Month: September 2010

Apple TV: kiss your cable goodbye

apple-tv.jpg

Cable companies like Time Warner and satellite companies like DirecTV are some of the most exploitive and hated companies in the country. Apple is one of the most loved companies. With the new Apple TV, Apple will give those nasty companies a rare new dose of competition.

I often ask people how much they pay for cable. Most of the time, I hear numbers like $90 a month or even more. Some people don’t know for sure how much they pay because they’ve bought bundles.

Last week, Apple announced that it will start shipping a new $99 Apple TV box later this month. I had been tempted to buy the older Apple TV for $229. Two things deterred me: the $229 cost (TV is not worth very much to me) and the fact that the old Apple TV box didn’t support Netflix. Isn’t it amazing how Apple knows what I want?

As far as I can tell so far, there are two major changes in Apple TV: 1. The new Apple TV does not have an internal hard disk. Instead, everything is stored on your computer and delivered to the Apple TV box over a Wifi network. 2. The New iTunes 10 includes “rental” of TV shows for 99 cents.

I’m fascinated that the new Apple TV box supports Netflix. Apple must have decided that Netflix is going to own the movie-streaming business, though Apple offers high-definition movies and Netflix does not. Is Apple planning to dominate the Internet delivery of TV shows the way Netflix dominates with movies?

I expect to see a lot of people cutting off their cable or satellite service and instead ordering the TV shows they want from Apple, à la carte. One’s movies would come from Netflix. As for the local stations, they’re totally useless except for their weather reports, and you can get that for free with a small antenna. In other words, higher quality, lower cost, with no money wasted on garbage you’re not interested in. You don’t have to have a Mac to do this. iTunes is available for Windows.

A postscript: I don’t have either cable or satellite TV at Acorn Abbey. The cost is too high, and most of the programming is useless. But I’d happily pay 99 cents for those things that I really want to see.

And a political angle: This is one of the reasons the big companies with near-monopolies on Internet service are so opposed to net neutrality. They want to be able to stifle this kind of competition from companies like Apple.

Keeping Facebook in quarantine

nyt-facebook.jpg

I was surprised at how many people were interested in my recent post on Defending your privacy on the Web. When I posted it, I was afraid that it might be too long and too technical and thus too boring. But in addition to the comments on the blog, I had a number of responses in private email. So I will continue to think about privacy issues and how to get around Big Brother’s spying eyes on the web.

The Washington Post signed up to share data with Facebook several weeks ago. Now I’m appalled to see that the New York Times also is in cahoots with Facebook. Think how nice it is for advertisers if your Facebook data can be used at places like the New York Times to target you with advertising. Facebook knows your real name, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, etc. Targeting ads is not in itself offensive. The problem is having all this information falling into the hands of corporate America, which will use it to build dossiers, including your name, on individual Americans. These dossiers can be sold to whoever is interested — like potential employers, or the government.

How can you avoid this?

The first Facebook rule is this: Never, if you value your privacy, sign in with your Facebook ID to any sites other than Facebook.

Second, punish nosy, intrusive web sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post by creating anonymous new logins. Here’s how.

1. Go to www.random.org and generate a random string for your sign-in ID, something like “RtAgr4MN”. Why a random string? It’s not necessary, but it’s a nice touch, and it gets you thinking about how randomness protects your privacy. Random data, by definition, contains no information at all.

2. Register at the site with your new sign-in ID, and give a fake (but workable) email address at www.mailinator.com. Your email name at mailinator.com can be the random string you generated in step 1 above. When the New York Times registration page asks you demographic questions about your age, etc., just make something up.

3. So that you won’t forget your new sign-in ID, edit the name of your bookmark to the site so that the bookmark name includes your sign-in ID.

4. For an extra level of anonymity, do Step 2 using Tor, the Onion Router. If you don’t yet know what Tor is, do some reading on the Tor web site. Tor is actually very easy to install and configure. Tor is much like a single-hop proxy server such as proxify.com, except that Tor uses multiple hops to hide your real IP address. Tor also is a free, open-source system. That is, corporations don’t own Tor.

I’m assuming that you’re already using the privacy steps I outlined in my previous post on privacy and that, when you sign in to a data-collecting site such as Facebook, you do so only in a separate browser. And of course it isn’t just Facebook we have to watch out for. It’s any of the sites whose revenue model is based on collecting, and reselling, personal data on its users. This includes Google and Yahoo, but the riskiest sites are the “social networking” sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are clearly making a big push to get themselves enmeshed with popular web sites such as the New York Times.

As much as we might like Facebook, remember that it makes its money by collecting and selling information about you. As for Twitter, as far as I’m concerned it’s completely useless, and I have no idea why anyone goes there. But Twitter was developed, of course, to profit off snooping just as Facebook does.