Linked List: August 18, 2008

Monday, 18 August 2008

Apple Offers Additional 60-Day MobileMe Extension 

This is in addition to the previous 30-day extension. At this rate, they’re either going to fix it or we’ll never have to pay again.

I wonder how many MobileMe customers there are? If there are a million — and I’m pretty sure they hit the million-customer mark a few years ago — then three free months of service costs Apple at least $25 million.

Tim O’Reilly:

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

This thought re-surfaced when TechCrunch launched CrunchBase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, TechCrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

This is the natural tendency for any site using an ad model where page views are directly correlated to revenue. This is why news sites break up stories over multiple pages, too. It’s a crummy practice, and in the long run, sites that succumb to this temptation are doing so at the expense of their credibility. Readers learn, remember, and resent when links on a certain site tend to be a waste of their time.

iPhone OS 2.0.2 

Entire release notes: “Bug fixes.”

‘Someone Is Clearly Doing Their Job Horribly Wrong’ 

Xkcd on the recent news that Premier Election Solutions (née Diebold) is blaming Windows anti-virus software for their voting machines “dropping votes” in Ohio.

MobileMe and (Lack of) Encryption 

Thomas Robinson on the lack of SSL support in MobileMe’s web apps.

Most Wine Should Be Sold in Boxes 

Tyler Colman, reporting for The New York Times:

A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.[…]

What’s more, boxed wine is superior to glass bottle storage in resolving that age-old problem of not being able to finish a bottle in one sitting. Once open, a box preserves wine for about four weeks compared with only a day or two for a bottle. Boxed wine may be short on charm, but it is long on practicality.

Via Atrios, who notes that the problem with most boxed wine in the U.S. today is that it’s crap wine.

Dell Denied Trademark for ‘Cloud Computing’ 

Sam Johnston on a decision by the USPTO to deny Dell a trademark for the term “cloud computing”:

Furthermore, they have declared “cloud computing” generic, in that it is “incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for applicant’s services”. This makes sense given that few of us think “Dell” when we think of “cloud computing”, even in this context.

I’d say no one thinks of Dell when thinking about “cloud computing”, except for their silly trademark application for the term.

1 in 3 Business PCs Drop Vista for Windows XP 

They just haven’t realized yet how awesome Vista really is.

Jens Alfke on MobileMe Web App Security 

Jens Alfke, regarding the security of Apple’s MobileMe web apps:

The most glaring problem is that, since the main page resource (HTML and JavaScript) aren’t loaded over SSL, there’s no way to tell whether they’re genuine. By now everyone ought to be aware of DNS forgery attacks; if the coffeeshop where you’ve gone online has an infected WiFi router, it would be nice to know whether its DNS record for “me.com” points to Apple’s servers or to a phishing site. But without SSL there’s no way to tell. Obviously, if you’ve loaded a hacked forgery of me.com’s web-app, any assurances made about “authenticated handling of JSON exchanges” are completely pointless, because your JSON exchanges are probably going straight to a pwned server in Uzbekistan.