Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
domain names

Internationalized Domain Names – Are They Really Worth the Hassle?

Internet domain names have always been written using the Latin alphabet – regardless of the content of the website. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and all other websites written in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet are forced to use a latin domain name to refer visitors to their website.
To a number of people, this is a concern because they feel that the requirement for someone to type the domain name using a foreign language acts as a barrier of entry into potential internet users that have no knowledge of any language that uses the Latin alphabet. The argument goes that such users would be more likely to use the internet if they were able to type the URL of websites they desire to visit using their native alphabet instead.

Another issue with the Latin alphabet is that it is not always capable of properly spelling a word of another language, and even when it is capable of doing so, several possible spellings may be correct, so the users will have a hard time guessing the “correct” spelling of the URL. For example, Aljazeera is usually spelt this way, but typing it down as Al-Jazirah or Eljazira would be an acceptable spelling by many Arabic speakers.

ICANN, the body responsible for regulating domain names worldwide, has been working for about a decade now on “Internationalized Domain Names” (IDNs), which will enable countries to have country-specific domain names that are written in any of the native languages of the country. The decision to use IDNs was finally approved last year and it is now possible for countries to apply to have such domain names. Applications are now in progress for Russia, China, Egypt, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and a few other countries as well.

I am not fully convinced about the actual need for having domain names in non-latin characters. I do not understand how someone is expected to use the internet without having to know how to at least just read Latin characters. You don’t need to know English to use the internet, but you need to know how to type the letters to send an email to another person because all email addresses currently are written using Latin characters. Of course the availability of IDNs would mean that you can have full email addresses which are written in non-latin characters, but imagine having an email address that can only be written in a language other than English – so even if you have a friend living abroad who does not have a keyboard that supports his native language, then he wouldn’t be able be able to send an email to you. Accessing websites from abroad would also be problematic, but at least with websites, you can have alternative URLs which are not as difficult to manage as alternative email addresses.

The choices for prefixes for such domain names seem worrying as well, while currently, most generic domain name prefixes such as .com and .net are very short, and country code domain names are even shorter such as .uk, .jp, and .om, most of the Arabic IDNs have the whole country name in Arabic as the prefix. So Saudi will use the Arabic word for Saudi as part of any Arabic domain name it issues, and the word Saudi in Arabic is made up of eight characters. So just imagine how long the domain names would be.

It does not seem that Oman has made a request to ICANN to have its own IDN. I do not think that the use of the Latin alphabet in domain names is a major concern in Oman because English is taught as the second language in the country. I think it is a good thing to give people choices, but I think the complexities associated with introducing an IDN in Oman should be carefully studied before going ahead with it.

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

Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
Censorship defamation

Omani Freedom of Expression Online

The internet has enabled a lot of people from all around the world to communicate with others and has provided a platform for those without a voice to speak up and reach out for an international audience without any physical restriction, and just as much as it has brought the best of people in terms of creativity and innovation, it has also brought the worst of people as it enabled them to talk freely under the cape of anonymity.
I do not think that I am the only one who said some really strange things to people online which I will never dream of saying to their faces in real life. A visit to any public discussion board on the internet would show you how much people swear at others, make fun of them, and even maybe harass them. Many people forget that there are human beings behinds these nicknames with feelings that could get hurt.

The concept of freedom of expression is pretty new to the traditionally conservative Omani society, and the sudden explosion of opportunities opened by the web led some to assume that freedom of expression means that they have the right to say whatever they want, just because they can, without thinking about the consequences, but the truth is that there is nowhere in the world where freedom of speech is an unlimited right, because no matter what personal right a person has, it must not infringe on the rights of others.
In Oman, and many other countries, this right is restricted by some other legal principles such as defamation and breach of confidence. Defamation is generally defined as the act of spreading false information about a person which could harm that person’s reputation. This law is much stricter in Oman than in some other places like the UK or the USA as defamation is a criminal act and not merely a civil matter. In addition to this, there is no clear requirement in the law for the statement to be false for it to be offensive but merely requires it to have the consequence of damaging that person’s reputation.

Freedom of expression is further restricted by the law of the breach of confidence, if a person receives any information with a clear expectation to keep that information in confidence, that person would be under a legal duty not to disclose that information to anyone else. This is a general principle that applies to all sorts of information whether it was a private issue told between friends or a serious confidential document delivered in a professional capacity, for example, the medical records of a patient.

These two are examples of the most obvious restrictions to freedom of expression on the internet or otherwise, but are not the only ones, in Oman, the Telecommunication Law also provides for a number of other restrictions such as prohibiting the transmission of harmful and untruthful messages through any means of communication.

The perception of the internet as an unregulated medium that allows people to say anything they want is far from true, the legal system covers a wide number of instances where speech on the internet could be punishable, and with the development of new methods for tracking the visitors of a website, it becomes not too difficult to enforce these laws on the internet.

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

Categories
Uncategorized

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.

Categories
Privacy

Facebook Privacy Concerns

Facebook officially launched its new controversial privacy settings which will have a significant instant impact on the extent to which private information is shared on it. Facebook claims that these new changes will help make it easier for users to decide what to share and with whom, but the reality is that the amount of information that can be set to private has been reduced and the default privacy settings are now configured to have most content shared with the everyone on Facebook and beyond.
The original success of Facebook over other social networks such as MySpace is believed to be attributed to the high levels of privacy it allowed its users to have. Previously, users had the option to share some of their personal data, such as their profile picture, with certain groups of users, such as friends only, however, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, the pages the user is a fan of, and some other personal information, are all now treated as publicly available information which cannot be hidden from anyone if the user chooses to put them on Facebook.
Another major change in the new privacy scheme is that default settings for writing new status updates and sharing pictures and other content, are set to be shared with everyone instead of friends only. This means that when you make a new status update this update will be visible to everyone whether or not you have them as friends, and as a lot of content on Facebook can be indexed by search engines such as Google, this means that even people not on Facebook may find your status updates if they make a relevant search. While privacy settings for such a feature could be configured to a more private option, the majority of users do not check their settings and very few people would realize that their old default settings were changed to the new default settings for sharing everything with everyone without them taking any action!

The new changes in privacy settings do have some new options that could allow users to have better privacy. For example, users now have the option to have per-status update privacy restrictions so that you post an item that you share only with your close friends or only with your work colleagues without affecting the rest of your updates.

It is widely believed that the new changes in Facebook privacy settings were made to push people to share more information with everyone, while this might not be in the interest of the majority of the users, Facebook hopes that this would enable it to compete with services such as Twitter – which by default makes users share their micro status updates openly. However, the purpose of Facebook is totally different from that of Twitter and Facebook’s attempt to expand into Twitter might be faced with a backlash.

If you are on Facebook and you regularly share private pictures of your family and friends, you might want to make sure you check the new privacy settings of Facebook and set your content to be viewable only by the groups of people you desire. If you would not like everyone to know that you are a fan of a certain page, you have no option but to unsubscribe from that page. The same goes for your profile picture, and other information classified as publicly available information, which you will have to remove completely from Facebook if you do not want everyone to see it.

The nature of Facebook is changing and this might be a reflection of the increased willingness of people to share more things online, but I doubt that the majority of people appreciate the impact this information could have on their social and professional life. It is still very unwise to share private information without any restrictions as it would be very hard, if not impossible, to get them off the internet afterwards.

Categories
Uncategorized

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.