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BlackBerry Bother

BlackBerry phones are different from other mobile handsets because RIM, the manufacturer of these phones, provides, in addition to the hardware, a special service infrastructure that allows users to share instant messages and e-mails easily through a very secure platform. This high level of security, along with the ease with which messages can be composed on BlackBerry devices, has made BlackBerry very popular in the business world.
However, this same popularity of BlackBerry devices, and the high level of security they provide, has recently stirred up many issues of national security in a number of neighbouring countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and even India, as even network operators are not able to intercept the messages exchanged by BlackBerry devices. This is especially because governments worry that terrorists may take advantage of these secure communication methods to plan their activities.

Communication is protected in the majority of countries around the world, and network operators are not allowed to eavesdrop on the communications of their users, but courts in any country would be entitled under certain conditions to make an order to intercept communications of some individuals on various grounds such as national security.

The problem with BlackBerry devices is that the messages of their consumers are routed through the servers of the company in Canada, and any court order in the UAE or in Saudi would not directly have an effect in Canada, due to legal jurisdiction issues.

It is not exactly clear what governments such as those in the UAE and Saudi want. RIM offers a number of services, one of which is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, used by companies and governments to communicate using a high level of security, which RIM itself cannot decrypt as the data would go through the servers of each company that subscribes to the service.

The other service more commonly used by consumers is the BlackBerry Internet Server, which provides a lower level of security that RIM is able to decrypt if asked to do so.

The governments of the UAE and Saudi are in talks with RIM, and they seem to have requested local servers for users registered in each country. This would ensure that if a court of law orders the communication to be intercepted, the order can be fulfilled.It is still unknown whether an agreement has been reached, as no official statement regarding the recent status of the ban has been made.

Looking at the issue from the perspective of national security, it is reasonable for any country to seek to have that level of insurance available in the case of an emergency. However, the truth is that BlackBerry is only one of the many available methods of communication which cannot be intercepted by local service providers. E-mail, instant messaging and all sorts of other web-based communication are encrypted and routed through servers located all over the world.

It would be unrealistic to ban every single method of secure communication or to ask every company to establish servers for local users in every country, especially as it might not be commercially viable for international businesses to establish local servers in small markets such as ours. The solution to this problem is not an easy one. Regulators should assess the impact strict regulation could have on innovations that could be built on these communication methods and must consider the benefits these communication methods provide to small businesses and society at large.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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The Copyright Disconnect

The worst thing about online piracy is not that it harms musicians and game developers, but that it normalizes the act of breaking the law without any sense of guilt. We all know that it is illegal to download a copyright work without paying for it, and we all know that by taking this action we somehow harm the owner of that work one way or another, yet the majority of people nowadays will not think twice about downloading anything on the internet and they have no moral issues on a personal level with it. A lot of people consider it a ridiculous to pay for computer software at all now that you can download anything you want free of charge if you look in the right places and feel entitled to have it.
Society here cannot relate to authors of copyright works because the majority of people are consumers who never created any intellectual product of significant consumer value nor do they know anyone who personally has. People are not afraid of breaking the law, because they know they cannot ever get sued or caught.

It’s not the mere act of illegally downloading files on the internet that makes people pirates, but their absolute belief that the law is meaningless and is of no impact at all on their daily lives.

A part of this can be attributed to the lack of awareness of the impact piracy has on the development of any economy based on intellectual property and the continuation of our society as one that consumes without producing anything in return, but the situation is also attributed to the disconnect between copyright law and current social values. Copyright law was developed for old industries in which works can be properly consumed and shared while respecting the principles of the “copy”-right, but these principles cannot be properly applied in a new world where every single use of a digital work involves creating a copy on the system that attempts to play that work.

We need copyright law in order to provide an incentive for authors to produce new creative works, but the law must be updated to provide users with appropriate exemptions to consume copyright works in a realistic manner while providing sufficient incentives for the authors to continue to create. Such exemptions should be the right to shift the format of the work, the right to remix the work, and the right to create parodies of the work.

In order for society to start respecting copyright, owners of those copyright works would have to realize that old business models might not necessarily work in a new digital environment, and new models, which may or may not include providing a free ad-supported alternative of the service, can create better chances for supporting the artists.

It is not easy for any one country to update its copyright law primarily due to international obligations that require a minimum standard of protection for copyright works (such as those provided in the Berne Convention), but accepting that the law has a problem is the first step in the process for creating the solution.

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This is Why I Unfollowed You

We still do not know how to use Twitter properly, we never had anything like it before and there are no solid social norms for using social media, but I think that there is a developing Twitter etiquette on how you frequently you should tweet, the content of your tweets, and the way you respond to others. Unlike Facebook, Twitter can operate as a one-way relationship between people, so you may be following people who don’t follow you, and those of your followers who decide to unfollow may do so without you easily noticing it.
The first thing to do if you want to make sure that others do not start unfollowing you, or even worse – start blocking you, is to make sure that you do not over-tweet. It is understandable that Twitter can be used among friends to update each other with the most mundane details of their lives, but making thirty updates in one go about random links and quotes is not something most people are willing to tolerate, especially when your showers of tweets bury all the tweets made by other people.

You also have to make sure that you do not use #hash #tags #for #every #single #word #you #type. The whole point of using hashtags is to be able to tag tweets with a certain topic or event to help make it easier for those interested in that topic or event to find your tweet. Tagging generic words in your tweet does not help anyone find your tweet – so hashtags should only be used for compound terms such as “#MuscatFestival” and not phrases such as “#Muscat #Festival” as the former would link only to MuscatFestival while the latter would link to any tweet that has the word Muscat or Festival. Having a hashtag for every single word makes it almost impossible to read a tweet and it doesn’t help anyone find your tweet.

DO NOT WRITE ALL YOUR TWEETS USING CAPITAL LETTERS. It might sound like common sense, but some people do not seem to be aware that using capital letters for whole sentences resembles shouting in regular speech. It is very annoying to have a conversation with a person who keeps on shouting, the same is true for people who write in all caps.

Use a photograph of yourself as your avatar or use a distinctive image which we can use to identify you. Nothing irritates me more than people who change their avatar every two days and put images similar to other people I follow making me confuse their tweets with those of other people. Nobody is going to like your tweets more just because you have a new avatar every two days, so please just pick one and stick to it.

Of course I am guilty of a number of my own twitter crimes such as using phani spelin (funny spelling) and over-tweeting on most days – which I am sure many people hate me for, but hey – nobody is perfect and just like you everyone else I am slowly learning what is acceptable and what isn’t on this new social media thing.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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Thoughts on the iPad

A month passed since Apple released the iPad, its new tablet computing device. The iPad is a strange device because it does not replace mobile phones (it’s too big to carry around) and it does not replace laptops (it doesn’t run desktop applications, no Flash, no CD reader, etc). The iPad runs the iPhone OS, which is a powerful mobile operating system, but one which is also extremely restrictive and does not allow its users to install any applications except those approved by Apple. Yet with all these restrictions, Apple managed to sell one million iPads within just one month – much more than what the iPhone sold in its first month!
The iPad is a new tablet device category that is primarily used to consuming media. Browsing the internet on the iPad is nice because you have to physically touch the links with your finger to open them and then scroll up or down with a gesture with your fingers. Videos appear beautifully on the crisp high-resolution iPad screen and even though it is not in proper widescreen aspect ratio, it is still comfortable to use.

The iPad is going to expand further the market for ebooks. The fact that it does not use e-ink, unlike the Amazon’s Kindle and other readers, will not be a big barrier for in this market, especially as the richness at which electronic magazines and other publications can be delivered cannot be replicated on any other devices currently in the market.

The iPad is also an excellent gaming device because of its screen size, processing power, its unique multi-touch and accelerometer controls, and its connectivity features via 3G, wifi, and Bluetooth. The combinations of all these features create new opportunities for gaming which attracted many mainstream game developers to the iPad which will help the device can easily compete with other traditional game consoles.

The iPad does not come without its flaws though. When it comes to browsing the internet, it is hard to ignore the fact that it does not support Flash and is unlikely ever to get it because of Apple’s new direction. I also found the screen of the device a bit too reflective for my liking and difficult to use in bright situations. Reading eBooks on it is also only comfortable when the file is formatted for iPad display and not any other PDF file created for printing on A4 size paper. For those of us who also like to write in Arabic, the iPad will also prove incomplete at this stage as it does not support Arabic text input (even though it reads Arabic text perfectly).

After having the iPad for a week, I still find it hard to recommend this device to everyone. It is surely is a nice gadget to have around the house to consume all sorts of media from the coach or from bed, and casually browsing the internet on it is fun, but I still do not think that it will solve a problem in many people’s lives. I do love my iPad now, and if you have the spare money to buy a new sexy gadget for browsing the internet from your coach then you will love it, but just remember that this device is for consumption of media and not really doing any serious work on it.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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The Walled Garden of Apple

The iPhone has been one of the most revolutionary devices in recent history, it has changed the way we use mobile phones, the way we browse the internet on the go, and the way mobile applications run. Apple managed to achieve this by imposing very strict controls over the operating system of the iPhone and the way users and developers interact with it.
Though technically comparable to that of a portable computer, the iPhone’s operating system is unique in the sense that Apple has absolute control over which applications may be installed on it, even those made by independent developers. There are methods to override the restrictions imposed by Apple and install any application you please, but that would void the warranty of the device, so the majority of users only download applications approved by Apple and made available for download through iTunes. Apple reviews each and every single application submitted to its App Store to ensure that the application is of satisfactory quality, that it does not improperly use system resources, and that it does not contain objectionable content.

For the most part, this has been good for users. It is not common to hear about an iPhone application that crashes or ones that impose a security risk. Yet many developers are starting to complain about the review procedure and the arbitrary decisions made by Apple relating to it. The definition of objectionable content turned out to be very loose so that applications with political commentary or risque content are banned on this ground. In addition to this Apple has rejected applications that compete with iPhone built-in features, such as Google Voice, which wanted to provide iPhone users enhanced calling capabilities.

Very recently a new iPhone software development kit was released by Apple which included new terms and conditions that prohibit using any language to develop iPhone applications other than the ones selected by Apple – even if these other languages were later translated into the same format as regular iPhone applications. Before the introduction of this new prohibition, developers were able to use their existing knowledge to develop iPhone applications without having to learn a new language and they could also develop applications for several other platforms using the same tools instead of having to use a different tool for each different platform. Apple does not only have control over what content developers have in their applications but also what tools and languages are used to develop these applications regardless of what the content is.

There is no doubt that Apple’s strict control over its devices has helped maintain excellent performance to its end users, but like the majority of people now, I am outraged by the new approach taken by Apple. It is simply excessive, even Microsoft’s old monopolistic practices seem innocent compared to this.

Yet I know that still most developers will not be deterred by the archaic rules the App Store because the opportunity to make profit selling iPhone applications exceeds that of any other existing platform, but I don’t think this will remain for long as competing platforms, such as Android, which are more open and transparent are starting to gain market share and could surely establish themselves as a viable alternative to the iPhone. We will just have to wait and see if Apple will be able to continue to rule the smart mobile space with such a regime.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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The Cloud is Not Your Enemy

I am a big supporter of cloud computing and all these technologies that allow you to save your data and work on it through any browser connected to the internet without having to worry about carrying your files with you or whether or not the application you need is installed on the computer you are using. Google Docs is one of the best examples of such applications. It does not only allow you to share your documents with other people online, but you can log into it from anywhere to edit your file and then directly email it as a Word document or Excel spreadsheets without the need to have any actual Office application installed on your computer.
At our workplace, we use Google Docs to keep track of the lists of projects coming in and out of the office. This allows more than one person of our team to work simultaneously on the same file, it also enables us to grant limited access to those who need to view the list but should not be allowed to modify it. We do not need to worry about file versions or duplicated files because we only have one file which is saved in the Google cloud. Worrying about copying the file on to a USB stick or emailing to each other the file as an attachment is a thing of the past. Docs also has a mobile version of the service, so we can check the status of our projects using our mobile phones from anywhere.

Surely there are some risks associated with relying on web applications, a lot of people worry about what happens if the internet goes down, but I am always amused by this question, do people still think that they can work without the internet? It is just like electricity in the sense that our daily lives depend on it. However, for this specific case having the office’s network down is not the end of the world because Google Docs can work in offline mode using Google Gears and then syncs back when the connection is resumed. It is also so cheap to have a backup 3G connection which you can use when the office internet goes down, and obviously you can always have weekly or monthly backups of all your documents downloaded to your local hard drive.

Another fear that people have with such applications is the risk that someone would gain unauthorized access to their documents and then destroy the information or disclose it improperly. It is true that this risk is always there, but one must think logically and realize that companies such as Google spend millions and millions of dollars investing in their security infrastructure – it is practically impossible for any one of us to match their resources. How likely is the existence of someone interested in our information who is willing and capable of breaching the security of Google and at the same time is not deterred by the legal sanctions that can be taken against him if he takes such an action? Not many people.

There is no such thing as a perfectly secure system, yet we still use email, telephone, and fax to communicate on a regular basis because we weighed the benefits and risks associated with using such methods and decided that the benefit outweighed the risk – that’s why we continue to use them. Cloud computing is exactly the same.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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Free Software – Free as in Freedom

Richard Stallman, one of the world’s leading activists in the field of free software, was recently here in Oman to speak about this subject. Stallman’s free software is not software that does not cost you anything to get, but one that gives you the freedom to copy, redistribute, modify, and examine the source code of the software. To the supporters of free software, these freedoms are as important as human rights in the digital age, as one should have the right to take control over any software that runs on his computer whether it was at home, school, or business. I understand the philosophy behind this position, but I can’t say that I fully agree with it.
To those who are capable of reading computer source code, debugging system issues, and customizing software on their computer, these rights campaign for by Stallman would be of great importance to the way they use technology, but to the majority of people on this planet, software source code is just as unreadable as software object code, people do not care how their software runs – they just want it to do what it is supposed to do. If what we are after is the best experience for consumers, then less access might be the most effective way of delivering such an experience. The iPhone is one of the most restrictive computing environment and while it is a very powerful device, Apple does not allow anyone to install any application before it examines and approves that software. To the supporters of free software, this is an extreme violation of their right to customize software they use as they see fit, but to the majority of the casual users of the iPhone, this ensures that their phones will not crash because of badly written code.

The issue of who should have control over software has several aspects, while it might make sense for the end user to have control over the software he installs on his computer, if you think of software like any other type of intellectual property, then the author of the software has more right over that control. If I create something I should have the right to reasonably control the distribution and use of my property. It is true that the law of copyright worldwide has not proved to effectively address the needs of the age of the internet, the basic concepts of copyright are still necessary as a tool to provide an incentive for individuals and companies to create more works and to provide them with a framework for making a living off their works. The solution to the failures of the copyright system should not be to trash it completely but to modify it to address the new reality of the web.

Of course, there are a lot of examples of successful free or open source projects all over the internet now, but that cannot reasonably be made the only way for creating all sorts of digital or any creative works. Different industries have different needs and it should be the market that will determine which business model to prevail.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

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The Open Source Option

Open source software is a computer program that is distributed free of charge with the source code used to create it, this is done with the hope that the transparency of the process would encourage other experts in the community to use their skills to further improve the software. Open source software and free software are not necessarily the same: an open source program would let the end user modify and examine the inner workings of the program, such an example of this would be the Firefox browser, while a free closed source program, such as Internet Explorer, would not let the end user modify or view the inner workings of the program.
Open source software has grown popular over the years due to the transparency of the application and the opportunity it gives to the public to modify the program according to their own needs. The fact that the source code is open to the public also helps discover and fix bugs and glitches quicker than traditional software due to the contribution of its users. Individual and corporate users of open source software also save money as open source software is given free of charge because (its developers usually make their money off advertising, offering support services, or via alternative financing methods).

Many countries have some strategies for using and supporting open source initiative, not only to avoid paying licensing fees, but also to spur innovation and encourage the public participation in the IT industry.

I personally rely on many open source applications both at work and at home. Firefox had been my browser of choice for a number years – until Google Chrome came out and became my favourite open source browser. I am almost forced to use Microsoft Office at work, but at home, I use OpenOffice.org to work with Word documents. OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office, lightweight, less cluttered and easier to use than Microsoft Word, It also lets you export to PDF out of the box, too. I also use WordPress on my blog, FreeMind for brainstorming, and FileZilla for uploading files. There is almost always a well respected open source alternative to any software you can think of: Ubuntu instead of Windows, GIMP instead of Photoshop, Thunderbird instead of Outlook, and even Android instead of the iPhone OS.

I think that it is such as a shame that not a lot of people around here give open source software a chance. You don’t need to buy, or illegally download, an expensive software without considering the open source alternative to it. I have written this article on a legally free open source office suite which I have been using as my primary word processing tool for more than four years now. The next time you need to install an application you should do a simple search to see if there is an open source application that does your task, you might just save yourself some money or avoid the headache of cleaning your computer from viruses after downloading a bunch of illegal applications.

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Overwhelmingly Google

I was greatly pleased when I finally successfully managed to have my phone address book synced with my Gmail contact list earlier this month, my life is so much easier now that I do not need to worry about maintaining multiple address books and I can easily update my phone address live by just editing the one on Gmail. I am amazed at how Google constantly launches excellent products that help solve daily problems in our lives totally free of charge.
Yet as much as I love Google, I am starting to get worried about my attachment to all the various products it runs. Like the majority of people around the world I use Google to search for things on the internet and I use Gmail as my primary email account, but I also use Google Reader to read news and updates from websites I follow, Google Calendar to organize my schedule, Google Docs to track my work files, Google Analytics to review the performance of my blogs, and did I mention that I use Google Chrome browser whenever I can?

While many people think of Microsoft as a company that carries a lot of activities with monopolistic attributes, it no longer seems to be of as big of an impact in a new reality where most applications are web-based and almost completely platform agnostic when it comes to the “desktop” side of things. At this stage dominance of the internet is what really matters, and for me personally, at any moment while I am online, at least three tabs would have a different Google product opened.

Some are worried about the scope of data collected by Google through all its various products and all problems related to the potential retention and abuse of that data for all sorts of things, but what I am worried about is that this expansion of Google into so many different fields could have anti-competitive effects on the industry.

Google has always been good with its data policies and allows you in most of its applications to export your data to another service or completely delete it from their servers, but while it is nice for us to have a company as big and powerful as Google to offer excellent services free of charge (as it can pay for everything from the advertisements revenues it makes), it becomes very difficult for other smaller companies to compete against it because they cannot match the resources of Google. This could lead to a reduction in innovation and consumer choice, and the biggest fear is that one day we will not use Google’s products because they are the best, but because there is nobody else who can offer an alternative. Some might say that this is not necessarily a bad thing as most of Google’s services are excellent, but when all the competition is wiped out, will Google still have an incentive to innovate?

The solution cannot be to boycott Google just because it is doing a great job at satisfying our needs, but we have to maintain an open mind when it comes to alternatives and give other products a chance in order to ensure that there will always be a chance for another option to existing for our own sake.

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The Twitter Craze

Twitter is the hottest thing on the Internet right now, yet people either do not understand, think it is silly, or are addicted to it. In Oman, Twitter is steadily gaining popularity as more people and companies join it. For those who still do not know what this is, Twitter is a service that lets you send very short messages (140 letters or less) to people who follow you. If you are on Facebook, think of it as a website dedicated to status updates, and instead of being restricted to friends you know, it is public.
The short messages of Twitter can be used in a number of ways. The most commonly understood method is to simply use it as an answer to the question “What are you doing right now?”. Your answer could be anything from “Having my famous cereal for breakfast” to “Running late for work as usual”. These are updates that enable your friends to know what you are doing at any moment.

The second function for Twitter is to use it as a chat platform. Twitter enables its users to reply to each other’s messages instantly using a myriad of devices. If you need a quick answer to a short question, like the location of a restaurant or an advice on something to buy, you can make an update on Twitter and get a short answer from any of your followers quickly.

The third function of Twitter is to use it as a source of real-time news, whether it came from professional industries or normal people. The concept of a “Retweet”, which is the equivalent to a rebroadcast of a twitter update, makes news spread across the whole of Twitter instantly, so if you found a tweet with breaking news, you can retweet it instantly to your friends who are likely to retweet it even further down the chain.

For people like myself who are officially addicted to service (I have made more than 10,000 status updates since I registered two years ago), Twitter has become part of the lifestyle we follow. My followers know about my life more than anybody else does, and I know a lot about the lives of those who I follow in return. I have used many different methods of communication over the years, but I had never before made a connection with so many people on such a personal level like I have on Twitter. It might sound unnatural to those who don’t use the service, but I now feel that I am part of a community which I cannot abandon easily.

I have been told that I no longer have any privacy because people know every single move I make from the minute I wake up until the minute I decide to stop reading my novel in bed and go off to sleep. I have to admit that I am no longer sure about the extent to which I should disclose personal information about myself, and I do not advise anyone to tweet as much as I do, but I believe that the whole world is still trying to understand social media and it will take us a while to establish a common etiquette for using such a service. Until that happens we will have to tweet using common sense to ensure that we do not harm ourselves and those close to us by exposing too much information to the rest of the world.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.