Remember “Thoughts on Music“? The open letter Steve Jobs wrote about 16 months ago? I think the community was right. It was a big, fat lie.

The iPhone 3G and the App Store hit the streets today. And just as could be expected, an e-mail came in from Defective By Design giving out the 5 reasons you should never buy an iPhone 3G. RMS has a good reason to be angry at Apple. Remember this?

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Music”

Apple is clearly under absolutely no obligation from all those developers - many of whom came from the development community for jailbroken iPhones - to put DRM on their apps. Yet they chose to, and probably not because of pressures from Sega and their cute little Super Monkey Ball implementation. This officially turns Jobs’s letter into bullcrap. He had the option to go without DRM and ignored it, ignoring his promises to the community at the same time.

What I personally think was best was leaving the iPhone as officially “closed” without patching the jailbreaking vulnerabilities. Up until now, only technically savvy users were able to run 3rd-party code on their iPhones, which reduced the number of noobish complaints, script kiddies, and stupid useless apps. Now, even your grandma is going to be playing Super Monkey Ball and Twittering from her car. It’s making the iPhone suck in even more people. If it was incapable of running anything more than Apple’s own code up front, people would be able to look at it for what it really is: a phone (or in my case, a music player). And only the hackers would be able to do cool stuff with it. That way RMS is happy because the phone can be “liberated”, but your grandma isn’t going to be encumbered with any more DRM than what already exists on your typical iPod. I’m not defending FairPlay, but at the same time I think DRMing the App Store is a bad idea because it places even more restrictions on users.

Now, hold on, you say. We only bitch about DRM on music because keeps you from playing that music on different manufacturers’ devices, and App Store apps can only run on the iPhone because of its API and platform even if they’re open source, so the DRM only limits and restricts software piracy. That’s a good point, but the DRM also prevents you from releasing apps under the GPLv3 (due to the obligation of distributing cryptographic keys) and from sharing free apps. I can personally confirm that even free apps are DRMed, as I downloaded a couple of free apps yesterday and found my iTunes account name embedded in the .ipa file along with a FairPlay version stamp. Looking at the DRMed Twitterrific Mach-O binary side by side with a non-DRMed binary of Installer.app in a hex editor further confirmed the existence of encryption in the executable.

This is just the wrong way to “open” a device to third-party development. Only licensed developers can run their code on their phone, and even then they can only run it in “debugging” mode in which the device is tethered to their computer while the program is running. And you need a programming license now just to run your own code on your own device. Sound familiar?

This is the response I got from the Roadrunner cable rep. Way to treat their potential customers, eh?

Dear Mr. Fuhry:

Thank you for your email. We always appreciate the opportunity to respond to our customers.

Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable. The services and availability may vary based on Package Selection and promotions that may be available in your area. We have found the most efficient method of providing you with pricing are for you to speak to a sales representative who will explain all packages and assist you in customizing a service plan that best fits your needs. Please contact our sales department at 1.877.772.2253. Representatives are available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Sincerely,
Mark

Your On-Line Time Warner Cable Representative

I replied to the e-mail politely noting that I already know what service plan I’m going for and that what I’m trying to find out is ethical and network management practices. Needless to say I think I will definitely be sticking with Windstream for right now. Especially now that I got it working nearly perfectly - more on that in a day or two.

Peter McCullough and I are starting up a community tech/news site aimed at geeks, affectionately called twogeeksonesite.com. Here we plan to post hardware reviews, track industry news, talk about current events, and provide a general tech discussion community. We’re not going for anything particularly Web 2.0 (e.g. social networking) but we are planning on something based on Enano and PunBB (and yes it will run the latest alpha code). I’ll be posting again when it’s all set up, but until then beware of scaffolding and “registration disabled” messages.

Hi,
Just a while ago I checked the Road Runner website and it looks like Time Warner is offering the service where I live. I have a few friends that used RoadRunner in the past until their area was bought out by Comcast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable#Former_divisions_sold_to_Comcast). I’m currently using Windstream DSL and I’m seriously considering upgrading to Road Runner cable, just have a couple questions though because I’m a power user and use my Internet for a lot of different things. My current situation is that I have an ISP that does absolutely no throttling or firewalling (which I positively love) but the connection isn’t as reliable as I’d like it to be. So my questions are:

• Do Time Warner and/or Road Runner support, financially or otherwise, any legislation that could have any impact (positive or negative) on net neutrality? If so, what bills are they, and where can I view more information about the legislation on the Internet?
• Do you have a monthly bandwidth limit? If so, what is the cap?
• Do you throttle any traffic using port blocking, deep packet inspection, or any other method? If so, what all is blocked?
• Are any ports firewalled by default? I am currently running a web server, mail server, and SSH server from my home. (My question applies to your home/residential service; I will not purchase a business account just to lift inbound port restrictions.)
• Does your acceptable use policy (AUP) or terms of use (TOU) have any restrictions on what types of traffic, inbound or otherwise, residential customers may allow? E.g. are there any legal restrictions that would prevent me from running a web server or a properly secured mail server?
• 15Mbits down is all fine and dandy, but what is the average upload speed of a residential connection? 1Mbit would be nice, but 1.5 or 2 would be even better. 5Mbit would be outstanding.
• How often does RR go down for maintenance? When was the last service outage in my area? Were customers notified of it in advance? How long did the outage last?
• Is there any possibility (even a 1% chance) that my area will be bought out by another provider, specifically Comcast, within the next three years? This is the one issue that I’m scared to death of with residential cable. As you probably know, Comcast is under heavy fire from both customers and the FCC for their questionable (and sometimes downright illegal) network management practices.
• Are there any times of day (or week) when traffic is throttled slower than the peak limit? Also, my DSL modem sometimes connects at a much slower speed than the expected 1.5Mbit/sec due to environmental conditions. Will this happen with cable? Power, phone, and cable lines are all buried underground in my area.
• Is the modem simply a bridge to the Internet or does it behave like a router with NAT? Can I access the modem to forward ports or, preferably, DMZ my router?
• How often does a residential IP address last on average? How much is a static IP address per month?
• Finally, my router and DNS server are at the south end of the house whereas the cable connection is at the north end. I have 75 feet of standard coaxial cable to work with, but does cable Internet require a higher grade of cable to work reliably and at full speed? Needless to say the modem would be in close proximity to the router.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. As of right now I am very seriously considering an upgrade to Road Runner provided that your policies are in line with net neutrality and will be for the forseeable future. I look forward to applying for Road Runner cable.

Sincerely yours,
Dan Fuhry
dan@enanocms.org

So I was working on my iPod trying to disable Stealth MAC without removing it. I tried using UIctl after RTFMing on launchctl and everything that it does. Unfortunately something caused my Touch to stop responding, and nothing came up when I rebooted.

I reluctantly decided to restore my device. It’s not an easy thing because I had a lot of crap on there, though it was all replaceable. I pulled up WinPwn and built an IPSW with everything but Cydia, which seems to not fit on the restore image. Everything looked to be going great, until iTunes gave me the dreaded 1604 error. Things looked really grim as I saw people talking about their $500 paperweights, and so on, and so forth.

The best instructions I could find were to log out and log back in to a Windows system as a different user. Then it occurred to me - what if iTunes’s database somehow became corrupt?

So I figured out that the 1604 error is in fact easily fixed, and here’s how:

1. Navigate to your Application Data folder. I did this by going to Start > Run and typing %APPDATA% (case matters).
2. Delete or rename the “Apple Computer” folder.
3. Start iTunes

You should be warned here that this will blank your music library and preferences, and if you bought music from the iTunes Music Store, beware that you might lose it. I personally don’t know either way because I’ve never purchased from iTMS.

Furthermore though, if you choose to rename the folder, you can have two iTunes profiles, one for restoring your iPod and one for general use. It’s not a fantastic way of doing things, but it’s better than not being able to restore IMO.

(Disclaimer: I cannot assume responsibility for any damaged or lost data or hardware caused by following these instructions.)

Wow! Has it really been a month? I must be busy or something - imagine that.

So a lot has happened in the past month, most of it being IRL things that I don’t talk about here. (That’s why God made Facebook.) But a few things have happened in my online and computer life as well.

The biggest and best thing: I got new speakers! The third X-540 set came in last week and it works great. I’ve been a lot more careful about turning this set off before playing with cables or rebooting my system, something that I’ve never had to do with other speakers. It’s a pain in the behind, but luckily Nighthawk doesn’t undergo reboots that often anymore. They actually sound pretty good for $120 speakers, so assuming they keep working for a few years I would consider them a good buy. Can’t really make an accurate judgment yet though.

A bit has gone into Enano as well. I’m working on several major feature additions to the ACL system, primarily tools for debugging existing rules. There’s a new API for calculating “effective permissions” and seeing where they are inherited from, and there will be a UI for it in 1.1.4. At this point I don’t know when 1.1.4 will get pushed out, but being an alpha it will not need to undergo a lot of testing, so I can release it when I feel that all the features I keep meaning to add are added.

I did a couple of things IRL too, namely a visit to the Albuquerque area where I have a bit of family. I did a lot of hiking around; the first day up on Sandia Peak I was pelted with snow and sleet. Pretty extreme for the Southwest, eh? I also visited Sky City and a couple of other nearby places.

Guess that’s about it, but I’ll hopefully be posting more regularly again.

216 days and 17 hours. That is how long my server was up without interruption according to the uptime command as of this afternoon. Not bad for an area that gets power outages like crazy this time of year (it hasn’t happened in exactly that many days).

The important thing is that I beat Neal Gompa’s record, 200 days. We’ve been in friendly competition about it for quite a while now and I was quite excited when uptime counter finally reached 200 days. There is a good and valid reason that it’s over now.

Last night I was fiddling around with NFS shares trying to make the Ubuntu live CD bootable with PXE. (I have no life. :P) Unfortunately I messed something up and got rpc.mountd to deny all mount requests, thus locking me out of 80% of my home directory from Nighthawk, and messing up my network boot system which uses Pelswick as a TFTP server. A reboot looked more and more imminent as I could not seem to get nfsd to unload (it’s built as a kernel module). Today in the late afternoon I took Bigmomma to runlevel 1 and gracefully stopped enough services to be able to peacefully umount /home, after which nfsd unloaded.

The problem came when I remounted /home and realized that I had been meaning to mount it with extended attribute (xattr) support enabled. I realized that I had not done this and once again umounted the device. When I did so, I got a big fat kernel panic, the first one I’ve seen in kernel 2.6.14.

So I let it sit there for a minute thinking about all that the server had been through during the last 216 days and decided that Bigmomma was about due for maintenance. So I turned the system off, pulled out the CD burner and 3.5″ floppy drive that were only used during the installation, blew 7 months’ worth of dust out of the case, replaced the cover, and booted her back up. She’s happily serving files and web pages again.

I did end up with a few “double free or corruption” messages from rpc.mountd so NFS isn’t quite perfect yet. It’s still a little unsteady even after recompiling the nfs-utils SRPM. Still working that part out.

Due to a little problem with my MySQL management script I just did the unthinkable and accidentally dropped the database for this blog. Not pretty, but I gotta deal with it. The most recent post I made a few days ago is gone, but that’s it, the rest is in Google’s cache, and posts since October were just restored from a full database backup I made. (Yeah, I’m due for another one. Long overdue, really, considering the fact that I’ve been so good about keeping Germantown backed up. Silly me…)

So things are going to be a little hairy for a few days. I will have to manually restore a lot of posts, which will take time. Hang tight.