matsu

Bad marketing, bad PR

Let me start by saying that I think the user experience provided by whole Apple ecosystem is second to none: from their Mac OS X computers to the iPhone, and how everything works together. Quoting Sir Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – this is my personal experience with Apple, not perfect by far, but better than anything else I’ve ever tried.

For the iPhone, Apple chose a business model of selecting carriers to associate with, and sell the iPhone as a whole experience instead of merely a device, including data plans and their special visual voice mail. Only with carriers that accepted their conditions, from subsidization of the equipments to profit sharing contracts. Not all carriers accepted this and some of us only had the choice of either not having an iPhone or changing carriers.

This happened until Apple, by the laws of some countries, became legally bound to supply operator-free versions of the iPhone. They complied with the laws, and the iPhone is sold unlocked in several countries, including Italy, from where my own iPhone was imported from.

Everything worked great, including the tethering option (connecting your computer to the internet using the iPhone) since the upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0, to the point that I decided to cancel my separate data-only contract that I used with a 3G USB modem to connect my laptop to the internet, and asked my carrier to upgrade the data plan on my voice card from 1GB to 3GB a month. It was a win-win situation for me, as I would pay less, and carry only the iPhone for everything.

Well, it worked well until last week, when the iPhone OS 3.1 upgrade showed up. As a legal user of the iPhone, and never having it jailbroken, I never really bothered to check if such upgrades would break something. My belief was that Apple would only add new features and make things work better, as they have been doing since I bought my iPhone almost one year ago. With the 3.1 upgrade, tethering stopped working. It just disappeared from the options.

After looking around for the reason, I found this page. Apple changed the way the iPhone accepts the tethering configuration, and now requires the APN in the carrier bundles to be signed, meaning that tethering will only work with the Apple associated carriers who allow tethering explicitly.

I have nothing against certain carriers forbidding tethering, it’s their own policy. But this change by Apple has meant that I have a legal operator-free iPhone (for which I paid much more than a subsidized and contract-locked iPhone) with a voice+data contract with my own carrier that allows tethering, and yet, I can’t.

I decided to wait, and seek clarification on Apple’s own support forums, on this thread. What pushed me over the edge to write this post was that they deleted my last message, citing that

“Your post was removed from Apple Discussions as it contained feedback or feature requests. These areas are intended to address technical issues about Apple products. Although your feedback is appreciated, unfortunately these forums are not designed for it and your thoughts/concerns will not get the attention they deserve.“

which is laughable, considering what is already posted there and the message that was deleted:

In the end, the real reason Apple sold operator-free iPhones is because they were made to by the legislation of certain countries. And because the AT&T data network is bursting at the seams (and they still want to push the marketing mantra of “unlimited” data plans), they forced Apple’s hand into cutting the problem by the source – just kill tethering in general. Apple’s solution, to allow tethering at all with their partner carriers who allow it, was to cryptographically sign the APN strings in the carrier bundles. Which left everyone with legally unlocked phones out in the rain if they don’t work with partner carriers (like myself).
I can understand why they did it. It just means they’re not worried about losing the fringe share of unlocked customers, who represent a tiny percentage of their sales.
If Apple doesn’t solve this (and I repeat, I think the percentage of users affected is not enough to force them to re-think their strategy), our only recourse is legal. They advertised an important feature, it worked perfectly with unlocked phones for a while, and then they removed it.

I think this whole incident is just bad marketing, and bad PR. Bad marketing, because they’re pushing an important feature such as tethering to sell the iPhone (saying “check your carrier for availability” – mine supports it), and then removing it, even if it only affects a certain part of their customers; and it’s bad PR because instead of saying to the owners of legal operator-free iPhones “please wait for a solution, it is coming”, they’re just passing out the message that they just don’t care. I know they didn’t want to have the obligation to sell unlocked iPhones (as it goes against their business strategy), but it’s not nice to be on the receiving end of this treatment.

And no, I’m not going to boycott Apple’s products, I’d be the one to lose, and neither am I going to seek legal recourse. If the situation is not solved soon, I’ll just revert to my previous solution of having a separate data plan. This is more of a warning to prospective buyers – you either buy the iPhone from a supported carrier or you might face surprises such as this one in the future, even if you do everything “by the book” and buy a legal operator-free iPhone.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

For the past few days I haven’t been able to access some very specific websites from my home ADSL connection – at first I thought it was the servers in question being down for some reason, but from yesterday on I haven’t been able to access Wikipedia, which lead me to call my ISP’s technical support – the answer: “We can’t either, it’s probably a problem with our network”. The biggest trouble is that my 3G connection is from a mobile provider in the same group of companies, and it’s suffering from the same problem… which I suspect is connected with their aggressive transparent http proxy servers policy (more correctly, intercepting proxy servers).

Howto: mounting your Mac filesystem through the internet using SSH

This brief tutorial will teach how to mount the entire filesystem of a fixed Mac computer connected to the internet through encrypted SSH so it shows up just like a network drive on any Mac you want, through any internet connection.

I’ll be talking about the host Mac (the one where the original filesystem resides) as host, and the moving Mac as the client, where the remote volumes will be read/written from.

Requirements:

1. Make sure you have admin privileges on both the host and client computers (although running your main account with admin privileges is not advised);
2. Make sure that on the host machine that you’re either connected directly to the internet and have TCP port 22 not firewalled or you have privileges to reconfigure your internet router to re-route port 22 requests from the internet to the host computer;
3. Make sure that you can access the host computer from the internet, either by having a fixed IP address (not normal on domestic aDSL or Cable connections), or by using a free service such as DynDns.org (this explanation goes beyond the scope of this howto – search for the solution for your own router or Mac on the internet);

Procedures on the host machine:

1. On System Preferences, under “Internet and Network” you’ll find the “Sharing” icon, click it;
2. Under “Services”, turn “Remote Login” on – authenticate yourself as necessary beforehand if needed;
3. Open a terminal window on the same machine, and type ssh yourusername@127.0.0.1 to test if in fact the SSH service has become activated – follow the instructions;
4. If the computer is connected directly to the internet, also under “Sharing”, you’ll find the firewall tab, click on the allow column for “Remote Login – SSH”;
5. Or if you’re connected to the internet through a router, you’ll have to look for port mappings or something equivalent on the router, to relay all internet requests for port 22 from the internet to the host computer (this explanation goes beyond the scope of this howto – search for the solution for your own router on the internet).

Procedures on the client machine:

You will need three pieces of software:

• MacFUSE – obtainable here;
• sshfs – also obtainable here;
• MacFusion – a wrapper to make everything more user friendly, obtainable here, make sure the version you’re downloading is compatible with the core version of MacFUSE you obtained (as I’m writing this, everything is a bit under development, so there are incompatible beta versions floating around)

1. Install MacFUSE and reboot, followed by installing sshfs and MacFusion (which in theory don’t need a system restart to work);
2. On a terminal window on the client, outside from the host’s LAN (i.e., connected through the internet) test first if you can SSH to the host machine, by typing ssh username@completedomain.com
3. If you can login into your account, the next step is to fire up MacFusion (which should be located in your Applications folder of your client machine
4. MacFusion is really simple – preferences are resumed to setting MacFusion to startup itself at boot, to check for updates to itself on Startup, and what to do when the client Mac goes to sleep and resumes.
5. The only thing missing now is to add, if you wish, the host computer to MacFusion’s favorites list – you’ll have to supply the name (whatever you wish), the server (without any “http” or similar prefixes), the Port can be left at 22, you can change the Server Path to / if you want for instance to access the “Volumes” directory to access any external disks that specific user has access to, and the most likely authentication method you’ll be using is “Password”.
6. The first time you try to mount (connect to) to the host’s filesystem from the client machine, MacFusion will even be nice enough to give you the option to store the password in the Keychain – this is up to you, if you trust you computing space enough to store passwords or not.

This is it! If everything worked, you’ll have a brand new volume on your desktop, that works exactly like a local LAN drive, with the permissions of the user you logged yourself as. Now you can do backups remotely through the internet, do anything you could do with a local LAN drive, but through a fully encrypted tunnel, and just limited by both the upstream and downstream speeds of both the host’s and client’s machine internet connections.

Long story short

Connected to a Windows 2000 server through a Citrix connection running on a Windows XP install (running inside VMWare under Mac OS X) being accessed through a Remote Desktop connection with a Java client on a Nokia E61. With GPRS.

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for the past few days. The concept behind it is simple but a bit hard to explain – it’s like an instant messaging nickname that you can update and receive updates from the people in your Twitter list, but it has several different quirks that make it more interesting. Their motto/slogan is “What are you doing?”, but there are a lot of possible different uses for it.

First off, it’s completely multi-modal – meaning that you can update it or receive updates by several different channels – on your phone through SMS messages, through your existing instant messaging account, through your web browser, or through a dedicated client (the system is open, anyone can interface with it – and for now it’s free and they are footing the bill for the SMS messages the system sends you). I like this multi-modality, meaning you can reach it and be reached (or not) in the way you choose.

As with any basic and open system, people have been using/hacking it in interesting ways, finding new ways to make it fun and/or useful. The basic usage is to give the world (if you have your account public, or just your friends if you have it marked private) a status of your situation, such as “stuck in traffic”, “eating lunch @ so an so”, or “taking crap from the pointy-haired boss again” – which gives rise to interaction, as people in your list may respond (either to the “ether”, or prefacing it with “@name” so everyone knows to whom the interaction is directed), giving it a feel of a big pub conversation (in which many times you’ll “hear” just the half of the conversation from the person on your list). Some people have also created identities that are fictional (like Darth Vader telling you what he’s doing and feeling ), or useful hacks (such as RSS news feeds that you receive like regular twitts). Another useful aspect of it, as the Twitts are archived in your account, is to record little ideas or phrases in the collective memory that you can look up later (and that you don’t mind other people finding out about, of course). Meg Pickard has written a nice summing up of Twitter as she sees it.

This makes Twitter not a messaging system as such, but more of an interface for very short messages, be it between people, or connecting us to machines (imagine getting your server status as twitts, as another example, something not very complicated to script). It will be bought by Google like everything else (it’s probably being indirectly financed by the money this guy made when Google bought Pyra Labs/Blogger). They’ve got a blog where you can keep up with their evolution.