. The interchangeability of the SIM card came from the fact that people want to change phones often. Remove your SIM and put it into a new phone and you are online within seconds. If the SIM card is built into your phone, you are locked down to the opening hours of a operator's store. Also you can only use the phone with the integrated SIM card with the operator your phone supplier wants to cooperate with. This would break all rules of a free market.

Secondly the SIM card represents a vital security key. If you can copy the sim card (assuming its emulated in software in the iPhone and you can jailbreak it), someone could write a "virus" which collects all encryption keys from all iPhones and could make expensive phone calls on the owner's cost. This would be a vital threat and empty your wallets. The SIM card uses an encryption key and encryption algorithm which is controlled by the operator. There's a matching entity in his network which does the same encryption. Most operator use the standard GSM encryption algorithm for authentication but some don't to not be vulnerable if that one gets broken (the older one has been broken, the newer not yet). In addition to that, the SIM card has additional functionality such as prepaid functions which allow you to get your credit limit in a menu, it holds predefined adressbook entries, can authenticate as multiple subscribers (so called proxy-roaming) etc. This means the SIM card is a highly flexible computer with extensions possibly done by every single operator based on their offerings or ideas. This would all no longer work if people would have to use Apple's integrated SIM card.

The biggest advantage of having SIM cards are:

1. I buy a new phone today and pop in my old sim card and can make a call a few seconds later. Operator doesn't have to do anything for that. It just works.

2. I can put in a new SIM card from another operator into my phone at any time and be online with the new subscription within seconds. This comes handy if you travel to other countries and want to use a prepaid lcoal number in that country. Imagine you would have to buy an iPhone for that every time you travel to another place.

3. Network operator can extend the functionality based on his offering and can choose another authentication method.

Integrated SIM card would ruin all those advantages. That's why I think it will never happen. Apple would lock themselves down to very few operators as the mainstream would not adopt it for sure.

What's more likely the source of this story is the fact that Apple works on a iPhone which does not have a SIM card at all. The logical reason why this could be the case is a CDMA iPhone. In CDMA there are no SIM cards. If a CDMA subscriber wants to buy a new phone, he has to buy it from his operator and have his subscription programmed into it. But programming the subscription into the phone was seen last in C networks in europe (analog networks with digital signaling) and has been abandoned long ago when GSM came online in the early 90ies.

The SIM has been invented for good reasons. Apple changing that is just not going to happen. It would open too many doors to security treats and cause massive compatibility issues and limits the market.

To XServe or not to XServe...

2010-11-17T19:17:00.002+01:00

Apple has announced to stop producing the XServe by end of January 2011. As a reason, Steve Jobs said it wasn't terribly selling well. To be honest, it doesn't surprise me. If you look at the rackmount server market, you can see two groups of customers.

Customer Group #1 is the corprorate market who don't care about the price and pay whatever it takes to get the job done. The XServe doesn't serve those guy's well as there's not a lot of corprorate software from Apple besides fileserving, webserving. The XSan and video editing market is probably all where Apple is really good at. But corporates want to run big clusters of Oracle databases (or MySQL or Postgres... etc). The XServe and MacOS X is not really well supported there by the vendors. Telecommunications market is (or was at least) in the hands of Solaris. MacOS X with its lack of SCTP has no future there. The corporate server market needs availability, uptime and guarantees. The first XServe's (still PPC) had a lot of missing things which are vital in the server market such as lights out management, remote console, redundant power supplies, RAID etc. The newest ones have a lot of that fixed, althought a remote console is still missing and sometimes even lights out management fails to work (seen that once or twice in last 5 years). So for the corporate market the XServe's price is "ok" but its feature set is limited. You can't run your 200GB database in memory as you can't put enough memory in it. There's no path to the high end.

Customer Group #2 is the hosting market. Those are the guys who buy 10'000's of servers at the time. The guys who host websites for millions of people and who run datacenters which take 8megawatts of power and the like. For those folks, offering MacOS X Server hosting would be an option as it can offer the small and medium enterprises options to use MacOS X Server features. Even if its only in a virtual machine but that's good enough for a lot of small to medium size customers. However when I look around what those folks are doing you immediately understand why they don't buy DELL, HP, IBM, SUN or Apple's XServe. They pile 100'000's of machines. Price DOES matter to those folks. So if you look at those guy's datacenter's you find a lot of noname boxes. They are inexpensive, can be ordered by the palette and if it fails, throw away and buy a new one. Its affordable. They are happy with the "limited" functionality of MacOS X but they would go for a Linux as it's not giving them an advantage to run MacOS X Server for 99.999% of their customers.

Customer Group #3 are the folks who develop under MacOS X and want to run their software as service for their clients. They buy XServes as it suits well into their datacenter. they are ready to pay the premium (+30% or so more compared to a normal Rackmount PC of same specs) because they use MacOS X's features which Linux can't give them. They use Cocoa, CoreData etc. etc. Those guys just love MacOS X and promote MacOS X heavily. They don't really need MacOS X Server, normal MacOS X will do. Some of them live of this exclusively. Those are the guys which Apple has just slapped into their face.

Conclusion: for corporate, apple's hardware is not good enough yet, for hosting its not cheap enough yet and the remaining market is too small for Apple to care about.

What Apple however forgets is that that "small" market very heavily promote MacOS X. Thats why the desktop is increasing because those guys make great software for it. This is what's making MacOS X unique. Its objectiveC, Cocoa and the whole environment. Apple now killed the opportunity to have its development environment enter the server market. Using MacMini's or MacPro's in the datacenter is just a joke. No serious business will depend on that kind of solution.

There is however a way out for Apple. Apple has to admit it is good at making software and laptops and desktops but not really good at making servers. Others do better servers such as Supermicro, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and even Cisco with its UCS. For every type of workload, you find the perfect workhorse and you can run Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD etc on it. But you can't run MacOS X or MacOS X Server on it. The solution to Apple's disaster would be to license MacOS X/MacOS X Sever to hardware vendors who are doing a very good job in producing servers. As Apple can't serve that market (otherwise the XServe would not be pulled), others can very well and instead of loosing everything in that market, they could gain more market than they had before. Market they where not able to address before. So Apple could only win.

But as they fear their MacOS X would leak out to John Doe's Desktop that way and everyone would just steal MacOS X instead, hell has to freeze before Job's would allow this to happen.

Result:

Customer Group #1 will never even consider MacOS X for their corporation.

Customer Group #2 will never consider MacOS X neither

Customer Group #3 will be pissed off heavily and move away from Apple towards Linux

Result #4: Desktop sales of MacOS X will be reduced. This might not happen over night but a couple of years later.

I'm myself in Group #2 and #3. We now move our 500'000 lines of server code over to Linux. I wish I wouldn't have to do that. I started to love Cocoa over the last few years due to the fact it made me lots of things simpler which are a pain to do in C.

You might want to consider looking at http://www.savethexserve.com/ if you where thinking of buying an XServe.

Apple Pricing

2010-11-02T20:52:00.004+01:00

Today on Apple Insider I read mac mini have dropped in price internationally. Sounds good but somehow I can not agree.

The same MacMini is offered in USA for USD 999 and in Switzerland for 1249 CHF. Today: 1 CHF = 1.02 USD. If you remove the VAT (7.6%) you end up in Switzerland on a price of 1183 USD for exactly the same product. That's 18.5% more expensive. Or in other words, if I have a MacMini shipped from USA with the fastest express service, I still pay more than 100$ less getting it from USA.

Why does Apple punish us for the weak dollar?

Rumours about CDMA iPhone? not really...

2010-10-20T16:20:00.008+02:00

There are rumours about a CDMA iPhone since many years. Everyone seems to have the magic crystal ball to predict the future. Verizon most likely would like to see a CDMA iPhone so they can be part of the hype. Fact is that outside USA, there are only very few countries using CDMA at all. So in the eyes of a global player like Apple, it doesn't make too much sense to support CDMA as they would limit their market. More likely would be a dual standard phone (technically complex to deal with) or a next generation phone supporting LTE which basically replaces GSM/UMTS/3G and CDMA. But the LTE networks are not quite ready yet so thats a far reach.

Some bloggers however think they can fool the people and create a hype. They try to show off that they are first in line to know all the facts but in fact they are simply guessing and making up stories. I can show you an typical example:

Boy Genious shows the so famous iPhone CDMA here:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/10/18/next-apple-iphone-verizon-model-hits-ap-field-test-stage-iphone-5-hits-evt-stage/

However if you look at

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/2

you find highres pictures of exactly the same hand and iPhone. If you put both pictures on top of each other and create a difference, you can see what has been changed:

As you can see, the only change was a change of resolution, the removal of the screwdriver (however the front piece of it is still seen) and the addition of a MEID-HEX sticker. This looks like the IMEI sticker on GSM phones. As I never had a CDMA phone (useless in europe) I can only guess this MEID is the mobile phone device id which is programmed into the device versus the SIM card.

Fact is, the picture is 100% fabricated. Fact is that website has no clue if there will be a CDMA iPhone or not.

PS: a small note about Richy Rich's post

http://richyrich.net/exclusive-verizon-iphone-4-photos/

showing some pictures about a debug version of the device apparently being "proof" of the first post by boygenious which is as stated above a fake. So proving something which is obviously fake by showing serious looking debug log pictures is ridiculous. Here's why:

If its a late stage debug unit it would for sure be seamless without a debug console

Even the iPhone first generation had a built in GSM debug menu which can be enabled by some *...# from the keyboard (many phones have that). Given the iPhone has no terminal application or "console" visible to the end user, it would make a lot of sense to put such debug information into a normal iPhone application. The GSM debug menu did show things like signal strenth, celltower Id and the like. This stuff is shown in a normal iPhone table view. Why in hell would any apple engineer for a CDMA phone go off and create an ugly terminal window to show similar CDMA stuff while there's already a built in viewer for such things. Doesn't make any sense to me. Early stage units which could have booting issues maybe could have such a console view but after all the iOS part of a possible CDMA iPhone would be 99% the same as the GSM counterpart as the CDMA or GSM modem parts run in their own respective CPU. In other words the only difference in iOS would be it would download a CDMA firmware instead of a GSM firmware and it would maybe use a few different AT command when talking to the baseband CPU. Debug logs (in case of crashes of the GSM modem) usually appear when synching but never would appear in such a weird terminal window. It just does not make sense to me.

Conclusion: Richy Rich simply wrote a small application to display nice looking text on a iPhone to say what he wants to say and made a picture of it. Now this strange SIM card slot on a pseudo CDMA device makes sense again, isn't it?

What worries more is that everyone seems to take it for granted if some nobody publishes something which all Verizon customers would love to see.

Unparalelled Support.

2010-06-16T17:43:00.008+02:00

Addendum 2:

Even though most issues had been solved. Our virtual mailservers running CentOS 5.5 and Kerio Mailserver and nothing else still dissapear from time to time. You can't ping the virtual machine, you can't run the Parallels Management Console (Can't connect) and only a reboot of the host system (a XServe running MacOS X 10.6.4) fixes it. The system log doesn't show anything obvious. *sight*.

Addendum:

Parallel's has addressed the major issues in Parallel's Server for MacOS X Version 4. There are only a few graphical GUI glitches left which are by far not critical. So if you run version 3 and have issues. Upgrade to 4. It will make your life a lot easier.

The Linux variant runs like a charm on our IBM blade server but still has issues on the other machine I used. I've given up on that one and write it off under "bad motherboard".

---------------

As we are building a large virtualized datacenter, we are testing virtualisation solutions. As we want to offer MacOS X Server hosting and want to do "real stuff" we looked closer into Parallels Server for Mac OS X. About 2 years ago I tried this before and it failed. It crashed, freezed etc. But as time has passed and Parallels Desktop usually is working fine, I thought I give it another try. But big problems arised.

1. You configure 8 virtual machines on a XServe with 20GB of ram and big fat harddisks. All looks great until you reboot the machine. The virtual machines won't start. So you check the box to autostart and save. But oh'oh, it is not starting neither. The settings don't get stored. You get prompted with weird error messages sometimes pointing to some "credentials issue" but if you simply do it again it doesn't happen. And some virtual machines look like "stating" but they arent. So you can't stop or start them. Rebooting the server is the only option.

2. Ok so let's try it on a Linux machine with the Parallels Bare metal server. Sounds like "kernel and app and nothing else" should be slim and working. After doing this on a big fat PC with many disks it all looks great until you reboot the machine a few times and your boot disk gets totally corrupted. Ok sounds like a SATA disk issue, new controller, different disk, same problem. But now the box is in a datacenter 3000km away from home.

3. Contact support. Well go to the webpage and try to contact them. Contact us requires registration. Well I am registered but I can't login. Password recovery works but logging in is still bringing you back to the login screen. What now? theres no way to contact support.

Doing the same with Firefox instead of Safari reveals that they have a buggy web designer. Well, ok now you are there. You can do a life chat. But oh, theres no product Parallels server there. So I have to choose Desktop. And then you are #1 on the list for the next 30 minutes. My patience is not so long...

4. Next thing the app crashed once so it created an automated submission and now I have a ticket on their RT system. Great. Finally I can explain my issues to someone. Its a priority #1 case as everything stops after a reboot so its a mission critical issue. You get an answer saying you get a reply within 24h. A day later nothing happened. After writing 5 additional add-on's to the support case, I get some lousy answers which gives a script (which isn't attached of course) to start the servers to be installed as a LaunchDaemon. While this is a ugly workaround at least for the not starting stuff, its no option for the hanging processes at start.

5. there's a nice checkbox in the config tool saying "iPhone support". if you check it, it says its not implemented. WTF. Why have a checkbox at all if its not supported??

6. You can't install CentOS 5.5 on the virtual machine due to some graphics driver issue. As this is a server, there's no graphics needed. plain old text mode however doesn't work neither. But why does it work then on the desktop system?

7. Parallel tools on a Ubuntu 9.10 server systems you can't install them.

8. You open a priority 1 mission critical ticket which they define as:

Severity 1 (Urgent): A customer is unable to install and run the software because of problems with a license key, the computer (server) fails to start, or the software crashes and corrupts data. No workaround or immediate solution is available.

The next day (more than 13 h later) you still have not a single reaction while you sent like 10 mails and logs and reports and screenshoots. After 16 hours, the first reaction was, well it will probably be fixed in 2 weeks in the next release (maybe). If you operate a datacenter with thousands of servers as we plan it, you don't want to get into the situation that your servers reboot, get stuck and you have to wait 2 weeks until someone makes a working product.

Conclusion: There's no working product for the DataCenter from Parallels. If you thought about it, forget it. At least for the next 2 years. This looks like some russian cpu cracks who had fun writing a (probably pretty good) virtual machine but have forgotten what software quality means. If your business depends on it, you are better off with more expensive solutions like VMWare. The only problem there is that they have no solution for virtualizing MacOS X Server. Someone might shout, "what about Fusion?". Yes thats true but that's a desktop application. Its built for users sitting in front of a computer. You can not virtualize 100's of servers on a big fat CPU with many gigabytes of ram and disk that way (ever thought how 100 windows look like on your screen?). I'm sure VMWare could make a product that way which would even work but they don't see the commercial market for it yet.

So whats the only other option? Piling up MacMini's. One for every customer. Thousands of wires. Ugly cabling. Reliability questionable. Or piling up XServes. One for every customer. Reliable but expensive.

I'm dreaming of a working virtualisation solutions working on big iron's like seamicro running MacOS X Server. But there are obstacles:

- One is called Steve which doesn't want MacOS X Server to run on anybody else's hardware than his

- The other is Apple who doesn't produce big enough fat servers

- Tnd the third is Paralells which is unable to produce serious products

or VMWare who see's no market.

No wonder MacOS X Server is not common at all in the hosting compared to Linux. Even though its a very stable server system with a nice guy which adds a lot of ease of use for many people who are not day in, day out working on the command line.

Folks. Give us an option! There's business to grab here...

Adobe and Case Sensitive Filesystems

2010-06-04T14:48:00.006+02:00

There was a time where Photoshop was the workhorse for Apple to show off how good their hardware was. Adobe was doing good things to the Mac platform. But those times are long gone. Photoshop was an example on how good MacApp was (a C++ framework at its time). The user interface was easy to use and intuitive.

I purchased Photoshop 7 at the time because it had the features I needed to work on certain pictures. I'm by far not a photographer or graphics professional so Photoshop is for sure having more power than I need but it had the few features I wanted which other tools did not have at the time. So I paid a fortune for Photoshop while only using a little.

Since Photoshop 7 has been out, things got really worse at Adobe. While having always been at the forefront of technology, they became lazy. They spent more time trying to lock their professional customers to their products instead of making the product better so more people would use it in the semi professional area and producing more revenue. Photoshop is probably the most expensive software I have ever bought but I was willing to pay it. Today I can't use it anymore. Carbon is gone with 10.6 and Photoshop 7 doesn't run anymore. Now the times of MacOS 9 are now 10 years ago, so you think they for sure have a replacement in that time. But only this year they introduced their creative suite 5 which is no longer depending on Carbon. Come on Adobe, it took you 10 years to do this transition?

Well did it bring other new stuff at least? Well they made it difficult to use Photoshop on your laptop and your office computer without paying twic. They install all kind of crap with it. Even Adobe Acrobat installs Adobe Air. Something I really don't want to have because its lame and useless. Where have been the times where you had one application icon which you dragged from your install media to your applications folder? Photoshop is a typical Application which absolutely should't require any installer of any sort because it doesn't have to modify the system. But it still does. It installs some background updater and what else I don't know. A lot of useless crap which blows your disk up. This is why PC's are so hard to maintain because no one knows what the hell an installer has done to your system. Adobe adopted this bad habit and made it worse.

Now back to my Photoshop installation. As I prefer to have Photoshop running on Intel 64bit and not in Rosetta emulation on Carbon, I wanted to check out if I can use the CS4 version on my Mac. But no you can't. My mac has a case sensitive HFS+ filesystem. This for a very good reason. Its a Unix system under the hood and there are unix based applications who get into trouble if they look for "Makefile" and "makefile" in the same folder. For example the Android development SDK requires a case sensitive filesystem. All applications which use files will find their stuff anyway as if they created File_X at some time, they will not look for file_x out of a sudden. So it was safe to assume that a case sensitive Filesystem should not give any application any problem. Well I was wrong. Adobe has won this trophy. They manage to screw things up that it doesn't run on a case sensitive filesystem. With CS4, you couldn't install it. With CS5 I hoped this was fixed as large parts of Photoshop where rewritten but today I got this:

Installation to case-sensitive drives is not supported. Please choose a different drive location to install.

Now, to tell you the truth, I have CS4 running on a case sensitive filesystem. It took me many hours to get it working but it does work. Why do they claim it doesn't? The answer is simple. Their programmers are lazy. Yes. That's the whole problem. Photoshop consists of the application and a lot of filter and import export plugins which are files by their own.

Photoshop , as many others app's makes use of plugins. Those are parts of a code which is separated in a shared library for maintainability. Filter plug ins for example remain in

/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS4/Plug-Ins/Filters/

so you can install 3rd party filters there and you can use them in Photoshop.

A plugin is a MacOS X bundle.

Those Bundles should have the following structure

PluginName.plugin/

Contents/

Info.plist the description

MacOS/

PluginName the binary

PkgInfo

Resources/

....

But with Adobe, it was sometimes named "contents" instead of "Contents".

Similar things happened to frameworks Photoshop is using.

This is how it should be:

./Adobe Photoshop CS4.app/Contents/Frameworks/registration.framework/Versions/A/registration

And this is how it sometimes was:

./Adobe Photoshop CS4.app/Contents/Frameworks/registration.framework/versions/a/registration

To fix this issue, you had to rename all the files by hand to the correct writing and it started working. Sometimes a plugin was accessed with a lowercase name but had a uppercase name in the filesystem or vice versa so launching photoshop and looking at the console to see what breaks told me which one it is. Around 50 files had to be changed in CS4.

Now why is this a problem for Adobe to fix? Because you have to look at the code and files and make sure they are always properly named the same way. You can not create file X and then access file x and thinking it works. But if you always use the same name X it will work. It would take Adobe less than a day to fix this once for all times but they rather spend their time introducing more anti theft copy protection into their product which makes it impossible to install without giving away your identity etc. And if you change your laptop (which I do like every 1-2 years) you are screwed again because the software is so much locked to your hardware that restoring a backup wont work.

This will make people go away. This is not what's called user friendly. If I would have to install CS5 today, it would probably take me another 5 days to get it right and for all this hand work i should pay Adobe something like 1000$ price tag for their product?

I rather spend that amount of money finding a replacement tool. Steve Job's is right if he think's the time of Flash is over. However I have the feeling its the time of Adobe which is over.

PS: There is another software which makes the same mistake.

The gaming engine Steam also refuses to run on case sensitive filesystems.

But those are the only two I encountered in my life.

No more MobileSubstrate

2010-05-27T21:08:00.006+02:00

My company operates SMS deliver solutions for the massmarket. As part of that it has access to low priced SMS delivery around the Globe. Compared to end user prices its a real bargain. In 2009, we decided to start to offer this to iPhone and iPod Touch users so they can send and also receive SMS at much lower rates than going through their traditional operators. Global.AQ was born.

In its current release it supports sending and receiving SMS. And by receiving I mean receiving from most GSM operators around the world. It also supports free SMS between Global.AQ users.

It seemed to be that we where very successful with this idea. We have over 250'000 subscribers after less than a year of launch. So we should be making a hell of a lot of money and be in the top rankings but we aren't. AppStore shows we have sold the app 185'000 times (this includes the free Lite version). So how comes the difference of 35%? One reason is because people purchase the application once but use it on two devices. That's a legitimate use but it still doesn't explain that much of a difference.

The reason are the jailbreakers. Now I'm not going to rant about jailbreaking. If you want to do it to experiment with your phone, fine. But don't come back whining if you screw up your phone. Happens many many times. When we developed Global.AQ initially we even made sure that jailbroken iPhone users can use Global.AQ in all cases and spent a lot of testing on it. However we did get strange support cases which we had to scratch our head on.

Some examples of what we encountered:

- Login crashes due to the fact that a language setting came back nil. This should never happen as there's always a language configured. I could never figure out how to get into such a situation but it happened to quite some customers. The fix was one line of code. It only happened on jailbroken phones or phones which where updated from a jailbroken to a non jailbroken phone. Never to new phones.

- People complained they couldn't purchase SMS but instead get an error saying something about "sandbox". In fact the in-app-purchase was believing it was running in developer testing mode and failed to work. This was caused by AppSync. AppSync patches MobileInstallation file on iPhone OS 3.x which is needed in order to install .ipa files manually without using iTunes.

- Push notification didn't work because of the certificate being destroyed due to the hacktivation. We made a popup explaining this at start but people still complained about it.

And many other simple crashes which we where always blamed off even though it was simply the phone's software crashing. This was in 90% of the cases due to MobileSubstrate a library which allows tools to redirect system calls and mess with all kinds of things. We have seen screenshots from customers with fonts being replaced, colors being wild etc. If you mess with such things on a system call level, you should not be surprised with frequent crashes, especially not if Apps and the iPhone OS are being updated with new system calls but the tools who patch them are only supported older outdated calls.

Anyway. Be it as it is, jailbreaking per-se is not the problem. Its what people do after that. Install all kind of old crap which modifies about everything but is totally unsupported. So I was feeling like Don Quichote fighting against windmills. You can never predict what people install next.

So the solution was: we can't fix your iPhone if you mess with it.

Anyway, coming back to the discrepancy of subscriptions versus sales. During our research for crashes, we figured out that a lot of users where using a cracked version of Global.AQ. Now out of 100% of users, about 10% have jailbroken iPhones. This would mean a whooping 25% where pirating our software? If you read this you will realize that it can't be true. 25% is too much.

The reason is a different one. Its UDID Faker. This is a tool which allows you to change your iPhone's unique device identity number (UDID). There where people out there who downloaded Global.AQ (cracked or purchased), used up the included SMS and instead of buying additional credits, just made our system fool this is a new device it has never seen before by presenting a new UDID with the help of UDID Faker. Result: a new signup shows up in our log on a magically new device.

My original intention towards pirated apps was like: Let it be. it will make our app popular and it will advertise. When people like it, they will buy it. And the ones who won't buy, they wouldn't buy anyway so the loss is none. But with Global.AQ there's a slight difference. Global.AQ is a piece of software and a service. If someone pirates the software, so be it. I have better things to do than chasing them. But we provide a service. And the service is not free to us. By people presenting a new device every time, they where creating real costs on our end. And those costs had reached the 6 digit euro figures. This is a hell of a lot of cash out of the window for our small company.

So we had to do something about it.

Here's what we did

a) we made sure our server was detecting tampering with the UDID properly log and block it.

b) we took the old version off the store. This means whom ever tried to sign up after that date was using UDID Fixer to get around paying as legitimate users would simply use their existing account if they reinstall Global.AQ. After about a month, we had 18'000 e-mail addresses from users who tried to sign up after the application was taken of the store. So there it was our difference! We have seen people who had signed up over 100 times in the past.

c) we released a new version with iPad support which doesn't run on jailbroken iPads and doesn't run on jailbroken iPhones/iPodTouch's which have MobileSubstrate installed.

The result of this is stunning. We have zero crash reports at Apple now. No more weird crashes (well some where our own faults). No more sandbox errors. Our daily new signup rate went down from around 500 users per day to about 50 per dayon the day we blocked new signups for pirated versions. Our sales figures where however stable.We got tons of bad reviews because of MobileSubstrate not working on the lite version (which is free). But we got good reviews for the Pro version which is paying.

What does it tell us?

1. Whatever you do to make jailbreakers happy, they will still rant. You give them free SMS as a promotion, they want more. If you take away free SMS they will be mad at you. Whatever gift you gave them, it will never be enough. They don't value your work. Otherwise they would not pirate your software. Nobody can tell me they can't afford the 1.99$/1.59€ of the standard version.

2. Legitimate users who paid for the software and got the service are happy. You offer them new features, they clap their hands. They buy more from you. They fill your bank account at the end of the day.

Now as a developer, for which of the two customer groups is it more fun to develop? What will pay off more in the long term? You can bet, it will be 2. Even we now have 10% of the new customers per day compared to before, those 10% represent 100% of the financial earnings. So thats what we are concentrating on.

This experience has shown us that kicking out MobileSubstrate is the right thing to do.

I was very close to even close down jailbreakers totally. But some users have no other choice than to jailbreak to get rid of the sim lock or network lock. That's why we left it in for the iPhone but not for the iPad.

Conclusion: It pays off to not run on jailbroken iPhones with MobileSubstrate. It will give you the ride of the lifetime as your reviews go to hell but at the end of the day, you will not loose anything. You gain more time as you need to spend less time on support. Your customers will be more happy. YOU will be more happy.

Same product, same vendor, different price?

2010-05-27T20:31:00.004+02:00

Today I was trying out the Genius feature of iTunes. It was proposing me a song from YES which I have bought and even somewhere have the vinyl version of. But it was playing an extended version. So I searched for the standard version which was not in my iTunes library. So I searched for it in iTunes Store. And guess what, you can buy it multiple times at different prices. No I'm not talking about the expanded edition. I'm talking about exactly the same song from exactly the same album. Once at Fr. 1.60 and once at Fr. 2.20. Weird.

Now if you look at the two albums:

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/album/city-of-love/id627355?i=627351

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/album/city-of-love/id220159598?i=220159820

You can see that one Album has 9 songs of Fr. 2.20 each but the album all together costs Fr. 13.

And the other album has 9 songs of Fr. 1.60 each but the album all together costs Fr. 14.40 which is exactly the same as 9 x Fr. 1.60

How can the same product from the same shop be sold at two different prices??

The iPad 3G and WiFi hotspots

2010-05-12T17:23:00.003+02:00

Imagine you have a brand new iPad 3G and you are running around airports. Gladly there's WiFi everywhere so you don't have to pay expensive 3G roaming data. Your mobile operator even offers you some WiFi minutes included. So you go and put a dedicated data sim card in your iPad 3G which has corresponding WiFi hotspot options included. Sounds great. In theory yes.

Now what happens. You end up on your favorite airport and you log on to the WiFi. Well to authorize yourself to the WiFi you have to key in your mobile number and you receive an SMS as verification code. But wait, where does it end up on your iPad's sim card? According to delivery reports, the SMS gets send, billed and accepted on the iPad but there's no way to see it. Bummer.

Ok then you take out the SIM card, put it temporarly into your iPhone and authorize that way? Ehm, the iPad has microsim's. If you put it into your larger iPhone slot, you risk of loosing it somewhere inside the case and never get it out. Fail.

Ok then you authorize using your iPhone's built-in sim card. Works, but then your iPhone sim card get's charged instead of the one from the iPad which you just added the "big huge data subscription".

In my case, I had to use my iPhone' sim card already for 400MB abroad last month and that's the biggest subscription you can get. So I wanted to have this solved and called Orange Switzerland. And guess what, their techies where able to solve the issue by allocating a fixed password. Bravo for their flexibility!

Airport Security

2010-04-11T08:44:00.005+02:00

This morning at the Kevlavik Airport in Icleand:

Take your shoes off, take your belt off, take your jacket off, take your laptop out, take your watch off. So far I have seen all of that before and its annoying. But here they enforce all of it and more!

The next thing they asked is to take all charger and cables out of the laptop bag. Now this is too much. My laptop bag is full of such stuff. It contained 2 iPhones (one for use, one for development), so 3 chargers, USB cables, Ethernet cables, Emergency Boot CD's and USB Sticks, Electronic smart pen, ebanking key, car keys etc. A digital nomade travels with a bag full of electronics these days. So I got upset and to not waste precious time, I put my bag upside down and shaked everything out while already starting to get nasty. I don't think they have seen more that way than if the stuff would have remained in the bag.

And because I got mad at them, they of course had to punish me by doing a hand touch scan even though the body scanner did not beep.

Millions of people are passing through Airport Security every day. Millions get punished and harassed through the security checks. Just because some security guy wants to show off his power doesn't make flying more secure. full body scanners don't make flying more secure but it makes flying a lot more hassle for the millions who travel without bombs and just want to go home or on vacation. Is it really worth it?

Flying is always a risk. Driving to the airport however is the much higher risk. Do you have to do a full body scan before taking the train, riding a bicycle or boarding a cruise ship? Frankly airport security got out of its hands. The security check level compared to the benefit for the community of all the fliers is in heavy misbalance. But why does nobody do anything about it? Politics want to do something to prove they are not useless. So the reaction of a caught bomber is "more security more security". However the result is that normal people get punished, the public takes up the bill and the bad guys find easy ways around it. And the politicians think they did something good. Now think again.

We are used to live in free countries. A few years back, taking out the laptop wasn't necessary. A few years back they did not think of full body scanners. And carrying a swiss army knife or scissors for your fingernails where never a problem. Have you ever seen anyone being killed by fingernail scissors? If one can do that, you can kill with a pen too. You can kill with hands. So why not forbid hands on board?

This is just another episode showing how our freedom gets destroyed by politicians. Wake up voters and claim your freedom back. More laws is less freedom. Life is always a risk, laws don't make them go away. Use your brain wisely instead instead of letting idiotic politicians do what they think is good for them.

Enough for today...

Microsoft Pirates...

2010-02-21T10:38:00.004+01:00

For what its worth. I forced myself to install Windows 7 on to my MacBook Pro. Of course into a boot camp partition. But as I like MacOS but once in a while have to use a Windows software, I usually boot it with VMWare. So I went through all the activation rubbish back and forth and so far it looked ok.

Now I'm on travel on a aiprort, fired up VMWare to do something and, there you go. Microsoft distrust its honest customers. The customers who paid like 700US$ for the full blown software. They get punished because they buy their crap.

I should really sue Microsoft for slander! They have still not learned that people can use a Mac and boot from disk or via VMWare (which makes the hardware look to be changed all the time).

Games and privacy

2009-11-27T14:49:00.006+01:00

I was in the mood to play a game. So I downloaded "Little Space Duo" to give it a try. But I never had the chance to run this Game. It was complaining it needs to register itself at launch. Now why? Its the first launch of the game. I didn't even had a chance to enter a registration key or anything. So what is it registering??

Now I use LitteSnitch for a very clear purpose. To know when evil programs violate my privacy and send out data I don't want to be sent out. Well in this game's point of view, LittleSnitch is considered evil as it specifically complains about it. Never the less, even if you allow all on LittleSnitch or disable it temporarly, it didn't work. So I did some research on what this app is really doing and did a wireshark trace with interesting results:

The app does connect to www.macgamestore.com and sends the following HTTP request:

GET /blocked/Little%20Space%20Duo HTTP/1.1
Host: www.macgamestore.com
User-Agent: Little%20Space%20Duo/1.0 CFNetwork/454.5 Darwin/10.2.0 (x86_64) (MacBookPro5%2C3)
Connection: close

So far not much information being revealed except my computer's type and architecture.
The response is however indicating more clearly on to why this doesn't work:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Set-Cookie: bpp=324184256.20480.0000; expires=Fri, 27-Nov-2009 17:41:17 GMT; path=/
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:53:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.3-1ubuntu6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8e
Last-Modified: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:53:37 GMT
ETag: "da4b2b-3c2-92d2da40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 962
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested document was not found on this server.
<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>
Web Server at macgamestore.com
</ADDRESS>
</BODY>
</HTML>



In other words they built a blacklist mechanism into the application and lateron removed the blacklist from the server which makes probably all games complain which have an online connection. The workaround is simply to disable the network interface completely. Then it doesn't complain ;-)

AppStore Dwarfs need glasses...

2009-10-08T21:39:00.003+02:00

AppStore Dwarfs are those magic workers behind the scenes at the AppStore. They do a lot of work simultaneously but they don't pay attention to details. Global.AQ 1.0.2 when submitted to the AppStore was rejected by the dwarfs with the comment that sending SMS doesnt work. It was written in the FAQ, on the App documentation, on the website that you must enter phone numbers in international format. Meaning with + in front. Every european who sends SMS across the border knows that. But the american dwarfs don't so they didn't type it correctly. I've heard another developer with a very similar application had exactly the same problem.

Now Global.AQ 2.0 is ready for prime time. First it was hold up due to "itunes disconnect". Then it took a full 2 weeks to get a reply saying, the app doesn't do what the advertisement text was saying.

They complained it doesn't do incoming SMS. Well they tested on AT&T where in fact it doesn't work yet (but AT&T is working on it, I'm sure it does soon) but it does work on a few selected networks (and many more are coming). But the advertisement text was telling this.

Conclusion: the AppStore Dwarfs must be blind. They never read the text fully.

So we have to wait for another 2 weeks. *Sight*

iTunes Disconnect

2009-09-23T10:17:00.012+02:00

For those of you who develop iPhone / iPodTouch applications, you are probably familiar with iTunesConnect, Apple's tool to upload iPhone applications. I don't often use it because I'm not producing 100's of iPhone applications every months and for the statistics part I use AppViz which summarises daily everything I want to know.
Now yesterday our Global.AQ software was ready to be released in version 2.0 into the wild after having worked many many months on fine tuning thousands of small little bits. So I pressed:

and then I got this:

for over 15 minutes! So I retried and retried and retried. Nothing seemed to work. As it was already late I decided to try again in the early morning, a time where USA usually went to sleep and European business have not started to work yet so the hope was that servers where completely idle. But no luck either. Even at 07:30 CET, it didn't work. Some users on twitter reported similar problems but success by just waiting. So arrived in the office I did start up Safari and just have it wait.

So I did and got this after like 30 minutes I got:

Trying again, I got another 30 minutes later:

Maybe that's the new way of rejecting developers?

PS: Apparently I'm by far not the only one havin

g this problem. 2 days later its still there. Apple apparently is "aware" but they did not answer any of my e-mails.

Today I even had a new variant of error message

Its getting more and more absurd.

24. Sept. 2007 19:45 CET
I think apple has moved the site from a mac mini to an array of XServes. Upload was out of a sudden possible and blasting fast. Global.AQ PRO 2.0 is finally there. Now we only have to pass the review process (another 2 weeks to wait... )

Espresso

2009-08-05T19:58:00.014+02:00

By espresso I don't mean the coffe but the radio emission on swiss radio DRS. In the next emission on ~~friday 5th August 2009~~ Wednesday 12. August 2009, there are talking about data retention and the new rules layed out by the EJPD. The same EJPD which responds today with the picture

Ok now I'm censored from viewing the law pages. Kind of interesting approach.

PS: it looks like everyone was getting this page. It is no longer the case. So it sounds like a stupid mistake of a sysadmin instead of real censorship. But still funny.

Swiss version of the german "Vorratsdatenspeicherung"

2009-07-22T10:13:00.006+02:00

The swiss federal police forces, the department for telecommunications surveillance, has invented new lawmaking. Based on the swiss law of telecommunications, they sent a "Vernehmlassung" to all internet providers in switzerland. "Vernehmlassung" is the discussion about a new law. Its usually a public process where the parliament asks the public if this new intended law is a good idea and what modifications should be made.

This time it was however different. The "Vernemlassung" was about rules which should follow the law. However those "rules" are self made rules by the police which go far and beyond what the law says. It invents interfaces which all internet providers must have so the police can send wiretap orders automated etc. Those orders which by law have to be authorized by a judge, however dont carry the information about which judge has ordered it. So the internet provider is by far not able to verify if this is legal or not. Also it imposes massive costs to the burden of the internet providers which he can not recover. So small ISP's can't complete this and have to go out of business. Furthermore those undemocratic rules have been declared confidential (how can you have a public discussion on something confidential??), are put into force on 1. August and passed through the "Vernemlassung" within 3 weeks at vacation time so nobody takes notice.

We have thus decided to stand up and break the confidentiality and publish our full answer so everybody can see for himself what power the police is trying to achieve.

The full answer is published on http://www.fink.org/ejpd-antwort.pdf

Other related posts:

http://www.woz.ch/artikel/2009/nr29/schweiz/18143.html
http://www.inside-it.ch/frontend/insideit?&site=ii&_d=_article&news.id=18419
http://blog.internet-briefing.ch/2009/07/22/vorratsdatenspeicherung_schweiz/
http://www.ayom.com/topic-30668.html
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Bericht-Schweiz-plant-Echtzeit-Ueberwachung-des-Internetverkehrs-von-Verdaechtigen--/meldung/142082
http://www.statewatch.org/EUFBISW.HTM
http://www.cablemodem.ch/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8463

Amusing iPhone

2009-07-10T15:18:00.004+02:00

Don't ask me how I got to this one. I'm sure I can not repeat it. I can confirm you its not photoshopped..

I tried to call someone and then hanged up. The phone

didn't took the hangup instantly and went black. Somehow I ended up with this after having it on again.

Free SMS for your iPhone

2009-06-29T11:03:00.007+02:00

If you want to send free SMS from your iPhone, simply download this iPhone application and you are all set.

http://www.global.aq/

The internet is not just USA

2009-06-21T10:47:00.004+02:00

The internet once got invented in USA so it started there a lot. But it didn't take too long to spread the world. Today, the internet is the place where international businesses meet and do business together. Globalisation is common. However there are some industries which have completely forgot that.

In my case I was looking for an easy way to process credit cards. I knew the "local guys" who do that do it in a very secure and highly professional way. But they are also very expensive and timeconsuming to get there. So I looked around and found a few who offered a small iPhone App as a credit card terminal. Sounded good for the rare small amount charges I had in mind. The iPhone App was sold or given world wide in the AppStore. But then you need some account with a processor. If you try to sign up there, you get stuck. You cant enter your country (missing field), you must enter a US state. The phone number field didnt accept numbers starting with a +. So I tried entering it "us-centric" in the way an american would dial my number.

Here's what I got:

What can I say, that processor didn't get my busines.
I'm still not amused how many american companies are running around in the internet thinking they could only do valuable business with americans. But they will loose at the end.

Officially Unlocked iPhone 3GS in Switzerland

2009-06-20T08:53:00.002+02:00

Here is the ultimate "how to" to get an unlocked iPhone in Switzerland

Step 1:

Go and buy a new iPhone 3GS in any Apple shop or at any Orange retailer. It is important that Orange is delivering the phone. Phones from Swisscom Mobile will not work. I got mines from Ingenodata in Basel for 999.- CHF (32GB iPhone 3GS model). This is the "full price" model which comes without any contract. (Orange told me full price was 1299.- but who cares. Your price might vary).

Step 2:

Take your purchase invoice and scan it in and e-mail it to info@orange.ch with the comment that you would like your full price iPhone to be unlocked. You should include the IMEI number and Serial number of your phone. You can find it at the back of the box. In my case I never got an answer from Orange that way (even I was promised Instant answer) but they need some proof you paid full price at some point.

Step 3:

Call 0800 700 700, the hotline of Orange and go through the too many menus to mobile phones and customer care. Ask them to unlock your iPhone which you purchased at full price. They might ask you to do what you did in Step 2. Be aware that depending on which person you end up talking to, the answer can be "send in the papers", "give me your IMEI and I activate it", "I'll pass it to the backoffice, they call you back" or "I have no clue, let me ask my collegue". But they all know that it is possible. And if they know how to do it, they can doit very quick.

Step 4:

If you end up on a friendly guy answering with "give me your IMEI and I'll enter it" then be sure your iPhone is connected via USB. Give him your IMEI, let him type it into the computer and once he has done that, launch iTunes. iTunes will ask the Apple activation server and should get the unlock code immediately. You get a message saying something like "Congratulation your phone is now unlocked". Don't believe the employees if they say it takes 2-3 days to be activated. It takes 2-3 days to get someone from Orange to enter the IMEI into the system but once its at Apple's server, its instant.

I've done that with 3 iPhone 3GS I bought this friday morning and even though it took me various calls (mainly because I was in a hurry as I was planning on traveling outside of country the next morning), it was an easy going process.

Note: even though I am a Swisscom Mobile customer since 1994 and I paid my previous iPhone 3G at full price, Swisscom does not want to unlock. This also means that if you buy iPhones from Swisscom, they wont unlock and you're stuck to be Swisscom customer and you can not put a foreign SIM card into the phone if you travel abroad (#1 reason for me to only buy unlocked iPhones). In my eyes this is illegal but I leave it to someone else to go to court for it.

I can only say, Thank you Orange for having this fair option, even though I'm not your subscription customer.

Pricing

2009-06-17T14:20:00.004+02:00

This happened while I tried to buy a train ticket from SBB. Translated it means that there are some delays on the pricing information. Well things can happen. Not a problem by itself.
But then it says that doesn't affect the ability for you to buy a ticket.

In cleartext: You can buy a ticket and they charge your credit-card for the exact amount, but if you don't buy a ticket, they can't tell you what the price would be.

Does that make sense to anyone?

new version of 419 scam

2009-05-28T16:15:00.003+02:00

Nigerian 419 scammers are getting on my nerves. Letters and emails are not good enough anymore. Now they start spamming via Skype.

[col alan] hello
can i have abrief word with you
[Andreas Fink] sure.what's up?
[col alan] im fine
how are u
[Andreas Fink] fine.
[col alan] im colone Alan Metler. us army
no cos for alarm
ok
[Andreas Fink] I see.
what brings me the pleasure to speak to the army?
[col alan] its all business
[Andreas Fink] sure of course
so what business are you in then
[col alan] some days ago my boys found a boy at the un office at iraq
with a consignment box
[Andreas Fink] and?
[col alan] so when i open up the box privately in my office i found out that the box contains 40million us dollars
[Andreas Fink] ah another 419 case...
[col alan] listen to me boy
this is serios
i have interv
the boy
i discover that the little boy father was the former owner of a oil company here in iraq
ok
bye

Will they ever give up?

Anarchy is coming to Europe

2009-05-19T16:56:00.004+02:00

Politics in Germany and all over Europe currently goes mad. Politicians have spotted that the internet can do something they want. The discussion around the proposed law to block child pornography from the net has sparked ideas. The original idea was to block unlawful content. The original intention might be very well positive but the technical idea behind it is just nuts. A wall around a crime so you don't see it, wont stop the crime from happening. And there's plenty of laws to stop the crime already. The police are just too lazy to execute them.

Anyway, this discussion has sparked the idea to use network filters to block a few pages from the net. Now other politicians are getting the idea. Well if you can block child pornography with that, can't we use that tool to block something else too? And voilà the list of "we could stop this and that etc" starts.

http://netzpolitik.org/2009/buendnis-fordert-schaerferes-zensursula-gesetz/

The music and video industry wants to block the pirates of course. You know those few evil entities which ruined their business model. They just forgot to note that the music industry has ruined themselves because their business model just doesn't work in the new world and they didnt adapt.

Anyway, tomorrow it will be a politician who wants to block someone who says something bad him etc.

And there we go. The dangers are

- Censurship first class
- No more freedom of speech
- No more distribution of political power (see HADOPI). A single entity is accusing and judging and punishing. And that entity is not even voted in a democratic way. It is controlled by the music industry in the case of HADOPI in france.
- Small ISP's have to go out of business as they cant afford the investments needed in such net filters.
- The world gets split apart. Freedom of Information destroyed.

And no, this is not happening far away in a dictatorship controlled country. Its not china. Its right here in Europe. In front of your door!

Germans: go talk to your politicians. They have not understood the power of the internet yet. Explain it to them. Show them what they are trying to destroy. And vote for the petitions against censuring. And also consider voting for the petition to allow again to eliminate stupid digital right managements which has always been a pain in the ass in my eyes and its only purpose is to punish the legal user.

French users: go talk to your politicians. Ask them why they allow someone to get disconnected from the internet while still having to pay without a judge ever looking at the case! Its your civil rights which is at stake. You will suffer from it at the end.

Paperium versus LiveScribe. Or how to get rid of customers

2009-04-30T19:41:00.006+02:00

Since a few weeks, I am exploring the technology of handwriting recognising pens. I bought a LiveScribe Pulse . It is capable of recording your writing on special paper and save it on your computer as drawing. It is also able to record voice together with your notes and you can run applications on the pen itself. The exactness of the drawings are stunning and the sample applications clearly show how amazing technology can be. One thing which I however missed was to directly paint on the computer. This would require a live connection between the pen and the computer which is not possible as the pen is connected via a small USB dock.

I've then heard of Paperium one which uses Bluetooth. Paperium is not capable of recording the voice though but I thought I give it a try to see if its maybe of use for another usage case. I received a nice package with two CD's with a printed registration code on them. Sounds like every CD is hand made with a different code. So far so good. Once you install the software (simple drag & drop) and launch it, you get welcomed with:

Please install License File
Select Help -> Install License File... from Menu

Now where is my license file? Why would anyone put "Install license File" under the help menu? Why would I have to worry about that at all? There is no license file on the CD. There's just a code printed on the CD. Some pages deep down in the manual you then find out that you have to enter the registration code on the papirion website together with the serial number of the pen and together with your personal data to get the license file which then enables your application. In other words, the seller restricts you from:
a) using the software with another pen (apparently the pen is a Anoto PC-201 made by Hitachi Maxell)
b) using the pen with another software
c) selling the software to someone else which is your legal right.
d) stay anonymous.

And of course their website doesn't say anything about those restrictions.
And all those limits for a hardware product which was 165 euros.

Apparently the seller is way more concerned about his software being copied than he is worried about being user friendly. And you should be. I have decided to return the Paperium product unused to the seller without ever being able to even try it.

I'll stick with the LiveScribe which I bough from intellishop.ch. Quick delivery (24h!), great product. Absoutely worth the bucks.

Digital Death Penalty and the future of civil rights

2009-04-28T15:40:00.005+02:00

There's quite some shakeup happening in the european lawmaking. A massive attack on civil rights is being pushed through by copyright enforcement entities. Trials such against the Pirate-Bay are showing that the fine line of hosting content or having a link to a content is not understood by low level judges. This would mean google could be sued for anything illegal you could find over it. And there's always something to be found. So google should be banned. Would that make sense to you? To me it doesn't but exactly those rules where used against the Pirate Bay.

But there's more changes happening. The Cybercrime convention as I wrote in my last blog entry is a time bomb which will go off at some point if not acted upon as well.

And the french are trying to run the 3 strikes rule for file sharer. This means if you get cought 3 times doing illegal filesharing, you will be disconnected from the internet. No questions asked.

Now at first this makes some sense. Remove the person the ability to do something illegal. Similar to take someone's weapon away so he can not do harm with it. But there is one thing which is getting forgotten. The internet for a "filesharer" is not just a tool to do filesharing. It has become a necessity of life. You can not send/receive emails without internet. You can in some cases not follow your public rights. In some cases its used for governmental use. So someone who can no longer access the internet is basically loosing a lot of civil rights. Think 20 years down the road. We might vote for presidents over the internet. Someone who had done something stupid in his childhood will still be banned from the net and can not participate. Even today, electronic banking rules everywhere. I predict in 2 years time you might no longer be able to pay your bills over the counter, or at least not without big problems and/or costs.

Now think about the 3 strikes rule again. This filesharer who has violated copyright 3 times when he was maybe 18 years old is now 40. He can not pay any bills electronically, he can not vote, he can not learn. This is what some people call the "Digital Death Penalty".

Is this penalty really the correct way to handle this?

Now to make the case a bit worse, the french president Sarcosy thinks it's ok to block access to "unlawful" internet content without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities. (see http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Campaign-Save_amendment_138_and_Internet_Freedom_from_Council_of_EU).

Now think again. I open a book publishing company tomorrow. And because I hate my neighbor, I will just blindly accusing him, he is sharing copies of my books. No judge needed, he gets blocked. I do this 3 times and he would be punished for life.

Even though this sounds like a far away example, you can imagine what powerful companies like the IFPI would do just because they think you have done something bad to them by pointing a URL to a file hosted by someone else. They could basically make you dissapear from the digital life. In my personal case, this would mean loosing my job 100%, loosing all my income with no ability to ever work inside the business.

Can this be right?

And a last thing is threatening Europe. Privacy in the internet is being melting down. Politicians in germany are using the "child pornography theme" to show that there is a major issue in the internet and that we need mechanisms to ban websites. They believe every ISP must install devices which support blocking websites. While everyone agrees that child pornography is bad and should be punished, some politicians think that blocking the access to the websites solves the problem. But its not. A list of blocked sites from Australia have shown that the sites they have blocked there have been still alive for months. A german newspaper has tried to fix this and has called the ISP in USA to find out what's the status. The site dissapeared within hours. So if its so easy to bring down childporn websites (and believe me the US police will prosecute such cases quickly), why to install all those devices to block access to sites which then can be so easy get around? Just to push to sell the boxes can not be the reason. The real reason is somewhere else. It gives the government the ability to block anything they dont want anyone to see. It gives them a tool to bypass juristical procedures. The example from Australia also has shown that one dentists website was on the blocking list. Why? because someone has hacked his computer. This problem was fixed long ago but he still resided on the blocking list. Why? Because no one told him he was on this list. So he got punished twice. He had to reformat his computer and reinstall everything and then no one could look at his website without him knowing that's the case. And he had no way of appealing to any decision.

What does this say to us? There are industries who do heavyweight lobbying to establish laws which allow to block any content someone likes without even a judge looking at it. Laws to bring down filesharers without a judge looking into it and to permanently ban them. Laws to enforce blocking devices, laws to make sure privacy is no longer existing in the internet so the potentially bad guys can be punished in advance.

In other words, the old fashioned music industry who is loosing its business is trying to convince us that its correct to leave child porn websites alone and instead use censorship to control our universe. They apparently have the money to pay expensive attorneys, to pay politicians and even french presidents to vote in their sense.

Just because they have the wrong business model we should pay this bill?

No. Stand up and make your voice heard.

To remind you what is at stake:

Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Art. 11

the right to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority".

Cybercrime Convention

2009-04-16T15:19:00.003+02:00

Switzerland has signed the cybercrime convention. Now its time to put it into applicable law. But this seems to be very tricky. Several IT and ISP's and telecommunications companies are objecting those changes for a good reason.

The issue is the new rule about hacking tools (see previous posts).

I have uploaded our detailed answer (in german) on to
http://www.bebbicell.ch/cyber-crime-convention-response.pdf

Apple's view of the world

2009-03-18T01:10:00.004+01:00

Here's Apple's view of the world. They are so proud that they have 80 countries offering the iPhone that they painted the world red. The map above however is missing Greenland and Iceland. It simply doesn't look that nice to have two big white spots in the middle of USA and Europe showing that Apple doesn't have world domination yet.

CyberCrime and the wrong way to bring it down

2009-03-17T09:31:00.004+01:00

The swiss federal adminsitration wants to change the law about cyber crime.

See also:

http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/gg/pc/pendent.html#EJPD
(or especially Genehmigung und Umsetzung des Übereinkommens des Europarates über die Cyberkriminalität )

I think this new proposed law includes some dynamite in the details

First of all: I think its time for the government to face the fact that there are many open ends (like the discussion we had with the order from Canton de Vaud). My biggest issue with facing CyberCrime is however that not the law is the issue but the ability of the police force to enforce the law. Mainly due to lack of knowledge and probably financial resources. CyberCrime is happening every day and is happening Quick. The processes on police work where maybe accurate 1960 but lack the needed speed of todays events. I had two incidents in my own company where it has clearly shown that the police has not the slightest clue what's happening on the internet, besides how to fix the issue. Costed me a hell of a lot of money at the end even it was a crystal clear case for me (as a techie...). But I must admit its not the fault of the law, its the fault of the execution of the law and the financial resources needed to follow those cases. That's the real problem. If it takes 6 months to get police help from another country, it will take 6 months to stop the spammer. Well the spammer is changing its servers daily. So what does that help? Anyway...

The law above however has a section which I think is dangerous and could affect our work:

Das materielle Strafrecht mit seinen am 1. Januar 1995 in Kraft getretenen Bestim-
mungen im Bereich "Computerstrafrecht" vermag den Erfordernissen der Konventi-
on über weite Strecken zu genügen. Anpassungsbedarf ergibt sich bezüglich des
Straftatbestandes des unbefugten Eindringens in ein Datenverarbeitungssystem (Art.
143bis des Strafgesetzbuches, sog. "Hacking"-Tatbestand). Hier wird vorgeschlagen,
eine Vorverlagerung der Strafbarkeit vorzunehmen: Strafbar soll sich auch machen,
wer Programme oder Daten zugänglich macht im Wissen, dass diese für das illegale
Eindringen in ein Computersystem verwendet werden sollen. Daneben wird, ausser-
halb der Erfordernisse gemäss Konvention, vorgeschlagen, das durch die Lehre
verbreitet kritisierte Merkmal der fehlenden Bereicherungsabsicht in Artikel 143bis
StGB zu streichen.

Now what does that mean? It is basically what the germans have done under the term "Hackerparagraph". It disallows software which could potentially be used for hacking to be distributed. The result of this was for example that in germany the WiFi tools to verify your WiFi security dissapeared. Why? because someone could use it for hacking. If you think this a bit further, you could use a C compiler to write a hacker tool, so the compiler could be considered a tool to do hacking and we all very well know know someone can write hacking tools in C. So to bring this ad absurdum, it could theoretically forbid us to distribute a C compiler. Or think about Linux with all the built in tools.

Of course this is a bit far reached but there are many gray zones in between. For example I use Wireshark, a great open source packet analyzer for my daily work because I develop network protocols. So I use it to verify my own written network protocols for accuracy or use it for troubleshooting on other networks. Of course someone could use this for hacking to listen to passwords in cleartext (for example from old POP3 accounts). So if the new law passes and we publish a wireshark version on our server, we become criminal?

The result will be that security tools to verify your security will be forbidden. You will not be able to verify if your machine is crackable or not. The real bad boys out there (and I'm not saying a hacker is a bad boy by definition because most are honest and more in the area of security researcher than anything else) will not give a dam if they are allowed to distribute this hacking software (they just use it anyway) because they per definition want to commit crime. So they will get hold of that software and just use it. And because no one was able to verify if POP3 cleartext passwords are floating on your LAN, they will find it out for you but they will not help you to make your computer network a more secure world, they will simply abuse it to send spam, to take money from your bank account or whatever they want.

So the normal end user is getting tools removed to help fight crime. This is helping the bad boys instead of keeping them out. Its like saying, you are not allowed to encrypt to protect your privacy simply because some bad boys encrypt to protect their evil plans.

The report from the EJPD was clearly written by lawyers, people who do not understand the technological impact of such laws. And thats why I think its pretty dangerous.

I think we should respond to this proposal to keep above paragraph out of the law. Otherwise we wouldn't even be able to help the police if they are investigating because the tools to do this are also used by hackers sometimes.

Here is what I got first from EJPD.

----------- snip ----------
Ihre Kommentare sind willkommen. Sie finden die Unterlagen unter http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/gg/pc/pendent.html#EJPD (Geschäfte EJPD: Cybercrime). Das Verfahren läuft bis 30. Juni 2009.

----------- snip ----------

There's also contact details on that URL there.

So feel free to make your voice heard or remain silent forever.

Exclusive fonts...

2009-01-10T14:50:00.003+01:00

Printing twice in a Windows app revealed above error message. It apparently has exclusive rights about the font somehow. Is it trying to modify it on the fly maybe?

Virtually inexistant support

2009-01-05T23:43:00.012+01:00

Edit: this problem has been fixed in VMWare 2.0.2. Now even 10.6 beta boots.

I own VMWare fusion 2.0.1. I use it on a MacOS X Server (XServe) to sometimes run Windows XP if I have to. But I also use it to try new stuff out in a "protected" environment. So I have a MacOS X Server instance running inside a VMWare Fusion virtual instance. I recently updated VMWare to 2.0.1 and MacOS X to 10.5.6. VMWare tells me that I should update VMWare tools inside the virtual machine for optimal performance. So I did. This is a BAD IDEA. MacOS X Server guest operating system didn't boot anymore after that.

So I reinstalled MacOS X Server 10.5.1 from CD, updated all the Apple updates to 10.5.6 again and VMWare tools again. Same problem. Locked up totally.

Clearly an issue for VMWare's support as its smells like a BIG FAT BUG.

So go to the website, click on support, you end up searching a database of similar cases. MacOS X Server is not found anywhere in there. So continue to register a support case. But oh-oh, you only get free support for 30 days. Well, ok I got to spend a few bucks. But no I can't. You try to log into the store and you get PAGE NOT FOUND. Sending a "comment" to the website triggers an email back after 30 minutes with the correct URL. Great now I'm able to waste my money in the shop and get a serial number for support. What now?

The confirming mail says you should register your product. So you click on it and what you get? Product registered. That's it. Now you log into support again and you get:

Well after quitting and restarting the webbrowser or force reload you can get past this. Now then you see I have an expired license. No mentioning of my registered pay per incident item. so what now? Well there is a item saying in emergency cases call this number. As this is my very last option, I call long distance across the atlantic.

"Welcome to VMware blabla, for VMWare Fusion, press #". I press #. "For VMWare Fusion issues please go to www.vmware.com .....". Great. Infinite loop.

Calling in again with NO OPTIONS selected. I end up on a human. GREAT. He can find my support license number but it says the license number I bought TODAY is already expired. He can not open a case due to that and wants to pass me on to the Licensing department to fix this. I get transferred and the call gets dropped.

I call again, "Welcome to VMware blabla, for VMWare Fusion, press #"... for Licensing issues and other stuff press 1. So I end up on another person. "Ah Fusion, please wait"... "Welcome to VMware blabla, for VMWare Fusion, press #". but now there's no option to wait. After 30 seconds "Please make a selection NOW"... and then "Welcome to VMware blabla, for VMWare Fusion, press #".

I call again and I end up on the same techie. He now figured out how to file my one time to support number and directs me through the website (including "not found" and all the issues again) I end up on a page to now file my support issues in a webform. He can not help me by phone. Its web / email support only (so why pay the bucks for commercial support if you dont even get phone support, but that's another story). So I successfully filed a request. HURRAY.

He also suggested to use VMWare Community. And there's an option from the support request page to go there so I do. I have to register AGAIN, now for the VMWare community (others call it forum but what the heck). Of course my usual username is taken and the webform only says that it can not register and brabbles some ununderstandable error. After picking another username I ended up on the forum. So I want to do a new post. Then I get this:

Going to the main page and go on to the community tab reveals this:

So I click on LOGIN (top left or the big fat button in the middle). This brings you to this page:

Fun, isn't it.

Getting nowhere, I decided to add those screenshoots to the support incident. But what do I get there:

and I also realized my phone number has changed:

To recap:
I spent about 1 hour of work, 29$ in wasted incident support, 3 international calls on a simple issue I'm sure the right techie could answer or fix in 1 minute.
The community can't help because you are not able to log in, the stuff is so carefully hidden in the website that no one can find it.

And after all this: my problem is still not fixed.

Well what options do we have? Unfortunately the competitor Parallels is worse. My Parallels Server actually freezes and after 2 months waiting, I have given up on them.

Conclusion: don't try to run virtualisation whatsoever on MacOS X on a server. Just don't even try. Boot camp is the only way (now I could start writing about 2h on how many countless hours it took me to get Vista running properly on my MacBook pro but I save this for another time).

Windows Alert

2009-01-01T18:08:00.004+01:00

What kind of question is this?? Yes I want to copy or Yes I want to move?
I have choice A or B but my options are yes or no...

Happened under Windows XP when moving a file from a ZIP to the desktop

odd laptop hardware

2008-12-01T13:43:00.003+01:00

Apple hardware, otherwise perfect, was doing something weird to me a few days ago.
See for yourself.

New war? UK in Panic

2008-10-10T10:31:00.003+02:00

Ok, UK is mad at iceland because lots of savings where put into icelandic banks and now have vanished. However, as it is always the case with investments: know your risks before you invest. The UK authorities apparently didn't read the fineprint.

But is this the right reason to start a war?
UK is now using the terror law as a tool for revenge?

Trouble and panic in Iceland.

2008-10-10T09:09:00.006+02:00

I have a big telecom's project in Iceland since a year. Iceland is a beautiful and amazing country. But it is in big trouble one might think. The 4 biggest icelandic banks have been taken over by the government over night. Icelandic companies of the finance sector are in big trouble due to that and the sector has big issues too.

Everyone thinks I must be mad to be in telecoms and into Iceland at this time. The reality is different. What's happening currently in the icelandic market is pure panic. Ok its for real that some people have lost or are going to loose big money or already have lost it. But does that have to do anything with my plans? It doesn't. It means my competitors get into trouble. They are already cutting jobs big time. It means a lot of people revise their budgets and will be looking for better deals to save. The result of this is that we might even get more customers than we thought. It means there might even be one or two competitors less. Have we lost money so far? No. As we only invested in our own infrastructure and didn't play games on the financial market, we have lost nothing. Our own infrastructure is still worth the same as before. Zero value lost. So why panic?

Quintessence: Generalizing trouble in panic situations is bad. One guy's trouble is the other guy's opportunity. Trouble and panic as it happens right now is just shifting money around quickly. Some will loose and some will win. And this time we won't bee on the loosing side.

NDA dropped

2008-10-01T18:34:00.001+02:00

Apple has finally dropped the NDA for iPhone development!
Its abut time developers can now talk freely between them!

Long live free speech...

Swiss German is not German

2008-09-17T18:09:00.003+02:00

Writing Swiss German on a German keyboard on the iPhone is messy. Autocorrection gets into the way constantly. There is a property which allows you to switch autocorrection off or on but Apple simply doesn't show this switch if you choose german language (or its not offered preinstalled on the models sold here). In other words, you must jailbreak your phone to be able to switch off autocorrection by adding one single line into a .plist file.

Its so easy for apple to fix this but they did not think someone in Switzerland might want to write english,german,italian, swissgerman, french etc. on the same phone. While switching between german and english keyboard is ok to switch autocorrection to the corresponding language, when it comes to swiss german, it just messes up your text totally. And then there are other people from other countries living here who want to write their native language for which the iPhone might not have support for. Well autocorrection makes it very difficult, I can tell you.

I reported this problem to Apple back in August already as Bug #6162063 and it got marked as duplicate of Bug #6182799. However it did not get fixed in 2.1 firmware.

Now I realize I'm not the only one. There is a large protest against autocorrection in switzerland and ~~4'600~~ 7'000 end users have already signed a petition against autocorrection not being able to be disabled! This is probably about 60% of the sold iPhone 3G owners (given after 1 year of iPhone "classic" there where about 15'0000-20'000 iPhones in the market in Switzerland)

So its time for Apple to THINK DIFFERENT....

http://please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com/

QTH

2008-09-17T09:43:00.003+02:00

My second iPhone application is now under review.

QTH is an application useful for amateur radio operators. It shows you your current location in longitude/latitude and in QTH locator.

For those non radio amateurs among you, QTH is a shortcut used in morse code and stands for "My location is...". The QTH locator (sometimes referred to Maidenhead locator) is cutting the earth into squares. It is used in VHF contesting a lot to calculate the distance of the connections.

Karl's blog

2008-09-16T16:32:00.002+02:00

Karl Kraft has written an excellent blogpost about his experience developing for the iPhone.
You might want to read his post here:

http://www.karlkraft.com/index.php/2008/09/12/hazmat-a-development-story/

SysInfo

2008-09-11T10:16:00.011+02:00

My first iPhone App is done. Its not rocket science but its a tiny useful application which gives you all kinds of information about your system such as kernel version, IP addresses, Model number etc. I have more applications in the pipeline but this one is the first one to finish and make it to the AppStore. It's now available in the AppStore.

Apple slavery (also known as NDA) [# 6192802]

2008-09-03T15:48:00.004+02:00

Others have complained about the Apple iPhone Developer NDA. I can only double back that opinion. I followed discussions why the NDA has not been lifted by now.

Some people say because of patents because things under NDA are not considered published.

If you take a look at the NDA though, you'll see that Apple not only forbids the use of private frameworks, but any unpublished API.

So if the NDA forbids use of any unpublished API and everything given out is considered not published, the conclusion is: Whatever you build your application on, is violating Apple's NDA in some argueable sense. In other words, whatever you do, Apple has a hook to kick you out of the door if they want to and if you're out, you will never come back. Apple has the right to do anything with you.

I call this a modern version of slavery.

SIM Locks the Second

2008-08-25T20:51:00.003+02:00

The Swiss TV magazine "Kassensturz" has picked up the SIMLock story.

Also, iPhones from italy are 569 € which corresponds to 922 CHF (not even taking off the more expensive italian VAT). So another proof the 1199.- CHF price is a real rip off.

The video is here: http://feeds.sf.tv/~r/podcast/kassensturz/~3/375512177/kassensturz_20080826_211031_526k.m4v

Programmers are artists...

2008-08-15T10:39:00.004+02:00

If you use iTunes and browse through iPhone/iPodTouch Applications, you will realize what Apple did. They used their music store, renamed it to App Store.

You can see this if you go into the AppStore and then click browse on the top right.
You will end up in a nicely structured window with applications listed. The odd thing is simply the application have a length, artist,album, genre etc.

This implies programmers are artists.

Thank you Apple!

(radar: 6152083)

Roaming Madness (Problem ID: 6138068)

2008-08-09T19:04:00.006+02:00

Living in Basel, Switzerland, attached to France and Germany, I can pick up many GSM networks. In my living room I picked up 9 signals. I'm sure from the roof I can pick up all of them.

I repeated the exercise what drove me mad during my vacation. Here's how I killed my iPhone's signal completely (until reboot).

1. I go into carrier preferences and selected manually E-Plus as carrier. Swisscom has roaming with them so it should work just fine.

2. After a while, I got no change into the carrier at the top left. So I go into carrier preferences again. Now I get welcomed with a popup saying "Network connection lost". Well not surprising, the signal might not be strong enough. As I'm already in the preferences I go back out and back in. Now it says it can not load my network list. This is like that until I reboot.

3. Exercise #2. I select "sunrise 3G" as a carrier. Well the iPhone lets me do that. I am 100% sure, Sunrise does NOT have roaming with Swisscom. But the iPhone lets me select it ? Yes. I got the checkmark next to it. So I went back out and everything looked fine. It still showed swisscom and some bars at the top left. Suspicious as I am
I wanted to see if it auto reselected my home carrier. So I went into carrier preferences again and voila. it switches to "No service". So far so good but now it says "Searching...." and no list appears. Never. You can wait for hours it will stay empty. The only way to get your phone back is to reboot it.

It seems to be that Apple has not well tested roaming. In USA it only works on AT&T. You can drive 5'000 miles and you will still have AT&T coverage or no coverage anyway. So why care about roaming?

In Europe we use roaming (and we get ripped of by the carriers for it). And due to SIM lock, Apple doesn't help the budget neither. In my case I can walk 10 minutes and I'm in another country (France). I can walk another 10 minutes and I'm again another country (Germany) again. At my home I can pick up signals of 8 carriers from 3 countries on which I can roam on all of them except the other carriers of Switzerland.

Coming back to my vacation spot.
There I had 4 carriers I could select from:

TDC
Telia
Sonofon
3DK

TDC had a strong signal. Telia a "ok" signal and Sonofon I have not seen at my vacation house and 3DK only very weak on the balcony. So I called swisscom support line asking which carrier would be best for my Laptop's 3G card (Novatel XU870). The answer was I should choose TDC as they have 3G roaming with them whereas they don't have 3G roaming with Telia despite Telia having 3G. The result was that I got GPRS speed. It was not good enough to use it for browsing or reading email even. While trying to do a wiretransfer on e-banking, I timed out on the login screen as the security key changes every minute or so and it took longer to transmit it so it was always expired. Telia supported EDGE in that region. However, my 3G card from Novatel had switched me back to TDC all the time. And there is no option to change the carrier. Apple has simply not thought of anyone wanting to do that. On the iPhone where I could at least read my mail, I had similar problems due to the experiences of switching carriers as explained above. Driving to the next village, dropped the signal for a minute or so and the guesswork started again. After a week, I fixed the problem for the laptop by manually changing the connection scripts to force a selection of carriers (using AT+COPS=...).

Its a shame a world wide company like Apple has never thought through what roaming means to non americans. I guess they have a learning curve on the mobile side.

But lets not give up hope yet and give them a chance to fix it. They fixed another problem I reported (one I'm not allowed to tell you due to NDA madness) even though they didn't told me its fixed in that new release. Could have saved me some hours of work. But what the heck.

SIM Locks...

2008-08-07T16:27:00.006+02:00

Finally I was able to get an iPhone 3G. I bought it from Manor.
According to toppreise.ch, you can buy the 16GB model it either with Swisscom prepaid SIM for 619.- or with Orange prepaid SIM for 899.-. But as I travel often and want to use my own network's SIM (which doesn't have roaming with neither yet), I bought the "APPLE iPhone 3G 16.0GB ohne Vertrag" (means without contract) for whooping 1199.- CHF (for your foreigners out there, 1 CHF is approx 1 USD). So I paid 580.- more so I have an universal iPhone and no prepaid SIM with it.

But what did I got? A SIM locked iPhone! So why did I pay 580.- more? Because they removed the prepaid sim from the bundle?

A total rip off.

As the Manor offering at toppreise.ch has been removed in the meantime, here some screenshoots of what it was before.
Product comparision
Product detail
Product description

IPv6.... the future or the past...?

2008-07-11T23:02:00.003+02:00

RIPE (The europen internet registry) says:
With approximately 85% of all available IPv4 Internet addresses already in use by May 2008, experts predict that the remaining stock of unallocated IPv4 addresses will be consumed by around 2011. This may have an impact on new Internet users and users of Internet devices that are not IPv6 enabled. In contrast, the pool of available IPv6 numbers will exceed 340 billion billion billion.

ITU invites to a workshop on IPv6:
The main purpose of this workshop is to raise awareness of the importance and opportunities of the deployment of IPv6...

Apple has support for IPv6 in MacOS X since a long time.

BUT: iPhone has no IPv6 anymore.

Am I missing something?

App Store starts

2008-07-11T10:23:00.004+02:00

AppStore has started. Tons of US-Apps. Of course they had 3 months more to prepare compared to folks on this side of the ocean. But there's more to it.

More information about Enterprise Distribution will be available soon.

So we can continue to go fishing...

But hey it ain't so bad. Almost no one gets iPhone 3G anyway as the supply is so short :-)

SIM Lock confirmed.

2008-07-03T22:24:00.000+02:00

Dear Mr. Abonde
Thank you for your email. We are happy to reply to your query.
The new iPhone mobiles (prepaid-Easy & postpaid) will be SIM-locked for 24 months. Swisscom is not allowed to sell unlocked iPhones. The SIM-lock is a component of the agreement of Swisscom & Apple. So it will be not possible to use it with SIM Cards from other providers.

So if you travel often, don't buy an iPhone DONT BUY.
(or at least not in Switzerland).

iPhone 3G unlocked

2008-06-27T07:36:00.002+02:00

According to http://www.dataquest.ch/iphone.html, the iPhone will be sold with or without a subscription in Switzerland.

That's good news. My guess is that Apple did not have a choice than to offer the iPhone unlocked in many countries as otherwise the carriers wouldn't take it.

So the wait is over soon.

The 3G iPhone is here

2008-06-09T21:17:00.003+02:00

Apple at WWDC 2008 now announced the widely expected 3G version of the iPhone.
Now everyone says "hurray". Well not really. There are essential things still wrong.

- 3G support is nice but its lacking the Video Call feature.
- It's apparently still locked to operators so you can't travel to another country and put a prepaid SIM in (to be verified shortly).

At least they got the price right this time. And added GPS is nice too. So its a trade off. For me, locking myself to one operator is a no go. I'm operating with lots of SIM cards all the time so I can't use just one. It would ruin all my travel budgets.

Relief

2008-06-04T10:51:00.002+02:00

Apple starts giving out SDK keys. After 3 months of waiting, finally there's movement.
I have not got mine yet though but I was allowed to pay for it.

WWDC 2008 Speculations

2008-05-23T20:45:00.010+02:00

WWDC is coming up. Everyone expects a 3G iPhone to come up and so far this seems to be a very realistic guess (but with Apple you can never be sure). Some people try to abuse this hype by publishing non existing future products for a not yet existing 3G iPhone. Another funny speculation is a 3G iPhone with 42Mbps download speed. As nice as so much speed sounds, it's useless for such a device. First: no network supports it today. Second: the CPU can't cope with so much speed (and if it would it would zap the battery in 10 minutes). Third: where you want to put so much data away? Thats 5.2MBytes per second. You want full HD resolution on your iPhone?Well your screen can't cope with that. And it takes exactly 50 seconds to fill up your 16GB of storage. And I still need to see that fast and affordable flash chips. But I'm sure this one will make it to many newspapers as it sounds so nice. So speculations over speculations and Apple masters it again to make everyone very eager to see what's now the real truth behind why I still have to wait for my SDK developer key. Hopefully they don't just come up with a new MacPro II. Well why not as long as there is "one more thing....".

See you at WWDC.

There's hope for europe

2008-05-05T20:40:00.002+02:00

Given Apple Insider says some europeans got their iPhone SDK keys now
(see http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/05/phone_sdk_goes_international_t_mobile_on_3g_iphone_in_austria.html)

it seems to be there's hope for the iPhone cracks out there in the 60% hacked market share land.
However the odds are not much better. Having enrolled in the very first hours of the iPhone SDK being available to download (yeah you where able to download 2GB files but you wheren't able to run applications on your 999 € phone with it...), I'm still locked in "You will receive notification of your enrollment status. Enrollment ID: ....". Apparently it is being used to promote WWDC 2008 as everyone hopes to see the 3G version there. Its pure speculation if the 3G version of a iPhone will be announced at WWDC 2008 but it's pretty realistic timing for a 3G version. Could also hold up Apple to release the SDK to a larger public because it could lead to "hints" apple doesn't want to give (but as the US developers are already good in leaking such information, who cares. Everyone knows anyhow, even before its released :-O).

So. time for me to print my t-shirts and check out flights to San Francisco. And to check out who to meet from Apple. Unfortunately there's no company directory so its VERY hard to find the right people. But let's not give up. Apple has been a great company in the past and I'm sure it want to be a great company in the future.

iPhone SDK take 2

2008-03-28T17:25:00.007+01:00

Now Apple has posted a new verison of the SDK. So you could think things do improve.
You are wrong. You can't even compile code anymore without having a key.

So nice of Apple locking us out even more. So we can stare once more to the screen saying:

You will receive notification of your enrollment status. Enrollment
ID: YD8P2E58P9

Bummer. I'm sure Bugreport ~~#5827950~~ #5787381 ~~will~~ has been be closed ~~soon under the category "non americans are potential terrorists. They could invade our iPhones".~~ as duplicate. So no more tracking of the issue *sight*

Apple price politics

2008-03-17T16:17:00.005+01:00

Apple no longer charges on a world wide price. Europeans are by far more charged for the same items as Americans.

Today I compared prices of the iPod touch. And they are wooping 51% to 76% more expensive
in Switzerland compared to the US price. Of course you should remove the 7.6% swiss VAT from this and what it would cost to ship it. But at 60% higher prices, it's a public offense to the loyal swiss market.

Hopefully people will react accordingly.

PS: part of the price increase might be caused by the swiss agency of author rights (Suisa) which pushed through a cost on a MP3 player. Its legal to download MP3's. So its legal to have them on your iPod but you are punished by a increased buying price. Its even that odd that its per Megabyte and its different if its flash or HD. A odd story by itself. But I leave it to the judges to use common sense to fix this one day.

When comparing to UK or germany prices, they where stilll 10-25% higher than in USA for the iPod touch. So its not THAT bad but still bad.

iPhone SDK nonsense

2008-03-16T11:21:00.002+01:00

Dear Reader,

I've followed the iPhone SDK launch and I can only shake my head. So I decided to let free my thoughts about it.

Apple originally didn't wanted to have 3rd party Apps on the iPhone. Web 2.0 is all what you get. Bullshit said the developer community. The iPhone was hacked and thousands of more or less useful app's where created over night.

Well this is interesting as an experiment but for commercial developer use this is not solid ground because you can not safely assume everyone has a jailbreaked iPhone. At least it had pushed Apple to release an official SDK.

We have awaited the offical SDK with tension. Our goal was to solve the most burning problems of the iPhone in the european market which Apple has simply forgot to solve because they have no clue how advanced Europe is in using mobile telephony. We have identified the following hot spots:

- MMS
- Bluetooth modem
- Bluetooth filetransfer (OBEX)
- Bluetooth sync
- Accessing or importing adressbook from SIM card
- SCTP Support for applications.

While investigating those solutions we have faced the wall at all times.

1. You can build your application but you cant run it on the iPhone. I have nowhere seen how you get this "special" key and neither how you get and install it. A simple error -34 is all you are going to see.

2. A lot of things use reuseable code. Thats what dynamic libraries are there for. The SDK can not build any shared libraries. Ok you can copy all code into the application but thats not the idea. Our WAP stack project is killed because of this.

3. Background daemons are not permitted. So no daemon who listens to bluetooth filetransfers, synch's or functions as a modem. Bluetooth projects are killed because of this.

4. Kernel extensions are not permitted. This kills SCTP. A fantastic network protocol which would be perfect to be used on the iPhone. SCTP supports seamless handover between multiple IP connections. So you could start downloading stuff on WLAN and continue to do so over EDGE/GPRS without any interruption on application level. Linux has it, Solaris has it, HP Unix has it, Windows has it. MacOS X hasn't. There's a solution for desktop MacOS X but its kernel dependent as it has to use an unsupported API to install a protocol above IP (next to UDP and TCP). Apple has told me they will support it. Maybe in 10.4.8 but maybe only in 10.5. Well we are at 10.5.2 now and there is still no corresponding API which was promised at WWDC 2004, 2005 and WWDC 2006.

5. There is no API to work with SMS This means you can not receive SMS to be dealt with inside an application. So no WAP push or MMS notification can be handled! MMS project killed. Chess via SMS killed.

6. The sandbox does disallow us from using any hardware directly. So importing from the SIM card? Don't even think about it. Project killed.

Now what does this mean? My project for the 6 "most wanted features" have been killed. So I can start developing another Tetris and stay in line with 192764652 other developers doing the same. And of course i have to sell it at the same place as the others. How can a buyer decide which tetris to take? Well it means Apple will be the judge at the end of who gets business and who doesn't.

I consider the requirement to sell via iTunes store as pure offense. There are many european countries who dont evne have a iTunes store yet. There are most european iTunes store who don't have Videos or TV offers. It will take dozens of years until there will be a iTunes store in every european country being able to sell applications.

Also there's lots of other places people look for apps. Handango, Kagi or similar platforms. So why should I give 30% of my revenue to Apple so I'm locked into their platform where no one looks and my market is limited?

And while we talk about the market: If i look how many iPhones have been sold in Germany and compare the population of Germany to Switzerland, it would mean in the first 1-2 months there would be about 7000 iPhones sold if its launched in Switzerland one day. If I compare this figure to the information of Swisscom moble saying that they have 15'000 subscribers using an iPhone in their network, I must say that the market of the "official" iPhones will be the minority for a long time.

My personal opinion is the marketing manager for the iPhone should get kicked. He has no idea on how Europe works in regards to mobile phones. Adopting US views don't work (otherwise there should be 10x more iPhones sold in Germany and UK). Europeans are by far advanced and used to new mobile technologies. But that guy just hasn't got taken a look outside the borders.

Apple should come back to its roots and think of what made Apple big. It was the developers who made useful applications for their hardware. Today those developers are being treated like kids. The message Apple gives them is "Go play in the sandbox" (and pay Apple a fortune for the permission to do so).

I can only say, don't allow this to happen to you and start protesting.

Especially if you are not living in USA, you get kicked your ass many times. European developers pay 50% more for being a member of the ADC! Even ADC Premium members who pay a very high price don't get accepted by the iPhone SDK Developer program. Europeans get iPhones half a year later (UK, Germany, France), or not at all (all remaning countries). They don't get any useable SDK they could start developing. iTunes stores don't exist in some european countries.

There is only one way Apple will change its mind to abandon the closed community approach: LET THEM KNOW what kind of nonsense they produce. You can do that by:

1. Create bugreports / feature requests (http://bugreporter.apple.com) making it clear what you want from Apple. Make sure how you feel being put into a sandbox. Make sure you keep copies of the bugreports. Apple is known to delete them silently or make it invisible. ( If this happens, make sure they know you are upset about that. Also a very doubtful practice by Apple.

2. Swamp Apple Developer Technical Support with requests of missing SDK features. Ask them why europeans have no access to the required keys of the SDK. You won't get any answer but at least it keeps them busy thinking on what they could do wrong.

3. Print T-Shirts for WWDC 2008 with a good slogan like:

"Free Europe from Apple's slavery".
"Thank you Steve for for treating europe like shit"
"I'm Apple second class developer (non US) but I still write better code than you!"
"Free the iPhone"
"No censorship for iPhone Appications".

(who has better ideas?)

4. And if that all doesn't work there's two other alternatives.

- ignore the SDK and write no applications for the iPhone
- ignore the SKD and write App's for jailbreaked iPhones (Thats soon the bigger market anyway)

Bottom line:

Let Apple know what kind of nonse they have produced!