Irreal

It’s become fashionable of late to beat up on Google and wonder aloud what happened to their celebrated “Don’t be evil” motto. Google provides a slew of useful services and the price we pay is to have our digital existences vacuumed up and sold to advertisers¹.

We here at Irreal delight in being contrarian so I’d like to send a little praise Google’s way. Google has, for some time, published periodic Transparency Reports in which they list government (all governments) requests for user information and how they responded to those requests.

Here in the U.S., we have a constitutionally dubious device known as the ECPA subpoena that is much easier to obtain than the normal search warrant. Google has announced that they will no longer comply with such subpoenas and will, instead, require a warrant. This is a bit of a gutsy move because the ECPA is, after all, the law and by defying the subpoenas, Google is inviting a very one sided battle with the U.S. Department of Justice. In a recent SANS Institute News Bites newsletter², William Hugh Murray notes

That the government has not hauled Google into court when it pushes
back suggests that, not only does it fear an adverse ruling, it fears
the light of day. Use and abuse of the Internet by government will
clearly get much worse before it gets better. There are now so many
exceptions to the Fourth Amendment that it operates only by accident.

Given what’s at stake and the risks involved I think we all owe Google a word of thanks. So, Google, good on you!

This is a collection of short observations that don’t merit a post of their own but that some may nevertheless find interesting.

• Social Science
  Here, in case you were wondering, is why most rational people consider the term “social science” an oxymoron.
• Apple Maps
  This past weekend I drove up to Orlando to visit with some family members who were taking in Disney World. There’s no problem finding Disney World, of course, but they were staying at a hotel I had never been to before so I didn’t know how to get there. I used the Maps application on my iPad and was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. The experience was very similar to dedicated GPS systems that come with some cars. You get the map, of course, but also turn by turn directions and verbal instructions as you approach a waypoint. To be sure, this is in the United States and in a very built-up area but the results, at least for this area, were impressive.
• Tilde as Home
  Last year, I wrote about why vi uses the hjkl keys to move the cursor. That turned out to be because the ADM-3A terminal had arrows on those keys. Now the Unix & Linux StackExchange tells us why the tilde (~) is often used to represent the user’s home directory on Unix-like systems. It turns out that the answer is the same: The ADM-3A keyboard had tilde and Home on the same key. If you follow the link, you can see the layout of the keyboard as well as a picture of the actual keys. An interesting bit of arcana.

Back in the beginning of January, I wrote about iiNet walking out of talks with Hollywood. The talks were Hollywood’s effort to strong arm Australian ISPs into spying on their customers to help “combat piracy.” The most compelling point that iiNet made was that the piracy problem is actually of Hollywood’s own making due to their failure to make their content available to Australians in a timely manner and at reasonable cost.

The Australians have a real beef. They can wait 6 months or more for a movie to released in their market and then expect to pay a premium. At least we here in the United States don’t have that problem. Oh…wait. Take a look at the chart at the link. Of the top 100 movies from 2012, only 7 of them were available on either Netflix or Amazon. On the other hand, 77 of them has been released to DVD.

Here’s a news flash for Hollywood: This is 2013 and people want to stream their movies. And they don’t want to wait 6 months to do it. We’re such whiners. But here’s the thing: whiners or not that’s what people want and they won’t be denied. They’ll just download the movie for free even though most of them would prefer to obtain them legally and pay for them.

Hollywood imagines they can get this genie back in the bottle but as they’re discovering in Europe, the better metaphor is not Aladdin but whack-a-mole. The sad thing is that they could pretty much solve this problem by getting rid of their outdated distribution policies.

I’ve written before about the deplorable production values in ebooks: misspellings, poor typography, missing words, terrible spacing, and a general lack of cohesiveness in the finished product. The problem is particularly acute with technical books as Tim Evans-Ariyeh points out in his excellent post What was the matter with PDF? Technical books look, he says, “as if you gave a troubled child a pair of scissors and a complex book and said ‘Hey kid, somehow make this fit a smaller screen.’”

He goes on to say that, yes, there are challenges in producing a single file for many devices of varying sizes but that we’ve had a technology that solves those problems since 1993: PDF. The real problem appears to be with flowing text. Ebook readers don’t really have—or at least don’t emphasize—the notion of pages. They like to flow the text so that it fills the screen at whatever font size the reader has chosen. That works pretty well for novels but is terrible for technical books where the page structure is very often important. I typeset my two technical books myself with Groff and I can tell you that a lot of effort goes into getting that page structure right.

John Wait, the legendary editor/publisher from Pearson Education, popped up in the comments to say that at InformIT they offer epub, MOBI, and PDF formats for their books and that PDF is the most requested format by far. Proprietary ebook readers, of course, want to lock you into whatever DRMed format they’re using and have little interest in providing PDFs. It’s companies like Pearson and O’Reilly that don’t have DRM that are giving technical readers the best experience by providing PDF versions of their books.

If you care about these sort of issues, the comments at the end of Evans-Ariyeh’s post are interesting. They explore some of the problems with PDFs and ebooks in general and are worth a look.