EU has its knickers in a twist over Microsoft Windows 7

Microsoft has decided that the forthcoming release of Windows 7 will exclude Internet Explorer 8 in the EU, to avoid any further anti-trust fines from the European Commission. Now the EU have their knickers in a twist because they told Microsoft to stop including Internet Explorer in Windows, but actually that wasn't what they actually wanted. They really wanted Microsoft to offer alternative browsers to customers when the customer installs Windows 7 for the first time. Therein lies a rather short sightedness from the EU, that has genuinely left them looking rather stupid.

Microsoft is unable to pre-install other companies software into the operating system. If they did, that too would be an anti-trust case waiting to happen. Who gets included, who doesn't? Furthermore, can you imagine the licensing implications, the tie in for language support. The list goes on. It is simply never going to happen, and nor should it. PC manufacturers have the responsibility to offer the alternative, not Microsoft.

Now the EU is left with egg on its face (yet again), and Microsoft will be giggling like a bunch of school boys. The EU got what it asked for. Case closed. No company should be forced to promote a competitors’ product. Now, how about we take a look at Apple and Safari, oh wise ones in Brussels?

Taking a bite out of Apple

Apple are in the news again today. The first story that caught my eye was that O2 is to charge an extra monthly fee for iPhone tethering. It plans to charge a whopping £15 per month when the new iPhone 3G S models come out, and the base contract cost will also increase for the new model. At first one has a tendency to blame O2, but if you really think about it, the bad guy here is Apple. Apple has mastered a very non-consumer-friendly "exclusivity deal" with O2, and O2 had to bid a lot of money to get the deal. This cost is being passed on to O2 customers.

I actually think that what Apple has done with O2 should be made illegal across the EU and that they should be fined. The French competition agency ruled the Orange-Apple exclusive deal anti-competitive and illegal back in 2008, and the Germans made a similar decision in 2007. The EU needs to stamp out this practice, and soon.

The second piece of news that I noticed this morning, was a story about a criminal gang that published their own songs, but then bought them via iTunes (and Amazon) with stolen credit cards. Notably, the gang made $300,000 from the royalties on $750,000 of sales.

If you do the math, that's a 40% return for the gang. The real crime is that Amazon and Apple earn the other 60%. Previous estimates have suggested that Apple's iTunes profit margin is around 30%. Have I missed something here, or are these two figures vastly different?

So in summary, the British authorities do not see a problem with Apple and a mobile operator openly colluding to restrict competition and fix prices and Apple are taking a rather nice cut on iTunes sales, passing 40% to the producers.

Dirty workaround for iPhone RDP and Cisco VPN problems

I've been trying to setup my iPhone VPN using the built-in iPhone Cisco VPN IPSEC client. The main reason being is that there is now an Remote Desktop (RDP) client available in the Apple App Store (RDP Lite) for free and I have servers which require a Cisco VPN client.

However, the iPhone only seems to support certain Cisco VPN configs. I have a wide range of VPNs I can test with and none of them would work. The suggested Apple/Cisco solution is to configure the Cisco hardware to work with the iPhone, but in my book that's just like drilling out the square hole to fit the round peg.

So, I thought of a way around this, which is a dirty, nasty and XXX rated. :-) 

You can RDP from the iPhone to your PC if you are on the same LAN. Then, via that RDP session, you can then use your PC's Cisco VPN client to connect to the required remote network and then RDP to the remote server from your PC instead. Whhheeewww....

If you want to connect to your PC from outside your home network then you can setup your Windows XP box to accept incoming PPTP VPN connections (which the iPhone seems to connect to quite happily) and configure your router to forward the connection through.

It's not pretty, and probably slow, but theoretically it should work...

Parliament Hotel - Better than expensing a second home?

With all the fuss going on at the moment over minister's expense claims in the UK, I thought that a much better solution. I think that the state should buy a hotel in Westminster and ministers would stay there whilst conducting their parliamentary business in London.

The underlying problem here is that the vast majority of MPs represent constituencies that are geographically distant from London, and as a result that are required to spend a great deal of time in London to conduct the day-to-day business of being an MP.

The second home allows minister the flexibility of somewhere to stay, rather than paying for a hotel, whilst in London. However, this system has been systematically abused.

If the state was to buy a hotel, many of the basic expenses that are currently individually claimed for by MPs for their second homes (heating, electricity, telephone, internet, cleaning) would all be provided by Parliament hotel on a fixed basis that the tax payer pays for, but with the knowledge that these expenses are fixed. Gone are the expenses for a new boiler, or £600 hanging baskets.

It would basically be a big halls of residence, and for other civil servants, such as the police, ambulance and fire fighters of London, this is a quite common scenario.

What do you think? Good idea or stupid idea?

How to bring down the system in 10 easy steps

1. Wait for the government bailouts to invoke inflationary consequences
   
2. Wait for unemployment to rise sharply
   
3. Wait for the housing market to completely collapse
   
4. Wait for the home owners to be stuck in negative equitity and lose their homes when they lose their jobs
   
5. Wait for the protests and demonstrations by the hippies and anarchists
   
6. Wait for the police brutalitity to get so bad that the media actually reports it
   
7. Wait for the media to have their key rights (as the fourth estate) to be removed by the establishment
   
8. Wait for the establishment to revoke your human rights, apply marshal law and implement a policed state
   
9. Wait for the protests, widespread strikes and demonstrations by the general public including the middle classes
   
10. Act and collectively stop paying all debts.
    

The past 9 months have demonstrated that the system is fallable. The interconnected governments, economies and social constructs are dependent on the free flow of credit. This is why we have seen the billions of dollars pumped into the financial system, even though in the long term the result will be massive inflation and an unimaginable burden of debt that will be passed on to the next generations.

The system is like a river. Every couple of years the public get a chance to slightly alter the course of the river in "democratic" elections, aimed to give us the feeling of choice and a voice. The end result, whoever we choose, is that the water in the river ends up in the sea. Action number 10, cuts off the water, and without water, the river runs dry.

Bringing down the system is risky. The result is most likely to be massive upheaval. Your comfortable lives will melt away, replaced with short to medium term pain; no jobs, starvation, violence and aggression. 

However, in the long term, people will adapt, and a new system will takes the place of the old. Perhaps better, perhaps the same, perhaps worse, but like a phoenix, it will be stronger and less infallable than the one before.

What might scare you more is that the first 9 steps are passive, and many of them are, or have already occurred. It is only the very last step, that requires your collective and active participation to complete the process.

I think I have outlined how the system has its very own built in self destruct button. But are you prepared to press it? I'm not sure I would.

Implementing RPX without ASP.NET Membership

I've almost completed my test of RPX with ASP.NET webforms. My first pass attempted to mix the ASP.NET Membership with RPX, and although I got it working, it felt like a fudge. I wrote a custom Membership Provider, and pushed the RPX identities through it, but somehow it just felt dirty. 

In fact I've never liked the ASP.NET Membership model, and it has always bugged me. It forces you into a model of username over email address (where email addresses are always more memorable and unique)  and never seems to deliver a profesional finish. Now OpenID is here to stay, making registration and login so simple, the Membership model feels slightly wonky. It still has its place, especially in intranet applications with Windows / LDAP, but as an internet model it just sucks. Look at any of the big popular websites out there, and then imagine the CreateUserWizard. I know it can be customized, but hell, they could have made it just a little bit more snazzy.

Membership rant aside and to cut a long story short, I dropped the custom Membership Provider. I cut everything down to the bare minimum, and aimed to produce a skeleton website, that uses RPX as an authentication mechanism, and would be my base framework for any new sites I build.

I used two tables, the first stores our base Account information, and it's dead simple, containing only an AccountId and a Nickname. The second table is AccountIdentity and stores identities for each Account, and one Account can be associated to multiple identities. 

Why multiple identities? Well, users often have more than one OpenID provider. They might have a Google Account and YahooID, they might also have a Myspace or a Facebook account. Any of these can be used as an OpenID, and the user might want to tie these all together into one Account with us, or not - the choice is theirs.

Our AccountIdentity table stores all of the common information provided by the RXPAuthenticationDetails, delivered after a callback to the RPX Service. 

In more detail - when a user clicks on the sign-in button, provided by the easy to use login controls RPX Now gives you to get started, you give RPX a Url on your website, to which the user will be redirected to after they have authorised your website with their OpenID provider. In this authentication stage you'll do a couple of things:

1. Check if the user is already logged in. If so, we are going to check the existing AccountIdentity table to see if this RPX Identity already exists for this user, and if not, we'll add it.
   
2. If the user is not logged in, we check the RXPAuthenticationDetails to see if a "LocalKey" was provided. If so, we've already mapped this RPX Identity to an existing user account. We need to load the appropriate account, check the identity does indeed match, and then log the user in.
   
3. Finally, if the user is not logged in, and no LocalKey was provided then this user is probably new. We should still check the existing AccountIdentity table to make sure the identity doesn't exist, and then we'll create a brand new account, and store the new associated identity.
   

Then we use the Account.AccountId as the Forms Authentication ticket, and sign the user in. That's it, nothing more complicated.

So, what about Roles, and Profiles you ask? Well that's to come...

Why the Pirate Bay should win

I don't buy music anymore, yet I don't download either. I'm living in a historic music bubble, deliberately uninterested in any new music, yet enjoying what I already own.

The simple reason why I no longer buy music is that I refuse to support an industry that I feel is deliberately and persistently abusing its customer base.

Every forward thinking company that tries to do something interesting with music and technology is given the middle finger by the music cartel.

I feel sorry for the artists, but they choose to sign up with a bunch of greedy, immoral robbing bastards.

I really hope the Pirate Bay wins, not because they are right, but what they stand for. If they lose, consumers should vote with their cash, and boycott all music until the cartel crumbles.

We all know that people are downloading copyrighted content via their torrent tracker, but we should put Google in the dock too, because you can find torrents through their search engine as well.

If Google had balls, they would say as much. I would love to see a statement of Google stating that fact. They would certainly win a lot of hearts and minds by doing so.

"Do no evil", also implies "do some good" too.