Dave Supports Lock-in
February 27th, 2008 by EyeOnWinerWhat would Dave say if GMail suddenly required it’s own browser to access? Now suppose that, to ensure you were playing by the rules, Google added a new HTTP header that only it’s new browser knew about?
What would he do? He’d scream bloody murder, of course. He’d have a week-long bitch-fest about this horrible new “controversy” and wring his hands about trunks and lock-in and the end of the internet as we know it.
Imagine my surprise, then, to have received this email this afternoon from a tipster:
Dave hasn’t mentioned anything, but he is now requiring a secret hash in the request header to download the AP/AFP RSS feeds for FlickrFan. If anyone else (Apple, Google, Mike Arrington, etc) did something like that he’d call them out and accuse them of terrible things. It shits all over standards, I mean it’s a whole new HTTP header called Hash. But predictably it’s really easy to work around… Frontier script and DW aren’t a clever combination.
Thoughts?
February 27th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
hash = string.hashmd5 (string (month) + string (hour) + string (day) + string (year))
February 27th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
That’s it, but it’s slightly more complicated because the hour string is actually a key in an array of data located somewhere else in the OPML editor. So you end up with a string like ‘2notequals262008′ instead of ‘221262008′. Laughable regardless, but the whole adding a completely new HTTP header is what really gets me. That’s so off the standard train it’s amazing.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I think Dave negotiated an agreement with the AP and leaving the RSS feed wide open put him at risk of loosing the right to distribute the photos.
The behavior is also entirely consistent with a software programmer that emrged from the 80’s.
Dave’s commitment to Open Source with Frontier was, IMHO, an exercise in getting his platform expanded to more systems without having to fund the ports. It didn’t work and the few people that track the project are long-time users of Frontier that enjoy the reduced financial restrictions on continuing to use the software. It’s a small but somewhat active group of Frontier folks.
I love working through Dave’s actions and this one is vintage Winery. His entire life’s work is bound in that platform and his current passions are producing interesting media hacks based upon that functionality. He’s NOT interested in seeing competitive software that takes his infrastructure and delivers similar or extended functionality.
Dave WANTS everyone to give him API’s (Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Flickr) but he is NOT interested in creating API’s for others to hack. His works are all gifts but he’s NOT giving away the technology that make them tick.
Thanks for the writing prompt.
PS> How did the rest of you feell about the Lakoff interview. I LOVED the information. It explains the current campaigns in ways that make everything a lot more clear. I loved hearing someone say what I have felt for months:
People want assistance with healthcare: insurance is NOT healthcare it’s a control point that injures the care giver and the patient in ways that are at the heart of the problem. I’d love to hear someone say that w.r.t. Universal Heathcare: insurance IS the problem even for those that have it.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Inventing a new HTTP header to lock other people out of an RSS feed is incredible hypocrisy on Dave’s part. If someone else did it he’d declare that the company had broken RSS.
It’s also an incredibly inept technical solution. There are plenty of ways to move pictures from a server to a desktop client without exposing them in an RSS feed.
There also are ways to put data in an RSS feed while limiting the readers that can access it. I guess this laughable hack means that Dave still doesn’t have HTTPS support in his software.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Having custom headers is hardly hypocritical — although in good faith all Dave had to do was prefix it with X-.
Locking down the feed is hardly hypocritical either: when did Dave ever complain about that?
And he wants API into data that users enter into systems, which doesn’t qualify for these FlickrFan feeds.
If we need something to grouse about, how about wondering how Dave ever qualifies for “press” passes?
February 28th, 2008 at 7:52 am
He also wants an API for data OTHERS enter into a system.
Do you honestly believe that Dave would be okay with this sort of behavior if it was Google doing the blocking?
February 28th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Sanity Check, both parts are incredibly hypocritical. He’s all about standards and not having lock in (how frustrated is he over the iPod and not being able to write Frontier code that moves songs to and from it?).
Let’s just say he wanted to use a hash to do lock-in, it should be sent in an HTTP POST variable. That would be standards compliant. But no, he creates a new header which is completely out of spec. If someone did that to RSS 2.0 he would shit a brick.
To me there is no ethical difference between running OPML Editor in the background and running a Python script in the background to download AP/AFP photos. Only the first method takes 20% of my CPU and gobs of memory. The second takes 1-3% while it’s downloading photos and nothing at all during the other 99% of the time.
There’s no way I’m going to run his scripting environment for any length of time. It’s probably the single worst OS X application I have ever seen. It’s beyond laughable.
If Google partnered with the AP to do a screensaver and pulled something like this, DW would probably talk about boycotting Google. Hell, if Apple automatically updated all of its users to a new version that included more lock in he would boycott Apple and write a letter to Steve Jobs. (It doesn’t give you a choice, your OPML editor updates itself every hour from his server.)