Iran sending aid to Gaza? What else is new?

Yes, the headlines from Al Jazeera read, “Iran to send aid ships to Gaza”. Here’s the problem: they’ve probably been aid to Gaza all along, but not the type of aid that actually helps people. Their type of aid includes guns, ammunition, and perhaps not much that could even be considered “dual use”. In fact, given what Iran is in hot water for, themselves, perhaps the ”aid” might take an entirely new dimension.

It’s not that I’m in favor of blockading aid to Gaza, especially legitimate aid. But Iran is classically overplaying its hand against the court of world opinion, while its own citizens are in great need of such aid, with oil prices having been flat for quite a while.

We can always point at one side or the other in the conflict in Gaza and assign fault. It’s undeniably true that Hamas shot off rockets into Israel, and it is equally undeniably true that the conditions in Gaza itself are appalling. Iran won’t resolve this matter. Instead they are just playing to everyone’s emotions, and they’re not doing that good of job at it.

iPhone: Good or Bad for the Industry?

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Before Apple released the iPhone it irked me that the pace of technology for cell phones lagged at an incredibly slow pace, the user interfaces were crap, and the deal between cell phone providers and service providers seemed to completely leave the consumer out of the value chain.

Apple changed all of that by going “over the top”, picking a winner in each market, but limiting what deal those winners would get. That was great, and really stuck it to SPs (who got rich anyway). They’re trying to do the same thing with the iPad, but in the meantime Apple has changed the accepted development model for businesses.

It used to be that you needed rich web connectivity, and that was good enough. Now you have to have an Apple app in order to reach all of those customers who love their iPhones. Good examples of this include Facebook, Airlines, and even that dinosaur who is responsible for Formula 1 promotion, Bernie Ecclestone. Yes, even F1 has an app.

Here’s the problem: many of the Apps are nothing more than shells for garbage that companies want to shovel at you, and they don’t want others using “their data”. A perfect example is American Express, who requires an app in order to view flight reservations. THERE ALREADY ARE MANY SUCH APPS. One of them is your calendar program. One thing you might want to do is download reservation information into your calendar. But American Express‘ travel web site GetThere.Com won’t let you do it. You have to download their app.

And GetThere is getting sneakier, as they no longer send many corporate travelers a full reservation in email, but instead simply send a pointer to their web page. Why are they doing this? Because they don’t want others like TripIt to capitalize on “their” (really your) information.

And so there seems to be no incentive for these bad players to be good players in an iPhone world, in spite of the fact that there are perfectly capable standards and programs and libraries to deal with much of stuff that’s being exchanged. What can be done to change that?

Update on Mail Saga

After a week’s worth of effort I’m coming to conclude that Thunderbird is still the best thing on the Mac, which quite frankly is sad. The Mac pioneered Multimeda, and yet any serious attempt to use Mail as a multimedia UI is met with an obstinate user interface. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just difficult to use.

On the other hand, I’ve found a very uncomfortable yet okay approach to dealing with Thunderbird’s breakage: have the compose font set to be “Variable Width”. I can’t stand the font, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t change in the middle of a paragraph.

A few people have asked me why I even bother with a mail UI, as opposed to Web Mail interfaces. The answer is two-fold:

I want access to at least some of my mail off-line.
For work I would have to go through any number whoops essentially to establish a WebMail interface that I like that ran under a web server on my laptop. It’s not an outrageous idea, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of work I shouldn’t have to do.

And so I will get by with Thunderbird, but I do think, as one of my other friends pointed out, that there’s a potential business opportunity for someone who actually WANTS to send multimedia inline HTML.

It’s also time to make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation. I paid absolutely nothing for the use of Thunderbird and Firefox, and both are still the best things going, in spite of their warts, and let’s face it: I’m a pretty demanding customer. Are you?

Mail Programs: Time for a Change?

It used to be the case many years ago that I would try just about any E-mail program that came into the market. To give you some idea, here are some of the mail programs I have used:

MM (TOPS-20)
BABYL (TOPS-20)
Mail (VMS)
Mail (UCB)
Mailx (UNIX System V)
MUSH
Mutt
Elm
Pine
Babyl (GNU Emacs)
VM (GNU Emacs)
Z-Mail (A Program written by Dan Heller based on MUSH, probably the first pseudo-graphical MIME program)
Andrew (CMU)
dmail (written by Matt Dillon)
Some really zippy MMDF mail program
MM (Columbia University)
Outlook
Outlook Express
Eudora
MH
Mozilla
and for about the last eight years: Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been great to me. For one thing, it’s had a very extensible architecture that has lasted quite some time, with plugins and everything. For another, it’s done quite well handling the gigabytes of mail that I process. The filter systems are reasonably flexible and it supported client-side certificates when I needed them.

Eight years for me is a pretty good run. I am, however, noticing that my trusty Thunderbird is showing its age and I really have run out of time to help (not that I really helped much anyway). For one thing:

Later versions try to index my entire collection of mailboxes (all 50GB of them) and this never completes.
The composition component is no longer sufficient to my needs. It’s not handling fonts correctly when I wish to send multi-media messaging.

And so I ponder a change. The question is, “to what?” Apart from all of my needs above, I have one more need: to be able to migrate from what ever I migrate to. This probably isn’t a problem, because one can always use IMAP copying in the worst of cases, but that can be slow.

First task, of course will be reducing what I can to ease transition. Wish me luck and do let me know what mail program you like, these days.

Ole asks a great question

[not unusual for Ole, by the way.]

Why does security have to be so complicated?

Now knowing Ole as I do, this is of course rhetorical, but it does remind me of two conversations I’ve had. One was a long time ago. A friend of mine was part of a cable start-up team. Some of you will know who this was. He showed up at a conference with his big financial backer, and then told me, “Eliot, I’ve created the perfect parental control system.”

My response was simply, “Are you now – are you now or have you ever a child?” Nearly any child who is motivated enough will get around just about any parental block. Kids are smart.

The same is largely true with security. A former boss of mine once put it succinctly, that it’s either sex or money that motivate people, and that bad guys tend to use the former to get the latter. A great example are the miscreants who give away free porn by typing in CAPTCHA text, so they can get around some site’s security. I think it’s a little more than just those two motivations, but the point is that computers didn’t create crime. Crime has existed since Eve gave Adam the apple. The FaceBook scam occurs every day in the physical world without computers when eldery are taken advantage of in person. Computers simply provide a new attack vector for the same types of crimes.

Bad guys are as smart as good guys, but their best is probably no better than our best.