Apple : Opinion: Google Drive: motivated by meanness |
- Opinion: Google Drive: motivated by meanness
- Interview: How the experts track a stolen laptop
- Opinion: Why an Apple Valve tie-up makes a lot of sense
- In Depth: Is iTunes Match worth the money?
- Independent publishers back Apple in ebook price-fixing suit
| Opinion: Google Drive: motivated by meanness Posted:  Hurrah for Google! Just six years after it was about to launch, Google Drive is finally about to launch! I don't know about you, but I'm excited. At last I'll be able to store files in the cloud, enabling me to access them from anywhere. And not just that, but I'll be able to use them on tablets and on smartphones too. If it weren't for DropBoxSugarSynciCloudSkyDrive that'd be pretty mind-blowing. Okay, okay, I'm being mean. But I can't help thinking that Google Drive's imminent appearance is motivated by meanness too. Google Drive has been vapourware for years, and while Google never shipped it firms such as Dropbox got on with the job of creating elegant cloud syncing services that are real, that work, and that are loved by their users. I bet Dropbox is in Sergey Brin's Enemies of the Internet list along with Facebook and Apple. I bet he sits there, imagining all those files, hidden from the watchful eyes of Google's spiders. "There is information on the internet we cannot crawl?" he shouts. "DropBox must die!" Something like that, anyway. Google Eggs, Google BasketEven if you don't care for other sync services, there are reasons to think twice before trusting Google with yet another piece of your personal information. Storing everything with one organisation, whether it's Google or anybody else, means that in the event of a privacy breach or law enforcement fishing expedition there's a lot of stuff about you being shared. Less dramatically but probably more importantly, Google makes children cry. Take Alex, for example. Alex was ten when Google killed all of his accounts: he created a Google Profile, and because Google accounts aren't supposed to be available to under-13s, all of his existing Google services were locked down. As his dad explained, "Google is basically just going to delete his last two years of email messages (they don't offer any way to log in and export his messages), and plans to cut him off from his family until he turns 13. This is a kid who lives on the computer." That's the problem with interlinked services. If you get shut out of one, you're often shut out of all of them -- and with Google services, it's easy to get shut out of them even if you're over 13. We saw that in the early days of Google+, when people using pseudonyms, business names or stage names found their accounts suspended. It doesn't do it very often, but Google reserves the right to suspend a Google Account "from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system" if there is a violation of the Google Terms of Service, product-specific Terms of Service or product-specific policies, or "at any time, for any reason, with or without notice". That's Google's prerogative, of course, but its guilty-until-proven-innocent approach to account suspension means I'm wary about putting too many Google eggs in the same Google basket. |
| Interview: How the experts track a stolen laptop Posted:  How the experts track a stolen laptopYou've heard the tales who manage to recover their laptops through identifying those responsible, but have you ever wondered how the professionals do it? We spoke to the head of the investigation team that spends its time recovering stolen laptops for clients ranging from large corporates with crucial data at stake to individuals trying to get back their family photos. The clients in question are uses of Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops – a subscription service for Mac and PC. The protection includes software at the firmware level, but also includes the services of a specialist recovery team who investigate a theft on your behalf after you report it. We spoke to Derek Skinner, Head of Recovery for Absolute in Europe. He leads a squad of ex-Police Globally, there are over 40 investigators. "We're all ex law enforcement," says Skinner "so we all speak the language and have a skill for investigation. It's a unique service." "We've a thousand years of policing experience between us. A lot of the police services use our product and know who we are. We then create our evidence packs and supply them to the investigating officer." What's the success rate? "It's three out of four, 23,000 total recoveries. It's a huge amount." How the tracking happensSo how does it work? "What happens is say your laptop is covered by us and gets stolen or lost. You report it stolen Via the internet portal or helpline." Local law enforcement is involved straight away. "We can't do anything at all until there's a police investigation in place," explains Skinner. "We are basically the agent for our customer, we'll contact the agency involved – we've got 6,500 law enforcement contacts globally. A huge database." In terms of the software involved, the laptop has a tracking agent hich changes its state. "It calls back to us and says 'am I OK?' and we say 'no you're stolen, call back in 15 minutes'. "It starts to call back across any internet connection, could be GSM, could be Wi-Fi. It's all covert, you can't see this kind of chatter. Then we actually force a couple of other tools onto the device - our forensic tools basically - so we start collecting much more information from the machine than we did in its normal state. Undetectable softwareWe were intrigued how the software avoids detection. "The software bodyguard sits in the firmware, so you could take out the hard drive or format it or do what you like – as soon as the laptop is switched on again the firmware agent will check with the software agent, see it's been compromised and install a new version; the persistence level is very high." So what happens next? "The case is assigned to an investigator and there's a personal contact then between the aggrieved individual and the investigator. On the technical side, as soon as the extra software is installed, it starts to send back screen captures, key captures, file retrieval, Wi-Fi triangulation or GPS points." The investigators are key at this stage. "All the bits of information are worth nothing if you can't compile them correctly to supply them to law enforcement." People are pinpointed through what they do with the system. "Facebook is a big help," says Skinner. "Obviously people order things online, eBay is a big one. All these [are] pockets of information we can pull together and validate using investigative tools that a police officer would use every day and looking at photos and triangulation maps. Should you do anything yourself?We also asked Skinner what he thought of vigilante action to recover stolen devices, such as the recent UK case of a man filming someone on a train when he stole a phone. "No. There's some real horror stories our there, certainly in the US there was a fatal shooting in Dallas over a laptop with tracking software and there have been numerous issues with Find My iPhone. Obviously one iPhone is identical to another iPhone – what good is a map? "Go to Paddington Station and see how many iPhones you can find there. Evidentially it's so weak and that's the problem with a lot of the DIY solutions; the evidence is not presented correctly, it's not interpreted correctly. "And it's a folly to believe that people that steal laptops are just laptop thieves. We've uncovered drug rings, stolen cars, huge handling organisations where they handle tech to go out to Pakistan and Eastern Europe. You're hardly going to knock on the door and say 'can I have my laptop back please?' "The idea may be good – 70 per cent of people say they would go themselves but it's a horrific thought. We deal with some pretty top-end criminals. A lot of these other software apps are actually downright illegal and have no certifications. A global problemIf laptops can't be recovered, the device can be completely wiped and, in some cases, bricked. "The data can be wiped to FBI standard – seven times overpass – so the data is safe," says Skinner. "Obviously we always want to recover the device as well, but it also adds the ability to get some closure – it potentially becomes a paperweight, nobody gains from the theft. On the other hand the device is clean and unusable." So where do laptops end up? Everywhere it seems. "We get devices that travel around the world in days, faster than FedEx." With people? "Yes. Obviously if it ends up in a warzone we're limited with what we can do, but we can still lock the device at the firmware level with a notice – we can write what we like. Often we can make it very personal and point out that individual. "You'd be amazed, we've had recoveries from Nigeria, Uganda, Northern Pakistan, unstable parts of the world, just by putting enough pressure on them. We had a device go to Pakistan from the UK and back and he was picked up entering the country illegally. We see a very big picture |
| Opinion: Why an Apple Valve tie-up makes a lot of sense Posted:  A few years ago a rumour appeared that Google was in the market to buy gaming giant Valve, ticking enough boxes to be given widespread coverage by the tech media. Principally it made a lot of sense – Valve, as well as being the company behind wildly brilliant games like Team Fortress, Portal and the doyenne of first person shooters Half Life, also owns the successful Steam delivery system. However despite a huge amount of excitement about the potential of a Google Valve tie-up it never came to fruition, but when Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted wandering into Valve HQ, it's no surprise that the rumour mill started grinding all over again. Although you can't entirely rule out cash-rich Apple snapping up one of the greatest gaming companies around, it would be an extreme and seemingly unlikely move.
More likely the two are collaborating on something. The rumour, of course, is that it could be gaming hardware, especially given the escalating talk that Valve is working on its own gaming box. This is, of course, hugely exciting. Valve, it could be argued, is the Apple of gaming. How do you reach this conclusion? Well, like Apple, it has built its success on a number of power brands (the inimitable Half Life series, Portal and Team Fortress), it has become vital to third parties through Steam just as Apple has with its App Store and, perhaps most vitally, it is an immensely cool brand with a mass of fanboys. Valve also adopts a similar attitude to press; although the world knows it is working on the next Half Life you won't see any details about it and the company certainly won't be courting publicity for the product – mainly because the rumour mill does its work for it. The truth is more likely to be that its something to do with a current Apple brand; it could be a game for iOS, it could be Steam on the much-rumoured iTV, it could be some other form of streamed gaming or it could be that Tim Cook is merely gathering some knowledge from a few guys that used to work for Microsoft before establishing a gaming dynasty. What if?But, for a little while at least, it's okay to wonder "what if ?" It's okay to talk about the Apple competitor for the Xbox and PS4 and fine to dream about Half Life 3 launching the system. Yes the truth is probably much more mundane. But when you have the Apple of gaming, and the Apple of, well, the world, meeting up it's also pretty good to have some fun with the news. Of course, if we see Google's Larry Page and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer turning up later in the week then we'd be okay with that as well. |
| In Depth: Is iTunes Match worth the money? Posted:  Is iTunes Match worth the money?Looking after a big iTunes library can be a problem. We started ripping our CDs in the early days of the iPod when disk space was still at a premium, and as a result a good chunk of our library consists of poor quality, low bitrate MP3s. It's enormous, too, and fear of losing the lot means we're constantly spending cash on ever larger hard disks. And then there's syncing. Oh, the syncing. Maybe we're unusual, but our iTunes library is shared across a few devices. There's the iMac, of course, but we like to listen to the odd thing on our old MacBook Pro too. There's the iPhones - the 4 and the 3GS - and the iPad, and the Apple TV. Home Sharing helps, but we're still spending more time syncing music than we do actually listening to it. iTunes Match solves all of that. It replaces your rubbish rips with shiny 256Kbps AACs, and if it doesn't recognise a track it automatically uploads your copy of it. It automatically syncs playlists and purchases between all your devices. And it saves on storage space by streaming music from iCloud. It sounds brilliant. Is it any good? Data grumblesThe problem with anything cloud-based is that at home you have speedy cable or ADSL and the joys of Airport Extreme, but when you're out and about you're dependent on the UK's mobile data networks. And in our experience, they're usually rubbish. So what happens when you try and use iTunes Match on a 3G connection? The short answer is that you wait. A lot. We tried iTunes Match in multiple locations - in the gym, in the garden, on the bus - on an iPhone 4 and the results weren't great, even when we had a strong 3G signal. Clicking on a song that wasn't already on our iPhone meant waiting ten seconds or more for it to start playing, and switching from song to song killed the currently playing track long before the next one was ready to start. We also encountered playback problems with songs stopping, and starting, and stopping again. 3G mobile broadband should be up to the job - its top speed in our area is 7.2Mbps - but that figure only applies if you cover yourself in tinfoil and tie yourself to a mobile phone mast. Our mobile broadband struggles with small PDFs in email attachments, so it's not a huge surprise that it chokes on good-quality music files too. Things are more successful on Wi-Fi. We tried iTunes match on our iPhone and on our Apple TV, and, in both cases, songs started instantly. You could use iTunes Match as an alternative to Home Sharing for your Apple TV, although we're not sure why you'd want to: after all, Home Sharing uses your home network, not the wider internet, so it's less likely to suffer from connection problems. When it comes to streaming, then, iTunes Match is great on Wi-Fi and less great on 3G. Apple knows this, we think, because 3G's off by default: to enable it you need to go to Settings > Store > Use Cellular Data > On. It's also worth mentioning that you should disable 3G if you're off on holiday. If you don't, the data roaming charges could ruin you. Backups and better
There's much more to iTunes Match than mobile music: it's an excellent backup service, and it's an exceptionally easy way to upgrade your iTunes library too. That's not bad for £21.99 per year. There are several benefits to backing up your iTunes library. The first is that the alternative of re-ripping years of CDs is horrible, and the second is that it saves you from having to buy an external hard disk or go through the process of burning CDs or DVDs. That said, we'd advise making a backup of your music before signing up for the service. Better safe than sorry. The icing on the cake is that you can also use iTunes Match to improve the quality of your library. Provided you've ripped tracks at 128Kbps or higher and iTunes Match recognises them, you can replace the existing copies with a new AAC file converted at 256Kbps. In our case, that meant updating 6,400 songs. There are a couple of conditions. You can only upgrade music, not other kinds of audio content, and you're limited to 25,000 songs plus iTunes purchases - they don't count towards the total number of tracks. There isn't a one-button "Upgrade my music" option, but the upgrade process is still simple. Once you've signed up for iTunes Match and let iTunes scan and upload your library (a process that takes hours), you can create a Smart Playlist. The criteria should be: * Match all of the following rules Save your playlist. Now for the scary bit: you need to select every file in your new playlist, press Option-delete, and select Move to Trash. iTunes will now ask whether you're sure about deleting the files; before clicking on Delete Songs, make sure that the "also delete these songs from iCloud" box is NOT checked. Your songs don't disappear when you do this. Instead, a cloud icon appears next to each one. That icon means the songs are not on your Mac, but are available in iCloud. The next step is to download them. To do that, it's time for another Smart Playlist. This time your criteria are: * Match all of the following rules Open your new playlist, select everything, right-click and then select Download. Now, go to bed: if you've got a hefty selection of songs to download, downloading the new versions is an overnight job. What happens if...?There are a number of things to consider before putting your head in the iCloud. Once you hit 25,000 songs you can't add anything else to iTunes that you didn't buy from iTunes. There is a way round that, but it's a clunky one: you can split large iTunes libraries in two and then only synchronise one of them with iCloud. Then again, it's not a problem that's going to affect huge numbers of people: 25,000 songs is the equivalent of nearly 2,100 CDs. You're more likely to run into the device limit, as iTunes Match is limited to ten devices. The main limit, however, is financial. If you don't renew the service after 12 months, your iCloud music library disappears. The tracks you've updated won't revert to rubbish bitrates again - they're yours to keep forever - but if there's anything in iCloud you haven't downloaded to your Mac it'll be gone. iTunes Match simply doesn't recognise some tracks, which is particularly annoying if it's happily matched the other 11 songs from the same album, and if there is more than one version of a particular song - for example, because it appeared on more than one album - it sometimes matches the wrong one. We found that albums were occasionally split up, so you might have tracks 1, 2 and 3 in one version of the album and the others in a second version. It's not the end of the world - a quick Command+I enables you to fix the metadata - but it's quite annoying. To be fair to Gracenote, whose MusicID technology does the matching, it's an incredibly difficult job: not only are there hundreds of thousands of records to compare tracks to, but those records have been released as remasters, anniversary editions, radio edits, US, UK, Japanese and German editions, collectors' editions, box sets… it's amazing the system works at all. Mac news and reviews  Apple Mac laptop reviewsApple Mac desktop reviews All our Apple news, features and reviews Nevertheless, don't be surprised if iTunes Match sometimes fails to, er, match. If that happens, it'll upload the version from your library instead. There are other issues. Some people have experienced artwork disappearing from matched music, while others have seen explicit versions of their favourite songs replaced with the swear-free radio edits or found that iTunes Match reset their ratings and play counts. Others didn't realise that iTunes Match erases libraries from other devices, so for example if you turn it on on your iPhone it'll erase your playlists (although it'll keep the songs that you've already got on the device) and some people have found their smart playlists playing dumb. Match Point?
If you're looking for Spotify-style 3G streaming, iTunes isn't for you: unless you have an exceptionally good connection mobile broadband really struggles with the high-quality tracks. On 3G, it's better to think of iTunes Match as a solution to those "Aaagh! I really want to listen to some Bowie but it isn't on my iPhone!" moments than a streaming music service. The real draw here is threefold: iTunes Match makes it easy to share content between your various bits of Apple kit; it backs up all your music; and you can use it to upgrade all the duff tracks in your library, which in our case meant over 6,000 songs. Will iTunes evolve into a Spotify-style streaming service that also offers music you don't already own? It's possible, but for Apple it represents a lot of effort and expense for very little return; Spotify, famously, doesn't make a great deal of money. We suspect that Apple will keep iTunes Match as-is, not least because 4G mobile broadband, which is already rolling out in key US cities, is more than up to the job of delivering 256Kbps songs properly. Rather than copying Spotify, we think Apple will add more kinds of content to iTunes Match: just look at the range of TV and movie apps available for the iPad, and the size of iTunes' film and TV catalogue. For now, iTunes Match is just about music - but in the not too distant future it might match movies and TV shows too. |
| Independent publishers back Apple in ebook price-fixing suit Posted:  Apple has received backing from smaller, independent publishers as it prepares to fight a lawsuit alleging it colluded to fix ebook prices. The US Department of Justice has accused Apple of working with five of the biggest names in publishing to stop Amazon and co lowering digital book prices. Three of the publishers have agreed to settle out of court, while Apple, Macmillan and Penguin are all set to fight the writ. However, a victory for the DoJ would be a major blow according to smaller groups, which say Amazon presents a far bigger threat to the industry than Apple. Don't scrap the agency modelMark Coker, founder of Smashwords, an e-book publisher and distributor said: "I hope this lawsuit fails," claiming a victory would give Amazon free reign to indulge in 'predatory pricing.' Coker spoke with the DoJ following the announcement last week, and urged them not to dismantle the 'agency model' which binds retailers to selling ebook titles at prices set by the publishers. "My message to the DOJ was that self-published authors are benefitting from the agency model," he said. "I told them to blame the publishers for setting prices too high, but don't blame them for the agency model. There's nothing wrong with that. "If the DOJ dismantles the agency model then they're bringing a return to the e-book pricing war. In a situation like that only Apple and Amazon can afford to sell books at a loss over a projected time. It would quickly snuff out small, independent retailers." Coker also accuses Amazon of being 'obsessed with competitors,' and while a price war would be good for consumers in the short term, everyone would suffer in the long run. |
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