Darth Apple and the iPhone: The Dark Side Revealed?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Date: September 30, 2007 12:52:43 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: Darth Apple and the iPhone: The Dark Side Revealed?



           Darth Apple and the iPhone: The Dark Side Revealed?

               http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000301.html


         "If you only knew the power of the Dark Side!"
         -- Darth Vader (Dum dum dum ... dum dee dum ... dum dee dum)
         [ Star Wars Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) ]


Greetings.  I invoke "Star Wars" analogies at my considerable peril,
but the current blowup (some are indeed calling it a "war") over the
iPhone does bring elements of the films' saga to mind.

In Star Wars we had evil masquerading as good, evil that became good,
and good that became evil.  We had lowly Ewoks (let's call them
"consumers") who defeated a would-be control-freak galactic empire
(let's call that "Apple").  Now admittedly, the Ewoks are very
nearly my least favorite Star Wars characters, only surpassed on
that score by Jar Jar Binks, but we'll let that slide for now.

Other than the obvious "good triumphs over evil" stance of Star Wars,
a key lesson of the films is that it's not always that easy to tell
the difference between your friends and those who would exploit you,
one way or another.

Apple has long been the darling of the "creative" community broadly
defined, existing in the glow of being the anti-Microsoft, despite
an extremely limited range of hardware platforms compared with the
vast array traditionally available for Microsoft Operating Systems.

But Microsoft has (mostly due to its own actions over the years)
taken on the mantle of the evil empire, while Apple -- especially
since Steve Jobs returned to lead the company, bringing with him an
air of widely admired "coolness" -- has been perceived as taking the
moral high ground.

But now Apple seems eager to do battle with some of its strongest
adherents, by trying to retroactively lock down the iPhone platform
with their own technological version of the Death Star, wiping out
third party applications and in some cases bricking the phones.
It's enough to give one considerable pause and to question some basic
assumptions.

On my belt is a Windows Mobile PDA phone.  It cost less than the
iPhone and unlike the iPhone was partly subsidized by Cingular (now
AT&T).  It runs a vast array of third party commercial and public
domain applications -- all the relatively basic stuff that iPhone
users say are missing from their phones, plus an incredibly wide
range more besides.

By and large, the only people who brick Windows Mobile phones are
ones who rewrite the OS firmware, which given the wide applications
availability for these phones is really unnecessary except for the
very hardest of hard-core hackers.  To my knowledge, neither the
phone's manufacturer nor the carrier have ever tried to erase, block,
or otherwise tamper with these phones.  Third party applications
support are one of their main selling points, and we don't hear
complaints from the carriers that these applications are somehow
damaging their networks.

Apple's attitude is, by and large, "If you do stuff to your phone
that we don't anoint as canon, and then it so happens that updates
we send to your phone later f*** you up, don't complain to us."

This is, from a legal standpoint -- given the verbiage of the
complex licenses associated with such products -- probably
legitimate, at least in court.

But from a consumer standpoint, seeing this sort of attitude from
the smiling face of Apple must come as something of a shock to
many Apple fans, some of whom might be expecting to see Steve Jobs
show up wearing a black cape at his next product announcement.

What's really going on is something that goes far beyond Apple.
Technology companies are rapidly extending their complicated
intellectual property agreements into the consumer devices that we
buy and depend upon.  In essence, we're more and more really renting
these products, not actually buying them, since legally there are all
sorts of restrictions on what we can do with these modern wonders,
and often ways that they can be turned into useless junk by their
makers if we don't play by their rules.

My sense is that intrusive intellectual property and Digital Rights
Management are rapidly approaching a serious tipping point where
consumer unwillingness to "just go along" with these restrictions
could reach a fever pitch very suddenly.

Eventually, people get tired of being told what they can or can't do
with electronic devices that they own, especially when faced with
what seem to be unreasonable restrictions.  This applies whether
we're talking about the iPhone, DVD recorders that refuse to record
since the local cable company has arbitrarily tagged even basic
channels as copy protected, or to "self-destructing" next-generation
DVDs when piracy is even suspected -- along with lots of other
examples now and coming down the pipe very soon.

Like the Ewoks who were viewed as primitive beasts by the Star Wars
Empire, consumers may not have the poison pill firmware updating
power of the "Death Star" -- but they do have some items even more
powerful at their disposal -- their wallets and their votes.

If they continue pushing so hard to ram these restrictive products
and licenses into the consumer marketplace, many manufacturers, the
telecom industry, and the entertainment giants alike may discover
that their Ewoks aren't buying, and are instead voting for
politicians with a more equitable view of how "the galaxy" should
be run.

Of course the plot isn't finished -- in some ways it's only just
begun.  We might still see script twists that are impossible to
anticipate, and the cast of characters, both good and evil, may yet
change and surprise us all.

But consumers will always be the ultimate force to bring balance to
these matters, if they choose to use that power wisely.

Let the force be ... oh, you know.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com



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