Ares' Soap Box

Can We Abandon Confidentiality For Google Apps? - An anonymous reader writes "I provide IT services for medium-sized medical and law practices. Lately I have been getting a lot of feedback from doctors and lawyers who use gmail at home and believe that they can run a significant portion of their practice IT on Google Apps. From a support standpoint, I'd be happy to chuck mail/calendar service management into the bin and let them run with gmail, but for these businesses, there is significant legal liability associated with the confidentiality of their communications and records (e.g., HIPAA). For those with high-profile celebrity clients, simply telling them 'Google employees can read your stuff' will usually end the conversation right there. But for smaller practices, I often get a lot of push-back in the form of 'What's wrong with trusting Google?' and 'Google's not interested in our email/calendar.' Weighing what they see as a tiny legal risk against the promise of Free IT Stuff(TM) becomes increasingly lopsided given the clear functionality / usability / ubiquity that they experience when using Google at home. So my question to the Slashdot community is: Are they right? Is it time for me to remove the Tin Foil Hat on the subject of confidentiality and stop resisting the juggernaut that is Google? If not, what is the best way to clarify the confidentiality issues for these clients?"

The Ethics of Selling GPLed Software For the iPhone - SeanCier writes "We're a small (two-person) iPhone app developer whose first game has recently been released in the App store. In the process, we've inadvertently stepped in it, bringing up a question of the GPL and free software ethics that I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help us clear up, one way or the other. XPilot, a unique and groundbreaking UNIX-based game from the early/mid nineties, was a classic in its day, but was forgotten and has been dead for years, both in terms of use and development. My college roommate and I were addicted to it at the time, even running game servers and publishing custom maps. As it's fully open source (GPLv2), and the iPhone has well over twice the graphics power of the SGI workstations we'd used in college, we decided it was a moral imperative to port it to our cellphones. In the process, we hoped, we could breathe life back into this forgotten classic (not to mention turning a years-old joke into reality). We did so, and the result was more playable than we'd hoped, despite the physical limitations of the phone. We priced it at $2.99 on the App store (we don't expect it to become the Next Big Thing, but hoped to recoup our costs — such as server charges and Apple's annual $99 developer fee), released the source on our web page, then enthusiastically tracked down every member of the original community we could find to let them know of the hoped-for renaissance. Which is where things got muddy.

Students Settle With TurnItIn In Copyright Case - An anonymous reader writes "With the deadline for a Supreme Court appeal rapidly approaching, the students who sued TurnItIn.com for issues surrounding copyright infringement reached a settlement with the site's company on Friday. Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves. If your teacher uploaded a paper and ran a TurnItIn report without your permission, I bet the students' attorney would like to hear from you."

Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished? - Dr_Ken writes to mention recent coverage of a Harvard Cyber-Law study on Techdirt that analyzes the uses of copyright in the academic world. Some are claiming that the applications of copyright in academia are stifling and that we should perhaps go so far as to abolish copyright in the academic world entirely. "I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone."

As noted in a previous blog entry here, I got my first iPhone app published for sale in the App Store a little under 3 weeks ago. Now that the first calendar month is complete (albeit not a full month), I'd like to share the results of the month's worth of endeavor.

According to the iTunes Connect site, iCoach has sold 28 copies in 19 days. Not bad considering I only used the app as an exercise towards learning the programming environment. In addition, in an effort to promote the application, I gave away 1045 copies of it.

Now for the breakdown:

Montana City Requires Workers' Internet Accounts - justinlindh writes "Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.' A portion of the application reads, "Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.' The article goes on to mention, 'There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters]

This will likely be my shortest blog post ever on this site.

What

The

Fuck

???

:: Checks clock to see if its April 1st ::

That is all.

Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades - A large number of schools participating in a pay-for-grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in September 2008, my wife decided it was time for her to get an iPhone. Being a software developer, I welcomed the decision. Earlier that summer, Apple introduced the iTunes App Store and along with it, the opportunity for a little bit of supplemental income. I figured the iPhone would be a write-off on our taxes, as would the Mac I'd need in order to do the development.

One of the guys I used to work with, who runs Open Stack, Inc., had been earning a couple of hundred dollars a day on his slow days. That was a nice incentive for me. Knowing what he developed (and actually paying for it), I know that it is going to take a lot of apps to make that kind of money for myself but even if I can earn 10 or 20 bucks a day, I'd be money ahead; my internet connection and cell phone bill would be covered. Fortunately, my wife is a geniue when it comes to marketing and she could probably sell snow to a polar bear. She's got a lot of great ideas for apps which, when I put them together, may produce a decent income stream for us.

Thus, it was decided. We formed an LLC for our activities, at a cost of $160 in Minnesota. We paid Apple the mandatory $105.69 after sales tax for a developer account. I spent $7 on a domain name, 3dogsandacatsoftware.com. I already had a server running Apache, and installing Drupal on it for content was no big deal. I bought a used Mac off of eBay for $350 or so with Leopard already on it. All in all, for under $1000, we got the business side of things off the ground. If I manage to make 10 bucks a day, that venture capital from myself will be paid back in a little over 3 months. It would certainly be nice to turn a profit this year.

The Learning Curve

Every now and then, something pops up on my favorite tech news site that just makes me scratch my head and want to sound off about it. This is one of those items:

iPhone App Pricing Limits Developers - HardYakka writes "According to this post in the Fortune blog, the iTunes app store has been a boon for users but some developers are saying the number of free and 99 cent apps make it difficult for developers to create complex, higher priced apps. Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory says the iPhone may never get its killer app like the spreadsheet was for the Mac. If Apple does not do something, the store will be left with only ring tones and simple games. Some are suggesting that overpaid developers are the problem and the recession will soon lower the wages and costs for complex apps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters]

Yes, you read the title correctly. Qwest is in the process of upgrading their DSL network to fiber, in order to support their new super whiz-bang 12 and 20mbps DSL service, which they're calling Qwest Connect Titanium and Qwest Connect Quantum respectively. These services are sold in addition to their existing 256kbps, 1.5mbps, and 3-7mbps services, respectively called Qwest Connect Silver, Qwest Connect Gold, and Qwest Connect Platinum.

I've been a customer with a Qwest DSL circuit for about 10 years now, starting out at 640kbps/256kbps. 1.5mbps/896kbps and currently 7mbps/896kbps. As each higher speed became available to me, I jumped on the opportunity for higher speeds, most recently the 7mbps speed, in March 2008. It had been available on my remote terminal since about November 2007, at least that's when I started receiving advertising for it.

The 3-7mbps speeds have been available on the Qwest network in the Twin Cities for quite a while, long before they were available off of the RT we're connected to. When they were finally available, I jumped at the opportunity to upgrade my speed. This was in March or April 2008.

On November 1, 2008, I received a letter from Qwest:

October 17, 2008

IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR QWEST HIGH-SPEED INTERNET SERVICE

Dear Jason Michaelson:

Our goal at Qwest is to offer products that meet your communications needs and to provide timely information regarding changes or events that will affect your service.