Apple Has Problems that Need Fixing, Too

Apple’s been getting under my skin lately.

I’d barely noticed it until the other day at lunch when a friend brought up the company’s battle with the US Justice Department.

Apple’s been accused of conspiring with publishers to fix the prices of ebooks.

If this is true, it wasn’t for our benefit as book buyers. The arrangement effectively drove prices up anywhere from 50% to 100%.

Apple would have been acting in its own interests and the interests of publishers to instantly secure marketshare and increase profits.

But alleged collusion isn’t the only thing that’s irking me about Apple these days. There’s plenty more.

Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive: Where There’s Clouds, There’s Thunder

Wow, what a thunderstorm this week, eh?

We heard it approaching on the horizon for a while, but I don’t think any of us expected anything like that!

What? Oh, no, I’m not talking about the weather.

I’m talking about those clouds on the internet.

You know, services like Apple iCloud, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. And I’m especially referring to the new one that caused this week’s huge storm, Google Drive.

“Clouds” are basically places up there in the internet where you can put all your digital stuff. Think of them as online hard drives.

I’m not going to give you the run-down on the various clouds’ features, or even try to assess which might be best. I’ll refer you to, “Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off“, on The Verge for that.

Instead, I’m going to provide a primer on what these clouds are for, why you might want to use one, and what you need to be careful of.

CBC Budget Cut? We Asked for It.

Facebook just spent a billion dollars on a tiny little internet startup called Instagram.

Meanwhile, our own beloved/celebrated/maligned/despised CBC is figuring out how to suffer through a $115 million budget cut.

650 people will lose their jobs at the CBC, and at least 6 programs will be cut.

Instagram, on the other hand, only employs 13 people. They were all just made instant millionaires.

Okay, I get that the trials and tribulations of a national public broadcaster are very different from the success of a private firm that has experienced a high profile aquisition. That’s very much an apples-and-oranges story.

But that’s not the story. The story is us.

Are Tablets the Perfect Computer?

Laptop computers took 12 years to reach 50 million people. That same milestone was reached by smartphones in 7 years. Tablets, which is to say the iPad, got there in just 2.

Many analysts predict that by the end of next year, total tablet sales will completely eclipse traditional computers.

But does it mean that the tablet is the “perfect” computer? Or is it just another gadgetstop on the neverending geek highway?

Most likely the tablet is just the first step in an evolution to something better that embraces a broader range of our natural communication behaviours.

Northwestel Exploits a Loophole

About a year ago the CRTC issued a requirement that internet service in northern Canada get faster. Like a lot of other people, I made the assumption that this meant Northwestel would have to improve their service overall. I was wrong. I missed the loophole that Northwestel exploited this week: service only has to get faster, not necessarily better.

A couple of days ago, Northwestel increased the upload and download speeds of their highest-level consumer cable internet “Extreme” package, to 2 Mbps and 50 Mbps. The company also introduced a very moderate decrease in price of $10, or about 7.5%.

That’s nice, but it’s shadow play, an adroit marketing sleight of hand that satisfies the CRTC and fools us into thinking the company might actually be improving something. The real value of this package didn’t change at all.

Namely, data transfer caps didn’t budge an inch. The “Extreme” package still includes a measly 100 GB of data for the new price of $120 per month. Compare that to Shaw’s offering down at the end of the Alaska Highway, in Dawson Creek (population: 12,000). For $10 less per month there, you get 1 TB of data (that’s 1000 GB) and download speeds of 250 Mbps. Bump your account cost up to $130 and your data is unlimited.

There’s no real value in speed increases because Northwestel’s speed ratings are, at best, theoretical to begin with. In the real world you’ll never, ever download anything at 50 Mbps through Northwestel’s service. Not even close. The company readily admits that (at least its CSRs do). Increasing data speeds is a foil, a dupe. Or, more plainly, it’s BS.

I tested my internet connection to Northwestel’s local office yesterday. Repeated tests yielded results of barely 35 Mbps. That’s a test of a local connection to a service provided by Northwestel. To a server in Vancouver I got just 16 Mbps.

Assume for a moment, however, that 50 Mbps was a realistic data transfer rate through Northwestel. Then increasing speeds on an internet package without also increasing volume is a cruel joke to play on customers. You can download the same amount of stuff from the internet twice as fast. What’s the point?

In simpler terms, Northwestel has has increased the speed limit on the highway, but we’ve still only got half a tank of gas to drive with. True, we can travel twice as fast as we used to, but we won’t get any further down the road. Unless, of course, we fill up at Northwestel’s gas stations where fuel sells for $50/l, which the company certainly hopes we’ll do.

In that view, Northwestel’s data speed change can be accurately construed as a play for more money from heavy internet users. We’re now more likely to exceed the company’s data caps and be punished by the company’s over-use fees. It’s a significant increase in risk for us.

Northwestel’s “Extreme” account adjustments this week are at best a tease and at worst a taunt. Almost certainly, however, they’re an indication of what’s to come for the rest of their internet packages: speeds will be increased, but data caps will stay the same. That way the company can exploit a loophole in the CRTC’s requirements to make the internet faster, but not necessarily better. While it’s true that we’ll be able to download content in less time, we’ll also be drawn more quickly beyond Northwestel’s minuscule data caps where the company will be able to extract significantly more money from us.

Are Subscription Music Services the Future?

It’s been almost 2 years since I wrote about the subscription music service called Rdio when it first arrived in Canada (Whatever music you want, whenever: $5 a month).

I’m a lot more bullish on it now than I was then. It’s clear to me that subscription services are the very best way to discover and enjoy music.

That said, I’m wondering whether Rdio and other services like it represent the future.

Our wont as consumers to “own” music might just be too strong.

Time To Turf That Northwestel Email Address

Internet competition is coming.

Maybe not today, or tomorrow.

But it’ll be here soon. And you need to make sure that your options are open when it arrives.

Your first step in preparing for internet competition is to ditch that tired old Northwestel email address you have.

You know the one I mean. It ends in “@northwestel.net”.

That address is the chain connecting you to the ball that is Northwestel.

Until you get rid of it, you’ll be hogtied to that company’s services.

So it’s best to get started on turfing it now.

Technically, getting a new email address is easy.

The hard part is moving away from your old one. That takes time and effort. And it shouldn’t be rushed. You should give yourself a few months for the whole process to take place.

The Core Problem with Bill C30

The core problem with Bill C30 (you know the one interchangeably referred to as either the “Internet Spying Act” or the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act”, depending on your partisanship) is that it doesn’t deal with any core problems.

There is a reason people break rules, both online and in the real world. They always have, and they always will. And we live in a society that doesn’t try to change that, we just seem more interested in punishing people for doing those bad things. We seem to evermore operate with the theory that if we can just build a big enough paddle, we can either spank all the bad guys into oblivion or they’ll just be so scared of us waving the damn thing around, they’ll think twice about doing bad things. (Or, more likely, find a new way around getting caught and punished.)

And that’s why I think Bill C30 is about the most back-assed piece of legislation I’ve ever heard of. It demonstrates that we as a society lack intelligent creativity. We lack the ability to think deeply about a problem and search for its root. Our capacity for logical research, analysis, evaluation and solutions-building has clearly been flushed down the toilet, and Bill C30 is the paper we’re wiping our collective butt with. We don’t want to figure out how to stop people from doing bad things. We just want to smash them into oblivion after they do them.

There’s always a reason why people do bad things. There are reasons people produce and consume kiddie porn (I shudder to think of what they might be, of course). There are reasons that people pirate movies — one of which was brilliantly captured by The Oatmeal today (I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened). There are reasons people steal identities and commit fraud. Wouldn’t we be smarter to recognize and study those reasons, work towards squashing them, and then apply our newfound understanding of the problems to prevent more people from doing those bad things? 

Bill C30 is the equivalent of walking through a field of thorn bushes and stopping every so often to apply some bandages, only to then continue through the field. Sure, that might be the most direct route to your destination, but wouldn’t it be smarter to stop and think, then find a route that doesn’t tear your flesh to ribbons?

Like, when my kid does something bad, I don’t yell at him or spank him or ground him. I talk to him, evaluate the root cause of the bad action, and I work with him to make sure he understands why what he did was bad and that he doesn’t do it again. I mean, I could put an ankle bracelet on him and fit his parka with a video camera so that I could know where he is all day and collect data about everything he does, then spank the tar out of him when he comes home after saying a bad word at school. That would be a true Bill C30 approach. But that would be really stupid, too.

I wish the government, instead of drafting a privacy-sapping bill that is designed to punish after the fact, had sat down and put some serious, intelligent thought into the root causes of the problems they’re targeting and come up with some intelligent, informed solutions. It would be way better to have no child pornographers than a country of prisons full of them.

Really, in the end, the government has just proposed a lame technical solution to a technical problem that a world of hackers will devote their lives to finding a way around. And they’ll do it on principle, not to help child pornographers (that will just be an unfortunate side effect). Bill C30 is not a solution, it’s a band aid applied to a sore on the skin of society. I’d prefer we figure out why the sore exists and remedy it.