Eye on Winer

What 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?

Dave thinks of RSS as one format to rule them all. He wants everyone to use RSS (and not ATOM!) so that everything works together. But is he displaying a new form of hypocrisy with the AP photos feed?

Looking at the comments to a recent post here at EOW you can see that some odd things are afoot.

For starters, a commenter found the AP feed and started using it without FlickrFan. He posted about that here on EOW. Shortly thereafter, the photo feed stopped being updated… but FlickrFan kept getting new pictures. How? Dave changed the address of the feed and rolled out an update silently to FlickrFan clients.

Security through obscurity.

Furthermore, it was noticed that the reason that so many RSS readers were having problems reading this raw feed was due to malformed HTTP URLs, in violation of the RSS spec. Essentially, Dave was using an encrypted URL (albeit a very weak encryption) which required an algorithm (albeit a very simple one) to read the URLs. Some readers did that by default, some did not. In either case, though, the feed was not properly formed RSS (by the spec).

Once that little catch was posted here at EOW, the feed mysteriously changed again. This time with more variations on the “http://” part of the URL… he changed the encryption algorithm.

Is he doing this to make sure that iPhoto can never read his feeds? Is he doing it to break third-party photo-downloaders? Are these just typos?

It’s hard to tell, but one thing is certain: what Dave is putting out is not well-formed RSS. If he’s borking the RSS to break other readers… isn’t that a little hypocritical?

I had intended to call the AP today and see what sort of agreement Winer had with them regarding FlickrFan. One of our enterprising readers seems to have beaten me to it:

eye,
I was fascinated by the prospect of having AP photos on my screensaver, so I downloaded Dave’s flickrfan software. After a day or so, however, I became concerned about the copyright implications so, to assuage my fears, I decided to give them a call. The guy I spoke with said he would look into the matter. He called back about an hour later to say that he doesn’t know where Dave is getting the images, but he doesn’t believe that this is on the up-and-up. He said he’d continue to look into it, but he doesn’t think he’ll find anything. He also, in our initial conversation, asked what sort of resolution the pictures were coming in at and seemed genuinely shocked by my reply.

Unless there’s some memo that didn’t get circulated at the AP, it appears that Dave is passing out their pics without their permission. If I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.

[Name Redacted]

Two things, for the record: First, I have not verified the content of the above email and make no representations as to its truth. Second, I would be very, very concerned about enabling the AP feed in FlickrFan. If there’s no agreement between Dave and the AP, simply pulling the enclosures from that feed would likely be considered a copyright infringement (and could bring with it some serious liability).

One grain of salt to add to the above email: I believe a lot of things about Dave, but I have trouble believing that he’d be so stupid as to distribute these images without permission from the AP.

UPDATE: Got some down-time and called around. After a few transfers I was told that FlickrFan is an AP Digital client, although most of the people I talked to had the same reaction cited in the email. What that means, of course, is that Dave is paying for all of us to see the photos. I didn’t get the sense that anyone I talked to really understood the repercussions of allowing thousands of AP photos to be automatically downloaded to one’s harddrive but that’s not really my concern. It appears that FlickrFan is licensed. (While posting this update I got an email from the previous emailer saying essentially the same thing.)

Writes Dave:

If I could be Emperor of the Universe for five minutes I’d outlaw all holidays in November, December and January and would declare that everybody should be nice to everyone all the time, no matter what season it is!

Of course, what Dave really means is that he’d make everyone be nice to him all the time, since he surely couldn’t bring himself to return the favor.

I wonder how long in 2008 Dave will go before he says something not-nice about someone in a very public place. Bets, anyone? I’d guess the over/under is sometime next week, as more people start to say “FlickrFan is idiotic.”

Also, I thought this was obvious, but I haven’t seen it explicitly mentioned yet — every piece of Dave’s new “screensaver” has already been done. All you have to do is set FeedDemon (or any number of other clients) to automatically download enclosures into your screensaver folder.