Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

A little company called Pystar just threw down the gauntlet by offering a $399 Apple Mac Mini clone they’re calling an OpenMac. Currently their website is overloaded with traffic, so don’t expect the links to work just yet.

For an additional $155 you get Apple OSX 10.5 Leopard installed on the system using a Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) emulator and the OSx86 project. Upgrading to an NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT will cost an additional $110, while Firewire ports costs $50. The base specs are formidable:

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB of DDR2 667 memory
• Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• 20x DVD+/-R Drive
• 4 USB Ports
• 250GB 7200RPM Drive

Buying a similarly spec’d mac-mini will cost you at least $1000 for a computer with worse specifications and a slightly nicer looking chassis. That’s right, Apple is charging you 250% more than Pystar will. Where’s the catch? It’s the Apple Leopard 10.5 EULA, which reads “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.” The Fortune Blog highlights a similar EULA section, which reads “This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time,” and concludes “that’s what’s wrong with this.”

The EULA, Does It Mean Anything?

No, it doesn’t. Based on the First sale doctrine, when you buy something, you essentially have the right to do whatever you want with it (a fact that bothers libertarians, corporations, but few else). That’s right, in the United States, you can buy a copy of OSX 10.5, install it on commodity x86 hardware, and ignore anything in the EULA to the contrary. Apple needs to learn that simply printing indecipherable text buried in a legal document doesn’t make it truth. If their hardware is truly superior, they should welcome the competition.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and this does not in any way provide legal advice

Apple Fans, They’re Hating!

Apple fans have a huge, negative response to this news. They just can’t stand someone creating a cheaper, faster clone of their favorite computer brand. Here are a few select samples, with citations:

• “This is illegal and will never happen. This is EXACTLY what Apple doesn’t want: it’s brand diluted with an ugly product full of bargain-bin components to appeal to the wellfare market. No thanks.” [src]
• “I smell a fly-by-night scam.” [src]
• “Many people may find paying 150% the price for a mac mini with less performance just as insulting” [src]
• “God damn that thing is UGLY. Building a box like that really destroys most of the joys of owning a mac” [src]
• “I can’t even imagine why someone would want all of the crap from the PC world swirling around inside of a well made fine piece of machinery. Good luck with that.” [src]

Essentially, this is the same reaction as Apple fans had to the $200 iPhone price cut: “You can’t drop the price and give Apple to the plebes!” Any Macintosh fans who are honestly upset by a little competition need to tone-down their absolute devotion to the Cult of Jobs, and see how this is good for everyone.

I came across the following code in a Mint installation today, and was pretty shocked. I’d never really considered that someone would want to pirate a $30 php product, but apparently I was quite wrong:

/* Code removed at the request of Shaun Inman, although technically it’s not his code anymore, just something someone (who knows who) hacked up around it… */

*the usual bypass authorization by modifying the function to always validate hack*

Mint Piracy is a well-known problem to Shaun Inman, so I emailed him a potential solution to the problem of having to release his source code to users, but still needing some control. Hopefully in the future, we can work to bring piracy of Mint to a quick end.

Update: Inman isn’t a fan of the technique (which I think is perfect):

There is a simple way for you to track the origin of Mint pirate releases, and that is to add information to downloads in a way that looks normal, but actually can be later used to authenticate the source.

Person x buys mint, and you assign them id 123456. In base 2 you have 011110001001000000. So, the trick is, you now need to find 18 places in the code where you can choose one thing over another. So for every person x, you generate a unique download, choosing different adjectives in the comments in different places, etc, depending on the id you want to steganografically encrypt. The key to this is that you don’t tell anyone you’re doing it, and they probably won’t notice.

What do you think? Would this cause more grief?

Ever since my name and address became basically public information, and my blog decently read, I’ve had interesting experiences with various kinds of identity confusion. Some of it is cute, some of it is malicious, and some of it plainly scary. It’s strange that the content of blog, which sometime is just a mirror, can confuse me with otherwise notable individuals! Perhaps if I had some way of absorbing the identities, brains, and bank accounts of the people confused with me I’d like it more.

Christopher Paolini

A beautiful photo of a dragonfruit, which looks difficult to eat

The author of award-winning children’s fantasy novels Eragon and Eldest is certainly not I, and yet a post which was supposed to clear the matter up only made it worse. Here is a small selection of the fanmail I’ve received over the years:

• A short story titled Warriors of Lost Time. The story is obsessed with adjective razor-sharp (”… me with a scimitar and small gladiator shield that’s razor sharp all around, Drake with a razor sharp crescent blade …”), includes completely unbelievable events (”That’s when we realized that we had slept for 45 years without knowing it…”), and abuses narrative surprise (”So we went to the mountains and tried to mine but we found dwarves. Dwarves! We couldn’t believe our eyes.”).
• Many short inquiries of the nature, “if this is christophere paolini please email me back cos i want to ask some questions and i love ure books.”
• International fanmail, “I am 17-aged Corean girl, (do you know ‘Corea’ anyway?).”

A Wedding Photographer

A couple being married; hopefully happy

It was interesting when I received an email asking for wedding photography services:

My wife and i are planning to have our wedding on September 27th, 2006 at St Paul’s Church Bow Common Burdett Road,. I am looking for the best photographer who will come and snapshot on the D-day and when i came across your email i was impressed.

It could have been a complicated bit of spam, but why would spam bother to ask me how much it would cost to have the photographs taken?

A Bored Housewife / Teenage Music Lover / Sickly Man

While I love listening to music and reading…

Apparently, I’m the kind of guy who needs to test his blood sugar frequently because of diabetes, because I was signed up for telemarketing information calls about blood meters. However, one call was all it took to get my name off their list.

I was also surprised to get “Jack Black: Welcome to BMG Music Service!” in my inbox one day. I would sign up for a CD club scheme, and yet somehow someone signed me up. A quick email took care of that problem.

The most recent “I’ve been signed up for services I didn’t want” episode was today’s Home & Garden magazine bill. I ask you–do I look like I’d read H&G?

Flemming Rose

Fire’s a bad way to die–aparently it’s quite hot.

According to the Nation, a Saudi Arabian newspaper claimed that an “Elliot Back” was the notorious editor of the “Mohammed Cartoons” and perished in a fire in his apartment. Unfortunately, neither is true. The actual culture editor of Jyllands Posten is Fleming Rose.

Various other Elliott, Elliot, Eliott, or Eliot forms

Someday someone is bound to think that I’m Missy Elliott. w00t!

Because I’ve owned the address elliott@cornell.edu for some time, people wanting to email any of the other e(l)+io(t)+@cornell.edu have often addressed me incorrectly. Moreover, I’ve had companies interview me and send congratulations to a different elliott@ email address, which has been a big turn off. The problem with being an Elliott is that there are so many ways to spell it. And that’s even without the Bäck/Back/Black/Beck problem. If there’s just four ways to spell my first name and four to spell my last name, you arrive at a good fifteen ways to ruin my name.

That’s right–you’ve got a 6.25% of ever getting it right.

For Alexander Wrege, Claim ID, a new identity Web 2.0 project, is a complete success. After setting up a profile on Claim ID, a search for his rare name turns up the new profile in first place:

Not everyone is as lucky as Alex. About half of the claim ID profiles I surveyed did not appear in the first page of Google search results. However, as the domain is nearly a year old, its profile should begin ranking well on Google.

What exactly does Claim ID do? It let’s you associate hyperlinked material (web pages) with your name and a brief personal-biographical statement. In their own words,

ClaimID is a service that lets you claim the information that is about you online. That information is then associated with your name, providing folks an easy way to see what is and isn’t about you online. In doing so, you get to influence the search engines, and provide people more relevant information when they search for you. It’s time to reclaim some power back from the search engines. ClaimID is about letting you have some say in what search engines say about you.

Features

You have control over the following elements of your online life:

• Associate any URL with your name
• Claim websites you own as your own, and verify them
• Associate a biographical statement with your name
• Associate an image with your name
• Organize URLs into groups

There’s also a bookmarklet to help you collect links related to you, a very pretty AJAX-based interface, and a blog to keep updated on Claim ID related news.

Problems

Their privacy policy dictates how account deletion works:

Users may delete their information from our database by deleting their accounts. All personal information will be deleted, but the user’s name will be “locked” so that another user cannot use this name.

This could lead to a large number of names being permanently tied up. Without some form of name recycling, people will have to sign up with “Elliott Back 7889898.” A denial of service attack could be used to void large numbers of names, as well.

Also, the only thing it does right now is create a (name, {url}) binding. While useful, hopefully Claim ID will expand its features in the future.

Conclusion

If you want to see what Claim ID should look like, take a gander at my claim ID profile, which is just a few links and my photo. In a couple years, this will be a powerful identity service.

When I see the following well-produced Apple iPod Shuffle knockoffs, I wonder why anyone cares? If they’re half as expensive and do the same thing, it’s just an example of foreign innovation:

This stack of iPod shuffles was sold on ebay to a poor Frenchman. He complains, “while browsing eBay, I spotted a seller proposing iPod shuffle (with a 40 units stock). He was reporting to have them bought in China, so I assumed he must have had a good deal.” Appleinsider reports that Apple has released a guide highlighting some noteable differences between faked iPods and real genuine ones:

For example, here are things to check:

• Nonstandard headphone jacks
• No dock connector
• The serial number 6U545TK2TJT
• No included USB cable
• Slightly longer screen than the real nano
• Play/Pause symbol on the middle button
• No repeat option on the on/off switch
• No battery or status light

If you’ve experience trouble with fake Apple products, leave your story in the comments. I’d love to hear what’s really going on out there.