TidBITS Issue #914

QuickTime 7.4.1 Fixes Zero-Day Vulnerability

by Rich Mogull

Apple releases a critical security update for a month-old vulnerability in QuickTime for OS X and Windows.Show full article

Home Macs | 05 Feb 2008 | Listen

iPhoto 7.1.2 Blocks Security Vulnerability

Apple has released a minor update to iPhoto that probably fixes some bugs, but the only detail that the company is willing to acknowledge is the fixing of a security vulnerability.Show full article

Home Macs | 07 Feb 2008 | Listen

iPhoto Print Products Available in Australia and New Zealand

Six years after releasing iPhoto, Apple has finally made it possible for users in Australia and New Zealand to purchase books, cards, calendars, and prints.Show full article

iPhone iPad iPod | 05 Feb 2008 | Listen

O2 Tweaks UK Monthly iPhone Plans

Responding to customer and media complaints, O2 has added minutes and text messages to its UK iPhone plans in some cases and reduced the overall cost in others.Show full article

In response to complaints from customers and the media, UK iPhone carrier O2 announced that it would be upgrading iPhone plans with more minutes and text messages for less money. Those on the £35 per month plan will now receive 600 minutes and 500 text messages, up from 200 minutes and 200 text messages. Those who were paying £45 per month get 1,200 minutes per month and 500 text messages, and people on the £55 per month plan will simply pay £45. All UK customers will be switched automatically to the new plans by mid-March; O2 says it will notify customers by text message when the switch is complete. There's also a new £75 plan that offers 3,000 minutes and 500 text messages. (For those in the United States, the exchange rate is currently about $2 to £1, so you can double O2's prices to see how they compare to AT&T's.)

All plans come with unlimited data, though that's subject to O2's excessive use policy, which they have now stated explicitly ("iPhone Launch Set for UK and Germany, with Murky Data Plan," 2007-09-20). It reads:

Your O2 tariff for iPhone allows you unlimited use of O2 UK's EDGE/GPRS networks and The Cloud's UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use, email and Visual Voicemail (VVM) on your iPhone only.

All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes. You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio/video content, enable Voice over Internet (VoIP), P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other customers of O2 or The Cloud.

If O2 reasonably suspect you are not acting in accordance with this policy O2 reserves the right to impose further charges or disconnect your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

O2 is on top of the release of the new 16 GB iPhone, providing instructions for moving from an older iPhone to a new one and allowing customers to buy one and use it for the remainder of their existing contract, rather than requiring a new contract.

Tech News | 09 Feb 2008 | Listen

Scan Mac News Headlines at Alltop

For a quick overview of what's happening in the Mac world, check out the Mac page at Alltop, Guy Kawasaki's new site.Show full article

Blog Post | 11 Feb 2008 | Print

Please Welcome Eliana Wren Carlson

by Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson is thrilled to announce the birth of his daughter, Eliana Wren Carlson!Show full article

Media Creation | 03 Feb 2008 | Print

DealBITS Discount: Save 20% on Sound Studio 3

If you didn't win a copy of Sound Studio 3 in last week's DealBITS drawing, you can still pick up a copy at 20 percent off... until 20-Feb-08.Show full article

Media Creation | 08 Jan 2008 | Listen

Tips for Better iPhoto Cards

If you've been frustrated by the lack of decent text formatting capabilities for cards and books in iPhoto, read on for the secret to full control over your text.Show full article

iPhone iPad iPod | 06 Feb 2008 | Listen

More Mileposts Along Road to 3G iPhone

by Glenn Fleishman

AT&T announces network upgrades, which gives us more confidence about the near-term arrival of a 3G iPhone that can make use of a bigger, faster network.Show full article

AT&T has announced that they will put their flavor of third-generation (3G) cellular data networking in 80 more cities in the United States in 2008, for a total of 350 "leading markets." They're also finishing an upgrade for better upstream speeds that will be complete this year, and have restated commitment to the path to 4G, which will offer extremely high broadband speeds, faster than today's cable networks.

This clearly moves the timetable for a 3G iPhone further along, because two constraints kept Apple and AT&T from releasing such a phone. One was battery life and chip size, problems which are clearly either solved or on their way to being solved. The other was service. AT&T's little secret is that compared with competing 3G networks run by Verizon and Sprint Nextel, they had a smaller footprint and a lower speed. These upgrades should put them on par with those two firms. (T-Mobile has no 3G service yet; just EDGE. They bought additional spectrum at auction that should result in 3G services starting this year.)

It would be a little embarrassing to deploy a 3G iPhone that could transfer data at only EDGE speeds in large parts of the United States, especially since sales of the current 2.5G iPhone show that the device will spread far and wide, beyond just major cities. The further AT&T rollout removes that marketing dilemma.

Verizon and Sprint Nextel use CDMA technology for voice and data; CDMA is used primarily in the United States and in parts of Asia, although not exclusively in any country. AT&T and T-Mobile chose GSM, a standard used by a vastly larger population, including Europe.

The 3G version of CDMA chosen by Verizon and Sprint Nextel is known as EVDO (Evolution Data Only), and the latest revision - Rev. A - can provide average speeds of 450 to 800 Kbps downstream and 300 to 400 Kbps upstream. Peak rates are technically 3.1 Mbps downstream and 1.8 Mbps upstream, but that includes network overhead. It's not unusual to have a 2 Mbps downstream burst when downloading a large file, however. A future, planned Rev. B would boost raw rates by 50 percent, and would work even faster if larger swaths of frequency were devoted to it than are used today.

GSM's path is to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), often called either HSDPA - D for downlink - or HSUPA - U for uplink. AT&T's announcement today included the news that they would have HSUPA fuly rolled out in 2008. This will let them claim 600 Kbps to 1.4 Mbps downstream and 500 to 800 Kbps upstream. The raw speed for AT&T's HSPA is 3.6 Mbps downstream and about 1.5 Mbps upstream. In Europe, a 7.2 Mbps HSDPA flavor has already started to appear, too, and future flavors will ramp up to 14 Mbps and higher, although more frequencies than currently used would be required, as well.

Another interesting part of AT&T's announcement is that they restated that they are on the path to use Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the basis of their future 4G network. While LTE is perhaps three years away from deployment, it's become the standard of choice. In the United States, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are committed to it. That's right - Verizon has decided to opt out of future CDMA improvements and switch camps. This has something to do with a minority ownership stake by Vodafone, a European GSM carrier, but it's also a notable technology choice for them.

Sprint Nextel remains the odd duck out, having chosen WiMax for its 4G network, but being in the interesting position of starting to roll out WiMax this year, giving them what they hope is a leg up on speed and network quality.

I'm sure that Apple knows they are one of the engines pushing AT&T's growth in data use - Wired recently reported that data use in cities like San Francisco tripled on AT&T's network after the iPhone appeared - and seeing a completed and ugpraded 3G network must make them more confident in releasing a new phone.

Entertainment | 06 Feb 2008 | Listen

Apple Punished for iTunes Success

Apple didn't announce DRM-free tracks in the iTunes Store at Macworld, and while that's disappointing, is it really Apple's fault? Show full article

A few weeks ago, in "Amazon MP3 Scores DRM-Free Music: What About Apple, 2008-01-10" I called Apple on Steve Jobs's claim that Apple expected to see more than half of the songs on iTunes in versions that were free of all digital rights management (DRM) by the end of 2007. I was hoping that Jobs would pull a DRM-free rabbit out of his hat during the Macworld Expo keynote address, but that obviously didn't happen. Other than tracks from EMI, music in the iTunes Store remains wrapped in Apple's FairPlay DRM.

Of course, the ability to offer DRM-free downloads from the iTunes Store isn't something over which Apple has any direct control; that's up to the major music labels that control the rights to the music that Apple sells. And therein lies the rub: the labels are unhappy that the iTunes Store has become the dominant player in the online music world, and they're desperately trying to help Amazon MP3 become a viable competitor. To that end, all four major labels have signed deals with Amazon for DRM-free tracks, whereas Apple hasn't been able to negotiate similar terms from the Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, or Sony BMG.

The problems the recording industry has with the iTunes Store don't stop with the fact that Apple is the dominant player and showing no signs of weakness. Jobs's approach with his "Thoughts on Music" open letter (see "Steve Jobs Blasts DRM," 2007-02-12), while perhaps effective at outlining Apple's position and drawing a line in the sand, didn't make him any friends with the major labels. Some of the iTunes Store policies, such as charging a flat $0.99 price for all tracks, regardless of popularity, and refusing to sell album-only albums, have also been ill-received within the industry.

Is there any wrongdoing going on here? Initially, I wondered if there might be collusion among the labels, but my buddy Fred von Lohmann over at the EFF set me straight. Even if there were some agreement among Universal, Warner, and Sony to keep DRM-free tracks away from Apple, consumers aren't being harmed because they can purchase a better (in the sense of DRM-free), lower-priced product from Amazon MP3. And the fact that EMI has already licensed DRM-free tracks to Apple suggests there's no general agreement anyway.

So, unfortunately for those who prefer the iTunes user experience, it seems that what we have here is megacorps playing hardball with one another. Apple negotiated good terms - from the user perspective - when it started the iTunes Music Store, and the labels are regretting aspects of those agreements now that iTunes has become the leading online music retailer. Arguably, the terms Apple negotiated back then may have been a significant factor in the success of the iTunes Store, but the labels see Apple's - and users' - desire for DRM-free music as a powerful negotiating chip.

The question is what Apple will have to do to get DRM-free tracks: return a higher percentage of the profits to the labels, abandon flat-rate pricing, or offer a subscription service. Or perhaps Apple will come up with another solution along the lines of using movie rentals in the iTunes Store to make up for disappointing movie sales and a limited selection - if life hands you lemons, rent a lemonade stand.

Inside TidBITS | 04 Feb 2008 | Listen

My First Macworld Expo

by Rich Mogull

Come witness the trials and tribulations as a rookie TidBITS editor attempts to ward off the Reality Distortion Field at Macworld Expo.Show full article

Never underestimate the power of the Reality Distortion Field. Its cold tendrils begin slithering across the land from their amorphous center in Cupertino weeks before Macworld. It hugs the lowlands, flowing past the hills of California, keeping to crevasses and shadows as it slips under the doors and through the cracked windows of the Mac faithful. Always reaching, touching, and waiting. Then, on the morning of the "Jobsnote" it flashes to life with a bright energy that captures even the coldest hearts of the media, now centered in San Francisco. Judgment wanes, inhibitions collapse, and Macworld begins.

Perhaps I'm taking a little literary license, but as someone who attends sometimes dozens of technology conferences in a year I can definitely report that Macworld is unique. It's a strange combination of enterprise IT conference, serious end user conference, and enthusiast gathering. Some people attend to catch up with old friends, others to learn new skills for their personal platform of choice, some for serious business, and many just to check out the latest gizmos.

Still others attend to report on the happenings and gather content for future articles, never expecting they'd walk home with a distinctly disapproved-of iPhone sitting in their pocket. Thus is the power of the RDF.

Although I've been writing here at TidBITS for a few months and consider myself a Mac enthusiast, I'm a relative newcomer to the Apple scene and far from a zealot. I've always wanted to attend Macworld and see it for myself, and now that a fraction of my income derives from writing about Apple it finally seemed justified. A few months ago I asked Adam if I could reference TidBITS to apply for a freelance press pass, and instead he offered me a staff position.

It seems the RDF plans ahead.

The heart of Macworld is obviously Steve Jobs's opening keynote on Tuesday morning. Whatever your beliefs about Apple and Jobs, his keynotes far exceed the usual drivel from most CEO-driven talks. As a professional presenter I studied his talks before I even bought my first Mac, attempting to pick up some extra stage skills. The morning of the keynote I woke up excited, a rarity even when I'm the one presenting. After meeting up with Glenn and a few other Mac notables in the press area, we headed in. I was immediately amused as the conference Wi-Fi, AT&T service, and Twitter all collapsed under the load of keynote-inspired traffic.

Although I didn't find the announcements all that exciting, Jobs's presence and skill were everything I hoped to see. He works the crowd as well as any stage artist. Rushing from the stage to the media room to write up the announcements, it's clear that the RDF is so powerful after the keynote that even jaded media find themselves being a tad less critical than under normal circumstances. Other CEOs should learn from Jobs; those first few articles often frame the rest of the coverage. Apple combines entertainment with marketing and product announcements not to show off, but to influence those first critical press pieces.

Joining with the other staff members to simultaneously write up our coverage in a SubEthaEdit article was the highlight of my week. As an independent consultant and writer it's not often I get to experience such real-time teamwork anymore. We divided up coverage of each major product announcement, and those without a specific assignment edited in real time. We don't liveblog the keynote here at TidBITS; rather, we try to publish thoughtful, analytical articles within two hours of the close of the keynote.

I spent the rest of the week in a blur wandering the Expo floor, trying to keep up with Adam and Tonya (no easy feat), and attending various breakfasts, lunches, and evening events. The Expo floor is an interesting beast in and of itself. One second I found myself grilling a major enterprise software vendor on their upcoming Mac support, the next I'm laying out my credit card for a deal on a pair of earphones. Most technology events are divided into "user" and "enterprise," but Macworld is one of the few meeting grounds where casual enthusiasts and serious enterprise users share the floor.

The former analyst in me noticed a few interesting trends. The most compelling is how Macs are slowly infecting the enterprise. Apple's products appeal to us as consumers; and it's only natural to want to use the same tools at work and at home. The traditional enterprise response is to block non-standard systems (and phones), but it's clear this is a battle they can't win as more and more knowledge workers demand to use their own tools. We call this trend "the consumerization of IT," and Apple is clearly benefiting from the early waves of technology workers bringing Macs to work - even against corporate policy. The vendors that support the corporate environment see opportunities, and we saw some surprising faces with new and upcoming products to support enterprise Mac users.

It was also interesting to see the growing interest in security among Mac users. When I first starting talking about security issues for Macs a few years ago, I was mostly met with blank faces or accusations that I was a Microsoft spy out to destroy Apple. These days the response is far more measured. People are interested in understanding what the issues are and if they are safe. Everyone seems to have a sense that as the popularity of Macs rises the security risk will grow, but no one seems to know exactly what that means. There was no shortage of security vendors on the Expo floor, but some offered little more than snake oil, while others understood they will be challenged since the current risk to the average Mac user is still pretty low. Needless to say, I won't have any shortage of security material to cover here at TidBITS.

Overall I quite enjoyed my week at Macworld. It was my first chance to meet many in the Mac community face to face (including Adam, Tonya, and Glenn), and it gave me a sense of the Mac world and major trends in a way that's difficult to achieve without physical interaction. I also learned two valuable lessons. First, whenever possible leave the laptop in the hotel room, so as not to end up lugging it around all day, something that's seldom a concern at security conferences. And second, leave unnecessary credit cards at home in case Apple ships something you really shouldn't buy without first waiting for the RDF to dissipate. Not that I don't love my new location-aware iPhone.

Opinion | 25 Jan 2008 | Listen

Get Bit Literate, with a Buggy Whip

There's a new entrant in the productivity porn genre: Mark Hurst's book "Bit Literacy." But Adam takes exception with, well, nearly everything that Hurst advises. Show full article

Do you feel as though you're struggling to keep your head above a fast-rising flood of digital data - email, photos, Web sites, instant messages - that threatens to inundate you? You're not alone, and that shared pain has given birth to any number of systems, Web sites, and books that promise an organized life and enhanced productivity, along with much more. The latest entry in the productivity porn genre is Mark Hurst's self-published "Bit Literacy," which offers a few nuggets of utility. But despite gushing quotes from luminaries like Richard Saul Wurman, Seth Godin, David Bodanis, and Craig Newmark, I found the book ultimately unsatisfying.

"Bit Literacy" echoes nothing so much as an earnest educational film from the 1950s. Hurst is entirely confident that his suggestions for managing email, photos, media sources, and so on are correct for everyone, regardless of profession, personality, or preferences. Plus, underlying the entire book is an almost Luddite-like distrust of the functionality inherent in special-purpose software and of computers in general, accompanied by frequent jabs at software developers for making programs that Hurst feels are designed to lock in market share at the expense of serving the user. Instead, Hurst paternalistically entreats the reader to buckle down and behave in highly specific, almost robotic ways, with the overall goal being to let bits go as much as possible. "Just follow my simple rules, kids, and you won't suffer the ill effects of information overload!"

With email, Hurst recommends the "inbox zero" approach, which isn't inherently problematic. But he encourages exporting individual messages to text files and filing them in normal folders using a specific naming scheme (initials-date-topic.extension). That's because he doesn't trust an email program not to lose mail and because he wants everything related to a project to be in one folder (with no or few sub-folders). So rather than rely on a program that's designed to make common email tasks easy - reading discussions, filing, searching, replying, and so on - Hurst would have you fall back on simple, generic tools that require significantly more manual interaction. He says - deep in an appendix - that there are no "bit-literate" email programs available, though he never specifies what features such a program would have.

Similarly, no to-do programs meet Hurst's requirements, except - surprise! - the one he developed, a Web-based system called Gootodo that costs $18 per six months (nothing is said about whether Gootodo locks users into the site like the tools Hurst constantly criticizes). His criteria for a to-do manager are:

Each to-do is associated with a particular day.
Users can create new to-dos for any particular day via email.
Each to-do has a priority ranking within its day.
Each to-do contains a detail field as well as a summary.

The only interesting point above is the capability to create new to-dos via email, scheduling them by sending or forwarding them to a particular address at Gootodo - that is indeed uncommon and likely useful. But Gootodo, accessible only on the Web (forget about syncing to an iPod, iPhone, or even iCal) seems overly simple and clearly won't scale for anyone with more than a handful of to-do items per day. Hurst dismisses such criticisms by saying that people with too many to-do items shouldn't expect a to-do manager to help with that problem. But that's why we're reading your book, Mark!

A footnote in the to-do chapter shows what Hurst thinks of modern technologies: "Still other requested features [for Gootodo] include AJAX, RSS, and other faddish acronyms that are only understood by techies and the journalists who love them." That's inanity - AJAX can enable far better online interfaces that don't require constant page reloads, and support for RSS lets people access content in ways that work well for them. There may be legitimate reasons to avoid AJAX and RSS, but faddishness is not one of them.

Where Hurst makes the most sense is in talking about managing incoming media. He recommends limiting the onslaught of published material by separating media sources to a "lineup" and a set of "tryouts." Within your lineup, he says you should have a very few "stars" that you read in their entirety regularly, a number of "scans" that you dip into mostly for interesting or useful pieces, and "targets" that you read only for a single targeted use. With tryouts, you're encouraged to be discerning, know why you're trying it out and for how long the tryout will last, and realize that any tryout may have to replace something in your lineup.

This essentially reasonable advice is somewhat undercut by Hurst's use of the "media diet" terminology. Little is more faddish than diets, and they're nearly impossible to maintain over any significant period of time. I'd worry that the same will prove true of Hurst's advice with regard to media, depending as it does on constant vigilance and self-denial.

I did find some other bits worthwhile. Along with the suggestion for a media diet, Hurst makes some excellent points about how to write email and Web pages for better comprehension and easier scanning. In particular he points out that it's best to state the most important idea in a message right off, followed by the information that supports the main idea. Other suggestions to avoid confusion and ambiguity include stating the obvious and using absolute dates in favor of easily misinterpreted relative dates like "today," "tomorrow," and "next week."

But the many problems obscure such bright spots. Another short chapter enables Hurst to explain exactly how he organizes his photos, though this section is particularly misguided. He would have you create one iPhoto Library per year and some other set (likely an album) for each event in each month. He acknowledges that iPhoto could do this in a single iPhoto Library but dismisses the possibility because it's possible that photo dates could be incorrect. That can and does happen infrequently, but incorrect dates can also be changed easily. There are good reasons to create and switch among multiple iPhoto Libraries, but having more than a year's worth of photos in an iPhoto Library is not one of them. All it will do is make searching more cumbersome, as you try to remember which iPhoto Library to look through.

Other aspects of "Bit Literacy" that bothered me include:

Hurst believes that sent mail somehow causes significant stress and should thus be deleted every week or so, with important pieces of sent mail BCC'd back to you and saved - outside your email program - as a text file. There's no reason sent mail can't be nicely out of sight and out of mind... until such time that you want to refer to it, something I've found valuable on many occasions.
Instant messaging is treated in only a paragraph or two, with no acknowledgment that it serves an entirely different communication purpose than email and may contain content worth archiving.
For backup, Hurst recommends (very briefly) manual copying of important files and folders every week or two. This advice borders on the criminally negligent, since most people have no idea of exactly where all their important data actually resides on a modern computer. Being forced to restore from Hurst's backup strategy would result in potentially massive data loss and huge amounts of wasted time.
Hurst would have us name all files using an initials-date-topic.extension approach. He admits the author initials are pointless for personal files, but defends putting the date in the file name on the grounds that he doesn't trust the filesystem not to mess up date metadata. This obscures the real name of the file - the topic - at the end of the file and ensures that different versions don't sort together. In contrast, when we at TidBITS work on versioned files with multiple people, our naming scheme is topic-version-initials.extension to force different versions of a given file to sort together, in sequential order.

In general, little acknowledgment is made of the very real issue that people use computers in wildly different ways today. Advice that makes sense for an engineering professor collaborating on research projects with colleagues around the world may have nothing of utility for an in-house graphic designer at a large manufacturing company or a freelance marketing consultant working with numerous clients in a small city.

Also, I found myself constantly bothered by Hurst's exhortations to let go of bits at all times. Yes, we're all accumulating increasing amounts of data, whether in the form of photos, email, or iChat transcripts. But attempting to eliminate those bits, whether by deleting photos, trashing email, or refusing to use iChat, will both require more immediate effort and result in future frustration from lost information. The popularity of services like Google shows that what people really want are tools to manage and sort through all that data automatically. The price of disk space drops all the time, and Moore's law ensures that we have ample CPU power; what we need are more and better tools to extract meaningful results quickly from our oceans of information.

Lastly, despite occasional references to modern tools like Google Docs, nearly everything in "Bit Literacy" could have been written 10 years ago when Hurst started his professional career. That in itself is not a criticism, but because of this outdated mindset, it feels as though Hurst has never revisited any of his thinking to determine whether new tools could in fact make any of these tasks easier. Whether it's with file names or photo organization, the scripted behaviors he recommends are exactly the kinds of repetitive tasks that computers were supposed to handle for us. Computers are the reason we're so inundated with digital data; to focus on approaches that require us to act more like machines seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Inside TidBITS | 10 Feb 2008 | Print

Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/11-Feb-08

by Joe Kissell

This week's discussions include questions about PC equivalents to iWeb and BBEdit, speculation on the causes of undersea network cable breakages, the reliability of Western Digital MyBook drives, and more.Show full article