BitDepth#890 - June 18
17/06/13 22:32 Filed in: BitDepth - June 2013
Polishing the Apple
Apple’s new professional grade Macintosh has earned disparaging comparisons to garbage bins. Really small ones though, it measures just 10 x 6.6 inches. Photograph courtesy Apple.
The keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference found Apple in a curious place. The company is making insane amounts of money, but its share price has dropped over the last few months, and the deadliest word in the world for Apple has been muttered more often lately. That word, of course, is stale.
In the last three months, Blackberry, along with the development axes of Nokia/Microsoft and Samsung/Google Android have fielded strong contenders in the smartphone market that have begun to make Apple’s five-year-old iOS UI start to look, well, dated.
A refreshed operating system for its phones and tablets, iOS version 7 grabbed a lot of time on stage and that’s hardly surprising. WWDC sold out in 71 seconds this year and many of those developers are keen to get a slice of the considerable pie that Apple has been sharing out to the tune of US$10 billion since the App store opened to serve its phones and iPad devices.
Other announcements checked boxes that the company seemed to be ignoring while offering up some juice in the music market segment where it does well.
The arrival of iTunes Radio is more of a preemptive strike than a business initiative for Apple. It’s never been keen about getting into the streaming music business, but it can’t ignore the success of Spotify and Rdio, so the new service is really about keeping streaming music fans in the iTunes software ecosystem that underpins its lucrative hardware sales.
It’s US only, but the music licensing arrangements that have blocked access to both Spotify and Rdio locally suggest that we won’t be streaming any iTunes music anytime soon.
There’s a new version of Mac OSX that isn’t named after a feline, Airport Express and a refresh of Final Cut Pro X coming, which should offer some hope to professional movie editors who have despaired waiting for Apple to get its act together with the software.
But the really big news at the developer conference was hardware.
Not a new iPhone or iPad, which get all the love, but new Macs.
A new Macbook Air wasn’t a surprise. The svelte laptop sparked the ultrabook movement and remains a prime choice for users looking for power in a lightweight computing device. An Air that’s faster and offers longer battery life is just logical, with sales growth of 100 per cent year over year.
The biggest surprise of the event was the new Mac Pro, the absolute zenith of the company’s computing hardware. Apple doesn’t sell many of these units relative to its tablets and phones, but the people who use these imposing towers are influential creatives who need the most powerful iron. They also haven’t been happy for years now.
The new Mac Pro isn’t an upgrade bone tossed to those power users. It’s a radical rethinking of what a professional tower might look like, as radical in its way as the NeXT Cube was in its day.
What it really looks like is the unholy love child of Darth Vader and R2D2 and it’s a continuation of Apple’s drive toward minimalism and a purer marriage of form and function in its devices.
The device known as a Mac Pro has shrunk from an imposing box with a menacing cheese grater front face into a polished black aluminium cylinder an eighth of its former size that runs up to 2.5x faster.
All the hardware is wrapped around a solid aluminium triangle that the company has dubbed a unified thermal core (what George Lucas could have done with a name like that in Star Wars, one wonders) that sucks heat from a 12 core processor and twin video cards up through the top of the computer.
Current Mac Pro users will quickly realise that Apple has flung everything else outside the um, cylinder. The company is betting on USB 3 (four ports) and Thunderbolt 2 (six ports), now capable of 20GBps transfers to connect all the stuff that was once stuffed into the Mac workstation box.
Expect an explosion in professional devices designed to mate with the new Mac Pro (one reason for Apple’s unprecedented curtain raising on a computer it isn’t ready to sell), ranging from external PCI card chassis to a greater range of fast external drives and big data connectors for photographers and videographers looking to make use of the faster Thunderbolt ports.
The radical redesign of the Mac Pro was only one of several messages that this WWDC keynote addressed. It wasn’t the first such presentation since the passing of Steve Jobs, but it’s the first to address speculation about the company’s direction since then.
So yes, Apple has taken note of the concerns about its ageing iOS platform, yes, it is offering cutting edge updates to its popular Macbooks, yes, it intends to meet the needs of its professional users, yes, it will update MacOS for its computer users and on top of that, yes we can return manufacturing to the USA, beginning with the new Mac Pro.
But really, it fell to Phil Schiller, the bear-like, gregarious presenter of many keynotes to sum up Apple’s attitude with the words, “Can’t innovate anymore my ass!”
WWDC keynote highlights.
Fifty billion apps on the iOS store have been downloaded in five years and Apple has paid developers $10 billion, $5 billion just in the last year.
Apple claims that the MacBook is the number one notebook in the US now, outpacing the PC in annual growth 15 percent to 3 percent over the last five years. Total growth over the last five years: 100 percent versus 18 percent for the PC.
Skeumorphism is gone in Mac OSX Mavericks. ““Even without the stitching, it still sticks to the homescreen,” Craig Federighi wryly noted while demonstrating the new Calendar app.
“True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation: It’s about bringing order to complexity,” Jony Ive on iOS7 which has attracted comparisons to current Android flavours.
Firewire is dead, long live Thunderbolt 2.
The keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference found Apple in a curious place. The company is making insane amounts of money, but its share price has dropped over the last few months, and the deadliest word in the world for Apple has been muttered more often lately. That word, of course, is stale.
In the last three months, Blackberry, along with the development axes of Nokia/Microsoft and Samsung/Google Android have fielded strong contenders in the smartphone market that have begun to make Apple’s five-year-old iOS UI start to look, well, dated.
A refreshed operating system for its phones and tablets, iOS version 7 grabbed a lot of time on stage and that’s hardly surprising. WWDC sold out in 71 seconds this year and many of those developers are keen to get a slice of the considerable pie that Apple has been sharing out to the tune of US$10 billion since the App store opened to serve its phones and iPad devices.
Other announcements checked boxes that the company seemed to be ignoring while offering up some juice in the music market segment where it does well.
The arrival of iTunes Radio is more of a preemptive strike than a business initiative for Apple. It’s never been keen about getting into the streaming music business, but it can’t ignore the success of Spotify and Rdio, so the new service is really about keeping streaming music fans in the iTunes software ecosystem that underpins its lucrative hardware sales.
It’s US only, but the music licensing arrangements that have blocked access to both Spotify and Rdio locally suggest that we won’t be streaming any iTunes music anytime soon.
There’s a new version of Mac OSX that isn’t named after a feline, Airport Express and a refresh of Final Cut Pro X coming, which should offer some hope to professional movie editors who have despaired waiting for Apple to get its act together with the software.
But the really big news at the developer conference was hardware.
Not a new iPhone or iPad, which get all the love, but new Macs.
A new Macbook Air wasn’t a surprise. The svelte laptop sparked the ultrabook movement and remains a prime choice for users looking for power in a lightweight computing device. An Air that’s faster and offers longer battery life is just logical, with sales growth of 100 per cent year over year.
The biggest surprise of the event was the new Mac Pro, the absolute zenith of the company’s computing hardware. Apple doesn’t sell many of these units relative to its tablets and phones, but the people who use these imposing towers are influential creatives who need the most powerful iron. They also haven’t been happy for years now.
The new Mac Pro isn’t an upgrade bone tossed to those power users. It’s a radical rethinking of what a professional tower might look like, as radical in its way as the NeXT Cube was in its day.
What it really looks like is the unholy love child of Darth Vader and R2D2 and it’s a continuation of Apple’s drive toward minimalism and a purer marriage of form and function in its devices.
The device known as a Mac Pro has shrunk from an imposing box with a menacing cheese grater front face into a polished black aluminium cylinder an eighth of its former size that runs up to 2.5x faster.
All the hardware is wrapped around a solid aluminium triangle that the company has dubbed a unified thermal core (what George Lucas could have done with a name like that in Star Wars, one wonders) that sucks heat from a 12 core processor and twin video cards up through the top of the computer.
Current Mac Pro users will quickly realise that Apple has flung everything else outside the um, cylinder. The company is betting on USB 3 (four ports) and Thunderbolt 2 (six ports), now capable of 20GBps transfers to connect all the stuff that was once stuffed into the Mac workstation box.
Expect an explosion in professional devices designed to mate with the new Mac Pro (one reason for Apple’s unprecedented curtain raising on a computer it isn’t ready to sell), ranging from external PCI card chassis to a greater range of fast external drives and big data connectors for photographers and videographers looking to make use of the faster Thunderbolt ports.
The radical redesign of the Mac Pro was only one of several messages that this WWDC keynote addressed. It wasn’t the first such presentation since the passing of Steve Jobs, but it’s the first to address speculation about the company’s direction since then.
So yes, Apple has taken note of the concerns about its ageing iOS platform, yes, it is offering cutting edge updates to its popular Macbooks, yes, it intends to meet the needs of its professional users, yes, it will update MacOS for its computer users and on top of that, yes we can return manufacturing to the USA, beginning with the new Mac Pro.
But really, it fell to Phil Schiller, the bear-like, gregarious presenter of many keynotes to sum up Apple’s attitude with the words, “Can’t innovate anymore my ass!”
WWDC keynote highlights.
Fifty billion apps on the iOS store have been downloaded in five years and Apple has paid developers $10 billion, $5 billion just in the last year.
Apple claims that the MacBook is the number one notebook in the US now, outpacing the PC in annual growth 15 percent to 3 percent over the last five years. Total growth over the last five years: 100 percent versus 18 percent for the PC.
Skeumorphism is gone in Mac OSX Mavericks. ““Even without the stitching, it still sticks to the homescreen,” Craig Federighi wryly noted while demonstrating the new Calendar app.
“True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation: It’s about bringing order to complexity,” Jony Ive on iOS7 which has attracted comparisons to current Android flavours.
Firewire is dead, long live Thunderbolt 2.
Comments
BitDepth#889 - June 11
10/06/13 21:13 Filed in: BitDepth - June 2013
Behind the blockbusters
Kirk, Spock and Khan in suitably explosive promotional materials for Star Trek: Into Darkness.
This wet season, or summer as our friends up north describe it, cinemas have exploded with action beginning with Iron Man 3 and continuing with Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Both are films that seem riddled with amazingly realised but utterly impossible technology, but neither, ultimately is about science.
Once you get past the beautiful people making pretty on the screen and the convincingly loud and colourful explosions, they are both really about politics and terrorism.
Exploring that is going to mean discussing the stories, which in turn means that there be spoilers here. If you haven’t seen either of these films, cut this column out or bookmark it, depending on your preferred reading medium, and get back to me if you want your cinema surprises intact.
With the unspoken, post 9/11 ten-year moratorium on cinematic destruction of cities apparently up since the coming of the film 2012, it’s seems that it’s now okay to blow up buildings in heavily populated city centres again, though the imperatives for such plots are much weightier than they used to be.
Tyler Durden might have been able to destroy buildings in the name of casual nihilism in 1999’s Fight Club, but such motivations seem flimsy to the producers of today’s special effects epics, even if the digital destruction is so much easier than it used to be.
You can’t just blow a beach house into the sea or unleash a savagely destructive alien horde or even crash a spaceship into a city anymore without getting your politics right it seems.
In both the third instalment of Iron Man, and the second in JJ Abrams' revamped Star Trek series, the real villainy is to be found in genetic manipulation for profit.
Seeking human perfection for such petty concerns as racial purity seem pretty lame when weighed against conquering all of known reality.
Yet in both films, the vehicle for planning the triumph of the superior man is old-fashioned terrorism, the blunt instrument of fear through intimidation and uncertainty.
One might think that a more nearly perfect human specimen might be inclined to think beyond using fear as a tool, but screenwriters are all too human, unfortunately, and a plot designed to support the machinations of a superior mind might be something of a non sequitur in a film that’s buoyed by people running around jumping off things that are breaking apart.
The engine of evil in Iron Man 3 is a weasel of a corporate scientist (disturbingly well played by Guy Pearce) who conscripts the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) to be the face of his wicked plans.
The Mandarin of the film abandons his comics origins as an Asian genius with super alien jewelry to become a Bin Laden analogue, the role further distanced from an itchy proximity to real world terrorism by an amusing plot twist.
Star Trek: Into Darkness deftly, if worshipfully resurrects the best film in the original series by rethinking Star Trek’s Nazi ubermensch cautionary tale, Khan Noonien Singh, as the perfect Mujahideen, a superweapon who outgrows his trainers and handlers.
Benedict Cumberbatch displaces Ricardo Montalblan’s theatrical flourishes of superiority with an unrelenting ruthlessness and casual manipulativeness that’s even scarier than the cold dead eyes and deadly physical precision that anchor his performance.
The new Khan doesn’t just see humanity as bugs, they are bugs he can’t be bothered to squash when he can just get them to kill each other.
Both of these films have been wildly successful. Is it because they blow stuff up real good or because they are quietly telling us something about our reality that we might never pay attention to if Charlie Rose or Noam Chomsky laid it out for us?
Kirk, Spock and Khan in suitably explosive promotional materials for Star Trek: Into Darkness.
This wet season, or summer as our friends up north describe it, cinemas have exploded with action beginning with Iron Man 3 and continuing with Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Both are films that seem riddled with amazingly realised but utterly impossible technology, but neither, ultimately is about science.
Once you get past the beautiful people making pretty on the screen and the convincingly loud and colourful explosions, they are both really about politics and terrorism.
Exploring that is going to mean discussing the stories, which in turn means that there be spoilers here. If you haven’t seen either of these films, cut this column out or bookmark it, depending on your preferred reading medium, and get back to me if you want your cinema surprises intact.
With the unspoken, post 9/11 ten-year moratorium on cinematic destruction of cities apparently up since the coming of the film 2012, it’s seems that it’s now okay to blow up buildings in heavily populated city centres again, though the imperatives for such plots are much weightier than they used to be.
Tyler Durden might have been able to destroy buildings in the name of casual nihilism in 1999’s Fight Club, but such motivations seem flimsy to the producers of today’s special effects epics, even if the digital destruction is so much easier than it used to be.
You can’t just blow a beach house into the sea or unleash a savagely destructive alien horde or even crash a spaceship into a city anymore without getting your politics right it seems.
In both the third instalment of Iron Man, and the second in JJ Abrams' revamped Star Trek series, the real villainy is to be found in genetic manipulation for profit.
Seeking human perfection for such petty concerns as racial purity seem pretty lame when weighed against conquering all of known reality.
Yet in both films, the vehicle for planning the triumph of the superior man is old-fashioned terrorism, the blunt instrument of fear through intimidation and uncertainty.
One might think that a more nearly perfect human specimen might be inclined to think beyond using fear as a tool, but screenwriters are all too human, unfortunately, and a plot designed to support the machinations of a superior mind might be something of a non sequitur in a film that’s buoyed by people running around jumping off things that are breaking apart.
The engine of evil in Iron Man 3 is a weasel of a corporate scientist (disturbingly well played by Guy Pearce) who conscripts the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) to be the face of his wicked plans.
The Mandarin of the film abandons his comics origins as an Asian genius with super alien jewelry to become a Bin Laden analogue, the role further distanced from an itchy proximity to real world terrorism by an amusing plot twist.
Star Trek: Into Darkness deftly, if worshipfully resurrects the best film in the original series by rethinking Star Trek’s Nazi ubermensch cautionary tale, Khan Noonien Singh, as the perfect Mujahideen, a superweapon who outgrows his trainers and handlers.
Benedict Cumberbatch displaces Ricardo Montalblan’s theatrical flourishes of superiority with an unrelenting ruthlessness and casual manipulativeness that’s even scarier than the cold dead eyes and deadly physical precision that anchor his performance.
The new Khan doesn’t just see humanity as bugs, they are bugs he can’t be bothered to squash when he can just get them to kill each other.
Both of these films have been wildly successful. Is it because they blow stuff up real good or because they are quietly telling us something about our reality that we might never pay attention to if Charlie Rose or Noam Chomsky laid it out for us?
BitDepth#888 - June 04
03/06/13 22:04 Filed in: BitDepth - June 2013
Limin’ with Lumia
At left, my personalised configuration of the Lumia 920, with the apps I use most often right at the top of the scrolling list. At right, using the keyboard in the text messaging app surprisingly switched to Portugese Spanish and wouldn’t switch back to English until I deleted all the non-English language profiles.
For the last two weeks I’ve been using a Nokia Lumia 920 as my primary phone. This is probably the toughest test a device has to go through with me, and a successful phone must prove that it can be configured to work the way I want it to.
Most casual smartphone users will find most of what they want to use on the Lumia. The software store built into the phone offers clients for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that are well designed and work well.
They may be surprised to find Instagram missing. Nokia includes a free image editor, Creative Studio, on its section of the Windows Phone store. It’s capable, but Instagram fans won’t find much joy there.
You’ll find Evernote, but no Dropbox or Wunderlist. Filebox will allow hardcore Dropbox users to access their assets and hardcore Windows users will find a very capable Skydrive client that fits into an Office software workflow well.
Lumia owners also get one unique app; a full version of the Modern UI Office suite that’s file compatible with current versions of the software.
For some business focused users, this may well prove to be the killer app of the Lumia line, allowing them to open work files on Skydrive using their smartphone.
Except for Wunderlist, all my hot button, or rather hot tile apps are present and accounted for on Windows Phone 8 and if they weren’t, I found software to substitute for the missing apps. Paperpress, for instance, reads my Instapaper cache of webpages.
Unfortunately, some of the built-in apps have the feel of unfinished software. Just days after starting to work with the phone, 11 system level updates appeared, at least one of which fixed a bookmark problem I was having with audiobooks on the device.
Running system updates betrays the phone’s Windows heritage though. Most phones just dim an app until an update is done. On Windows Phone 8, at least for now, text streams along the updates for built in apps, providing a brisk narrative of what’s being replaced. I found it fascinating. Some users, recalling The Matrix, may be freaked out. On a more positive note, if you don’t like some of the included software, you can simply delete it.
Several update cycles later, most of the wonkiness seemed to have been ironed out on the device, but some of the software design decisions seem odd.
You sweep from left to right to drill down into the file system and then from right to left to get back to where you were.
Some apps demand that you sweep upward, almost arbitrarily. I’m sure there’s some internal logic that I’m not getting here, and I still don’t understand why a phone call demands first a sweep upward and then a tile press to answer a call. Surely, one gesture should let the phone know I want to answer the call?
And about these tiles.
The People tile, a quite attractive display of images culled from e-mail and social media avatars, doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose, though it livens up a tile display quite nicely. You can resize tiles from a tiny square to a full screen spanning rectangle, but it isn’t always clear which tiles make sense at which size.
The tile for the store displays an “updates available” count regardless of its size, but the Twitter tile does nothing but display an icon no matter how big you make it. A Windows Phone 8 user’s best bet is to try tiles at different sizes and see what works best for them.
If you squeeze the centre of the volume buttons on the Lumia, a menu drops from the top which controls any currently playing audio. I found this out by accident, but it’s enormously useful.
Despite a quite serious amount of effort, I can’t figure out how to create a playlist of songs in the media player (I finally looked it up, it takes five utterly non-intuitive steps to do).
For a while, I couldn’t even transfer music files to the phone. The OS doesn’t seem to know what to do with files that appear in a Dropbox/Filebox file listing and the Windows Phone app for Mac, which claims to have file transfer capabilities, is useless.
I ended up connecting to the phone in Windows 7 in virtualisation on the Mac, where the device behaved like it had met a long lost friend.
The phone is littered with fit and finish software quirks like this. The software store, in particular, seems loosely curated. Searches for popular apps will sometimes turn up quite sketchy looking software. What, for instance, is “Instagramtweets?”
The Lumia will be a big win with serious-minded users, particularly business people who want an extension of their desktop experience on their smartphones.
The phone has a great camera, which will be part of a roundup of smartphone imaging in a couple of weeks, but it’s hard to see how this collaboration by Nokia and Microsoft will excite a young audience.
Related: BitDepth#886, Illuminating the Lumia
At left, my personalised configuration of the Lumia 920, with the apps I use most often right at the top of the scrolling list. At right, using the keyboard in the text messaging app surprisingly switched to Portugese Spanish and wouldn’t switch back to English until I deleted all the non-English language profiles.
For the last two weeks I’ve been using a Nokia Lumia 920 as my primary phone. This is probably the toughest test a device has to go through with me, and a successful phone must prove that it can be configured to work the way I want it to.
Most casual smartphone users will find most of what they want to use on the Lumia. The software store built into the phone offers clients for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that are well designed and work well.
They may be surprised to find Instagram missing. Nokia includes a free image editor, Creative Studio, on its section of the Windows Phone store. It’s capable, but Instagram fans won’t find much joy there.
You’ll find Evernote, but no Dropbox or Wunderlist. Filebox will allow hardcore Dropbox users to access their assets and hardcore Windows users will find a very capable Skydrive client that fits into an Office software workflow well.
Lumia owners also get one unique app; a full version of the Modern UI Office suite that’s file compatible with current versions of the software.
For some business focused users, this may well prove to be the killer app of the Lumia line, allowing them to open work files on Skydrive using their smartphone.
Except for Wunderlist, all my hot button, or rather hot tile apps are present and accounted for on Windows Phone 8 and if they weren’t, I found software to substitute for the missing apps. Paperpress, for instance, reads my Instapaper cache of webpages.
Unfortunately, some of the built-in apps have the feel of unfinished software. Just days after starting to work with the phone, 11 system level updates appeared, at least one of which fixed a bookmark problem I was having with audiobooks on the device.
Running system updates betrays the phone’s Windows heritage though. Most phones just dim an app until an update is done. On Windows Phone 8, at least for now, text streams along the updates for built in apps, providing a brisk narrative of what’s being replaced. I found it fascinating. Some users, recalling The Matrix, may be freaked out. On a more positive note, if you don’t like some of the included software, you can simply delete it.
Several update cycles later, most of the wonkiness seemed to have been ironed out on the device, but some of the software design decisions seem odd.
You sweep from left to right to drill down into the file system and then from right to left to get back to where you were.
Some apps demand that you sweep upward, almost arbitrarily. I’m sure there’s some internal logic that I’m not getting here, and I still don’t understand why a phone call demands first a sweep upward and then a tile press to answer a call. Surely, one gesture should let the phone know I want to answer the call?
And about these tiles.
The People tile, a quite attractive display of images culled from e-mail and social media avatars, doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose, though it livens up a tile display quite nicely. You can resize tiles from a tiny square to a full screen spanning rectangle, but it isn’t always clear which tiles make sense at which size.
The tile for the store displays an “updates available” count regardless of its size, but the Twitter tile does nothing but display an icon no matter how big you make it. A Windows Phone 8 user’s best bet is to try tiles at different sizes and see what works best for them.
If you squeeze the centre of the volume buttons on the Lumia, a menu drops from the top which controls any currently playing audio. I found this out by accident, but it’s enormously useful.
Despite a quite serious amount of effort, I can’t figure out how to create a playlist of songs in the media player (I finally looked it up, it takes five utterly non-intuitive steps to do).
For a while, I couldn’t even transfer music files to the phone. The OS doesn’t seem to know what to do with files that appear in a Dropbox/Filebox file listing and the Windows Phone app for Mac, which claims to have file transfer capabilities, is useless.
I ended up connecting to the phone in Windows 7 in virtualisation on the Mac, where the device behaved like it had met a long lost friend.
The phone is littered with fit and finish software quirks like this. The software store, in particular, seems loosely curated. Searches for popular apps will sometimes turn up quite sketchy looking software. What, for instance, is “Instagramtweets?”
The Lumia will be a big win with serious-minded users, particularly business people who want an extension of their desktop experience on their smartphones.
The phone has a great camera, which will be part of a roundup of smartphone imaging in a couple of weeks, but it’s hard to see how this collaboration by Nokia and Microsoft will excite a young audience.
Related: BitDepth#886, Illuminating the Lumia
BitDepth#887 - May 28
27/05/13 19:30 Filed in: BitDepth - May 2013
An e-mail primer
Here’s a recent e-mail that shows how spammers try to subvert digital controls.
In 1, the sender’s e-mail address is given an official sounding title, but the e-mail client reveals the actual sender, who is not e-mailing from an official LinkedIn account. This field, where users will normally put their real names, can be anything, including another e-mail address entirely and some clients will show that and not the underlying e-mail address as seen at left.
The extended e-mail header is revealed in 2, which tells the truth about the e-mail. A skilled mail server wrangler can read this geek stream and divine a great deal about this e-mail’s routing.
For 3, the sender has spent a bit of effort making the body of their e-mail look like an official LinkedIn transmission, albeit with a link that looks nothing like something that the social media service would use.
Regardless of which side of the political divide you choose to support, it’s clear that the discussions about the recent revelation of a thread of e-mail conversations offered in Parliament by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley has provoked strong emotional reactions.
That’s understandable when it comes to politics, but such sentiments are wholly out of place when it comes to the technologies underlying even such commonplace services as e-mail transmissions.
Technology is absolute. It deals in verifiable bits that either are or are not. A message either has a proper transmission header or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it's unverifiable and useless as evidence, regardless of who offers it. This may be a confusing matter for politicians, who trade in mood, feelings and allegiances, none of which have any impact on bits.
Information on the web may have mood and feeling, but its existence is trackable and verifiable every step of the way (unless people take the trouble to use anonymizers and other identity obscuring tools).
E-mails can't just look right or wrong, they are either truly electronic transmissions and can be verified as such with a trackable footprint or they are not. It really is as simple as that.
If that last bit looks familiar, it’s because it’s part of an answer to questions put to me by Global Voices on the matter. I repeat that statement here because it seems worth considering in the heat of opinion on the matter.
As of this writing, there has been no public revelation by the Opposition Leader of digital copies of these alleged transmissions that might be scrutinised by authorities.
That this simple fact has not occupied a greater profile in the discourse is an illustration of the passions driving the situation and it may point to a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of e-mail, which can’t simply be transposed to print while retaining its essential character.
Like much of modern technology, the humble e-mail has come to be dressed in appealing and readable skins of design, whether users choose to read their mail in a dedicated client or using web based e-mail services.
An e-mail is far more than the words we are invited to read because this digital document, like its predecessor postal mail, travels through multiple collection and transfer points before reaching its destination.
Sitting next to the management in our living room, I’ll often send an e-mail with a link to something interesting. To speed things up, I’ll usually send it to her business domain using my business domain, since both are hosted by the same company.
That doesn’t mean that they will pass through the same server though. That e-mail will leave my laptop, stop at Flow, get rerouted to the hosting company’s servers, get transferred to her e-mail server, then make its way back, stopping off at Flow on the way back.
Depending on the state of the Internet at the precise moment I send the e-mail off, it may get rerouted halfway around the world before reaching its destination, someone sitting within reach of my outstretched hand.
Every routing that e-mail takes gets logged within the e-mail itself and provides a unique imprint of its specific source, transfer history and destination. General David Petraeus found out just how detailed that information can be to his considerable misfortune.
Detectives pursuing clues among physical objects look for identifying information, DNA evidence, fingerprints, materials that are out of place.
Digital detectives assigned to review these accusatory e-mails will search for much the same thing, but it will be found in the bits of digital transmission, not in paper facsimiles.
Here’s a recent e-mail that shows how spammers try to subvert digital controls.
In 1, the sender’s e-mail address is given an official sounding title, but the e-mail client reveals the actual sender, who is not e-mailing from an official LinkedIn account. This field, where users will normally put their real names, can be anything, including another e-mail address entirely and some clients will show that and not the underlying e-mail address as seen at left.
The extended e-mail header is revealed in 2, which tells the truth about the e-mail. A skilled mail server wrangler can read this geek stream and divine a great deal about this e-mail’s routing.
For 3, the sender has spent a bit of effort making the body of their e-mail look like an official LinkedIn transmission, albeit with a link that looks nothing like something that the social media service would use.
Regardless of which side of the political divide you choose to support, it’s clear that the discussions about the recent revelation of a thread of e-mail conversations offered in Parliament by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley has provoked strong emotional reactions.
That’s understandable when it comes to politics, but such sentiments are wholly out of place when it comes to the technologies underlying even such commonplace services as e-mail transmissions.
Technology is absolute. It deals in verifiable bits that either are or are not. A message either has a proper transmission header or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it's unverifiable and useless as evidence, regardless of who offers it. This may be a confusing matter for politicians, who trade in mood, feelings and allegiances, none of which have any impact on bits.
Information on the web may have mood and feeling, but its existence is trackable and verifiable every step of the way (unless people take the trouble to use anonymizers and other identity obscuring tools).
E-mails can't just look right or wrong, they are either truly electronic transmissions and can be verified as such with a trackable footprint or they are not. It really is as simple as that.
If that last bit looks familiar, it’s because it’s part of an answer to questions put to me by Global Voices on the matter. I repeat that statement here because it seems worth considering in the heat of opinion on the matter.
As of this writing, there has been no public revelation by the Opposition Leader of digital copies of these alleged transmissions that might be scrutinised by authorities.
That this simple fact has not occupied a greater profile in the discourse is an illustration of the passions driving the situation and it may point to a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of e-mail, which can’t simply be transposed to print while retaining its essential character.
Like much of modern technology, the humble e-mail has come to be dressed in appealing and readable skins of design, whether users choose to read their mail in a dedicated client or using web based e-mail services.
An e-mail is far more than the words we are invited to read because this digital document, like its predecessor postal mail, travels through multiple collection and transfer points before reaching its destination.
Sitting next to the management in our living room, I’ll often send an e-mail with a link to something interesting. To speed things up, I’ll usually send it to her business domain using my business domain, since both are hosted by the same company.
That doesn’t mean that they will pass through the same server though. That e-mail will leave my laptop, stop at Flow, get rerouted to the hosting company’s servers, get transferred to her e-mail server, then make its way back, stopping off at Flow on the way back.
Depending on the state of the Internet at the precise moment I send the e-mail off, it may get rerouted halfway around the world before reaching its destination, someone sitting within reach of my outstretched hand.
Every routing that e-mail takes gets logged within the e-mail itself and provides a unique imprint of its specific source, transfer history and destination. General David Petraeus found out just how detailed that information can be to his considerable misfortune.
Detectives pursuing clues among physical objects look for identifying information, DNA evidence, fingerprints, materials that are out of place.
Digital detectives assigned to review these accusatory e-mails will search for much the same thing, but it will be found in the bits of digital transmission, not in paper facsimiles.
BitDepth#886 - May 21
20/05/13 20:44 Filed in: BitDepth - May 2013
Nokia's new Lumia is an intriguing collaboration involving the veteran cell phone manufacturer and Microsoft. Some thoughts about the hardware first... Click here to read more...
BitDepth#885 - May 14
13/05/13 23:17 Filed in: BitDepth - May 2013
Kelli Richards, online digital distribution pioneer, offers advice to local creatives on moving their work online... Click here to read more...
BitDepth#349 -August 2002
13/05/13 22:58 Filed in: BitDepth+
A 2002 BitDepth column about online digital marketing and promotion... Click here to read more...
BitDepth#884 - May 07
06/05/13 21:39 Filed in: BitDepth - May 2013
Putting the new Samsung S4 to work... Click here to read more...
BitDepth#883 - April 30
29/04/13 20:18 Filed in: BitDepth - April 2013
Ready to make a smartphone choice among the many new devices on offer? Some things you may want to consider... Click here to read more...
BitDepth#882 - April 23
22/04/13 22:41 Filed in: BitDepth - April 2013
At CDX2, issues related to government and big data formed a major part of the discussions. Some of the key topics are reported here. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#881 - April 16
15/04/13 20:48 Filed in: BitDepth - April 2013
At the second Caribbean Digital Expo, the discussions were about content and hard metrics. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#880 - April 09
08/04/13 21:53 Filed in: BitDepth - April 2013
Evernote is a great tool to capture notes and synchronize them across platforms, but writers may find it a useful tool for working in workgroups and on multiple devices. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#879 - April 02
07/04/13 00:05 Filed in: BitDepth - April 2013
Wunderlist makes a digital to do list present on multile devices and platforms. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#878 - March 26
25/03/13 21:37 Filed in: BitDepth - March 2013
Samsung's Elias Kabeche, VP Sales and Marketing for Latin America, answers questions about the company's new smartphone. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#877 - March 19
18/03/13 20:10 Filed in: BitDepth - March 2013
Samsung introduces the new S4 smart phone. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#876 - March 12
11/03/13 21:21 Filed in: BitDepth - March 2013
The National Carnival Commission goes to the stakeholders of Carnival to clarify its role. Some suggestions arose. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#875 - March 05
04/03/13 19:34 Filed in: BitDepth - March 2013
CarnivalTV has been fighting to do its work in the festival for two years now. What's been happening with them? Click here to read more...
BitDepth#874 - February 26
25/02/13 21:56 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
All the bacchanal about copyright in Carnival 2013 was about money, whether it's real or imagined remains to be seen. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#873 - February 19
18/02/13 19:36 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
An open letter to Allison Demas on managing Carnival 2013, Click here to read more...
BitDepth#872 - February 12
11/02/13 21:25 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Is Carnival a collection of traditions or is it a commercial enterprise. Deciding this will define its future. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#871 - February 05
04/02/13 21:20 Filed in: BitDepth - February 2013
Blackberry, formerly RIM, introduces the new Z10 and a new operating system for a new era of smartphones. Is it too little too late? Click here to read more...
BitDepth#870 - January 29
28/01/13 21:13 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
Thinking about backup hits home when a drive goes away suddenly. Thoughts about backup systems and strategies. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#869 - January 22
21/01/13 22:45 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
HP brings its new enterprise level storage system to Trinidad and Tobago, sparking some thoughts about deep storage. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#868 - January 15
14/01/13 22:31 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
In a bizarre online error, Adobe inadvertently offers public access to its seven year old CS2 suite. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#867 - January 08
07/01/13 22:30 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
Cool stuff we learned in 2012. Click here to read more...
BitDepth#866 - January 01
31/12/12 21:42 Filed in: BitDepth - January 2013
Gifts you should have got for Christmas. Clip and save to pass on to your loved one for hints on your birthday. Click here to read more...
