Eye on Winer

Yahoo programmer Premshree Pillai attended a Brickhouse presentation recently by Dave Winer of his software FlickrFan. His review:

I can’t believe he spoke for an hour or so on how he wrote a script that’d display Flickr images as a screensaver. D’oh!

Now if Dave were to read this he’d reason that I missed the point and that what he did was much more than that. But that’s Dave.

(Yes, Scoble was around. I think I remember seeing Aaron Swartz also.)

Update: Winer showed up on Pillai’s Flickr site and posted a response.

Just curious, why didn’t you talk about that at the meetup? There was a lot of discussion, you really should have had said your piece then and there. I suppose maybe I wasted a lot of time, maybe you could have done what I did in a lot less time. Maybe I could learn a lot from you. Shame that you didn’t offer to share your insights.

I wish I had a picture on my HDTV of Winer’s face when he read Pillai’s comment.

I agree with Dave that Apple’s “trade” (Yesterday, Today) — their brand new drive, for your drive full of sensitive information — is bad business. They shouldn’t do it or, if they do, there should be a policy that the drives are erased well (say, for example, DoD grade).

One thing about Dave, though, is that even when he’s right, he finds a way to be wrong.

You have no control over when a hard disk will crash, or any foreknowledge of when it’s even likely to crash. So there’s no way to protect against this kind of security issue.

Let’s assume that his premise is correct (no control or foreknowledge of a drive crash) let’s further assume that once the drive is “un-crashed” all of the data that used to be on it could be read. Even assuming those things, it doesn’t mean there’s no way to protect yourself.

Take a look at the principle: you have to be able to predict a security breach to protect against it. True and false. Arguably, you have to be able to predict (generally) that a breach might happen in the future, but you certainly don’t need to have any warning about specific attacks. If you did, none of our security mechanisms would work.

Dave seems to be fixated on one solution: destroying the data on the drive. In that fixation, he’s ignoring a much easier (and pre-emptive) solution: encryption. OSX comes standard with FileVault. Keep your data encrypted at all times (like you should on a laptop with sensitive information anyway) and suddenly losing your harddrive becomes a much less serious security problem.

It’s still a business/PR problem for Apple, but (as usual) Dave’s amping things up a little bit here.

Dave must spend a fair amount of energy thinking of ways to silence his critics. On his site, he employs filtering and moderation, allowing only the opinions he sees fit. That’s why it’s so ironic that he’s so up-in-arms about the Apple settlement: “Of course Apple is fascist scum for shutting down Think Secret.“

Fascist scum. For wanting to keep their corporate secrets, you know, secret. How awful of them.

If the tables were reversed and Dave was on the harmful end of leaked secrets or violated contracts, you can bet he’d have a different opinion about the ‘fascist’ nature of it.

Rex Hammond, the guy Dave is celebrating with that post, is being rather dense:

John Gruber of Daring Fireball (of which I’m a fan) suggests that I (he points here, at least) am “jumping to conclusions” by suggesting that Apple “somehow forced” Think Secret to cease publication. I’m trying my best to figure out how it’s jumping to a conclusion by interpreting the following quote as something else: “As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published.” There is nothing ambiguous about that statement: If it is part of a settlement, then Apple is a party to the decision to shut the site down.

Notice the change of terminology, from “Apple ’somehow forced’ Think Secret to cease publication” to “Apple is a party to the decision to shut the site down”. That’s the conclusion you’re jumping to, Rex… that being a party to the decision means that they forced it. Here’s a plausible scenario:

Apple: Alright, just give us your sources and this all goes away.
ThinkSecret: We’re not giving you the sources. We’d rather shut down.
Apple: Okay, that’s fine. Stop publishing Think Secret and it all goes away.
ThinkSecret: Really? Okay. Deal.

This is the civil equivalent of letting someone walk for buying stolen property just by promising not to do it again.

Take a look at this pile of conceit and condescension:

Scoble has a piece today on Apple’s brand promise that nails it precisely, never seen him hit the mark so well. Congrats. The other day at lunch I was telling the Uncov guys that despite what they may think, Scoble really is brilliant. Read this piece, I feel completely vindicated (though sometimes I read his stuff and shake my head in disbelief at how he could be so wrong).

Dave never ceases to amaze me with things like this. How could any normal person write a paragraph like that, and about someone they call a friend? If Scoble wrote that about Dave, he’d have hell to pay.

They will break us, I’m sure of it. If I told you how, they’d unleash a storm of hate at me very much like what you get when you criticize Apple.

Irony, thy name is Dave Winer. First of all… Dave has been “sliming” Google for as long as I can remember. He’s the Commander-in-Chief of Google FUD. To say nothing of the hate-storm that he himself directs at anyone who disagrees with him or questions him in a way in which he doesn’t approve.

Later he criticizes Apple for hypocrisy and lack of humility. If you submitted Dave as a character in a pilot of a TV show, he’d be tossed as being too unbelievable.

This is something of a cheap-shot, but I laughed when I read it:

The error messages say something isn’t operational, which isn’t really a word in the English language.

Umm… Dave?

As for the main point of his post, I agree with it. I use both Macs and PCs. My PCs work better. My Macs work pretty well, too, but they’re a long way from “just working.” That said, Dave is not a credible source for this, since he’s demonstrated, time and again, his complete inability to figure out easy pieces of tech that weren’t designed specifically for him.

There was a long period of time in which Dave Winer hated all things Apple, and the reason was Applescript, which came with System 7 Pro and annihilated Luserland Frontier as a commercial scripting tool. (Weird but true: Before it was about publishing, blogging, outlining, twitting, kvetching, or litigating, Scripting News was about scripting.)

A commenter on Fake Steve Jobs remembers this time fondly:

My favorite Whiner moment took place back in 1993. Dave had been tirelessly pitching his complicated scripting system called “Frontier” [to] 3rd party developers. Juust then, Apple announced it was developing a much better system-wide scripting environment called “AppleScript”.

Dave freaked and threatened to sue. So someone on the Applescript team printed up badges to wear at the Apple Developer’s conference.

They read “Applescript: the final Frontier.”

Dave was not amused.

Dave writes:

Something that’s remarkable to consider. As closed to developers as Apple is with the iPod and now the iPhone, it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft, a company with a long tradition of offering developer platforms, hasn’t managed to offer a product that’s even worth considering by developers as an alternative to the non-existent option of producing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

One more time, this time with my own links added for fun:

Something that’s remarkable to consider. As closed to developers as Apple is with the iPod and now the iPhone, it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft, a company with a long tradition of offering developer platforms, hasn’t managed to offer a product that’s even worth considering by developers as an alternative to the non-existent option of producing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

There you go, Dave. Fixed that for you.

One is better than two, except when it’s not.

That says all I need to know about what kinds of locks you need on users. The only lock you need is to create a better product. The rest of it is nonsense.

Unless we’re talking about API formats, in which case choice is a horrible, rotten, no good, very bad thing and we need locks to prevent people from using anything except XML-RPC.

It’s also humorous how bitter Dave is about not getting a press access from various different vendors. He goes from being highly agitated, to assuring us that he has no access because he still has integrity… maybe he should thank Apple and Microsoft for preserving his integrity when he was prepared to throw it away for a little glimmer of info… or a shiny new laptop from Microsoft.

Dave puts out an interesting perspective on the latest goings on in the world of ‘podcasting’ as a trademark. He demonstrates that he knows a little bit about trademarks but, as we all know, Dave is no attorney, trademark or otherwise. Here’s where he’s right.:

Although I am not a lawyer, it seems to me that iPod is an excellent trademark, it’s not descriptive, it’s a made-up word, until Apple came up with it, it meant absolutely nothing. So, from the start, it was a defensible trademark.

There’s no doubt that iPod is a trademark. The problem comes in when he starts to talk about why ‘podcasting’ isn’t an infringement on the iPod mark:

I think podcasting may create some confusion for the podcasters but not for Apple. No one confuses a podcast with an iPod, any more than car wax is confused with a car.

Trademark law is not about confusing one good with another. Certainly that’s one thing against which the holder of a mark is protected, but that’s not WHY trademarks exist. From the earliest days of common-law trademark the purpose has been to avoid consumer confusion as to the SOURCE of the goods. To protect the good-will that a company has built up and to protect consumers from being misled into purchasing or using a product that doesn’t come from where it seems.

In this sense, Apple has a decent (though not air-tight) argument that the term ‘podcast’ infringes on the iPod mark. Why? Because consumers might believe that things calling themselves “podcasts” are made, endorsed, or otherwise supported by Apple. Whether this can be explained away is irrelevant, the problem is that the average consumer might not know that ‘podcast’ is a general term referring to a specific kind of technology instead of a source-identifier.