Psystar Sues Apple…. Again

Psystar has decided to sue Apple again. According to ComputerWorld, they are arguing the following in front of a Federal Judge:

“By tying its operating system to Apple-branded hardware, Apple restrains trade in personal computers that run Mac OS X, collects monopoly rents on its Macintoshes, and monopolizes the market for ‘premium computers,’” said Psystar’s lawsuit, filed last Wednesday. “Apple’s share of revenue in the market for premium computers — computers priced at over $1,000 — is currently 91%.”

Last month, retail market research company NPD Group estimated that Apple controls 91% of the $1,000-and-up market, a fact that got significant play in the media and on blogs.

You might recall that Psystar tried a similar tactic the last time around with no success. Although Psystar is arguing that this lawsuit is different:

“This case raises a wholly separate set of issues [from] those in Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp…because that case is limited to Psystar computers running Mac OS X Leopard,” the company’s lawyer’s argued. “Both the technical mechanisms used by Apple to tie Mac OS X Snow Leopard to Macintoshes and the technology used by Psystar to get Mac OS X Snow Leopard to run on Psystar computers are new and different and not within the scope of the California litigation.”

I guess we’ll see when this case makes it inside a court room. I’ll give the usual IANAL disclaimer before saying that my feeling is that Psystar’s chances are about the same as a snowball’s chance of surviving in a blast furnace. Would any lawyers out there care to comment on their chances?

Finally, A Get A Mac Ad That Sings From A Different Songsheet

While I find the majority of “Get A Mac” ads cute and entertaining, they’ve all lately sung from the “we don’t get viruses” songsheet, which gets old after a while. At least this one is different. The ad highlights the fact that that PC Magazine has rated Mac number one in customer support, and that PC World readers have called Mac the highest in reliability. The other thing is that is pointed out that the Mac is “number one in customer satisfaction,” though the ad does not cite a source for this claim. Refreshing.

Here’s the ad for your viewing pleasure.

Route1 Scores Major Deal To Sell To The Dutch Government

First the Americans, and now the Dutch. Canadian remote access provider Route1 seems to be on a roll as they’ve secured a major deal with the Dutch Government:

Route1 Inc., (TSX-V:ROI) a security and identity-based services company, today announced that the Government of the Netherlands Ministry Foreign Affairs has increased its deployment of Route1’s TruOFFICE™ subscription-based service and MobiKEY® devices to enable secure interactions with their digital resources from anywhere, at any time. The Route1 solution will be deployed to both personnel at headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, as well as personnel located at Dutch Embassies abroad.

That’s interesting, but the big news is the number of users who will get to use their MobiKEY product:

“Route1’s identity-based solutions allow security-conscious organizations like the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to easily and quickly deliver services to geographically dispersed personnel with a high level of security,” said Dean Peloso, Interim President and CEO, Route1 Inc. “This order represents an increase in the Ministry’s deployment by another 2000 users. We look forward to growing our relationship with the Government of the Netherlands as other departments look to follow the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to meet their needs for highly secure identity-based access solutions.”

Two thousand users is nothing to sneeze at and should provide a significant revenue increase to this company. And some much needed good news for a company that has had some negative press lately. Clearly their boardroom battle hasn’t gotten in the way of closing deals. Hopefully the trend continues.

Bell Ordered To Tell Customers About How They Use Deep Packet Inspection

I guess making Facebook roll over and cry uncle isn’t enough for the Privacy Commissioner Of Canada. The target de jour is Bell Canada and their use of deep packet inspection technology:

In a report dated Aug. 13 and made public on Friday, assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham told the company it must change its service agreements and the Frequently Asked Questions section of its website to notify customers that it collects and retains their personal information through use of its deep-packet inspection technology.

The commissioner found that Bell’s DPI, which among other things is used to identify peer-to-peer file-sharing so that it can be slowed down, tracks a person’s IP address — a numeric code that identifies a specific computer on a network. Users’ IP addresses typically change each time they log onto the internet, but as is common practice among service providers, Bell ties the codes to subscribers’ user identifications.

Denham considers this combination to be personal information that belongs to customers, which is protected under privacy laws.

“Given that Bell can link its Sympatico subscribers, by virtue of their subscriber ID, with internet activities (in this case, type of application being used) associated with their assigned IP addresses, in my view, IP addresses in this context are personal information,” she wrote.

The report said the privacy commissioner’s office will follow up with Bell within 30 days to see if the company has complied with its requests.

Bell for its part said that they will comply. That’s great for their customers. But what about wholesale customers such as those with Acanac or Teksavvy who are being screwed by Bell affected by this as well? Will they get any benefit from this?

Of course, Bell shouldn’t be using deep packet inspection in the first place. But that’s another argument for another day.

Two New Palm Pre Ads From Bell… One Disses Yanks… Why Bell, Why?

You know, Bell was doing so well with their new Palm Pre ads. Until I saw these two new ads this weekend. Episode three is cute, but I have a problem with Episode four. It takes a few pot shots at our neighbors to the south. Something that may play well to some Canadians, but I think might be a bit over the top. After all, not all Americans are obese people who drive pickup trucks, who are missing teeth and who have been inbred for generations.

In any case, how about you take a look and judge for yourself.

DHS Changes Laptop Search Policy…. But Don’t Jump For Joy Just Yet

You might remember that I wrote about the fact that the US Department Of Homeland Security has the right to search your laptop when you cross the border. There’s a new development on that front. It seems that DHS is going to alter that policy. In a nutshell, here’s what the new policy is:

The long-criticized practice of searching travelers’ electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers’ machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.

This is a step forward from what they were doing in the past. But some have said that this doesn’t go far enough:

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a ditigal civil rights advocacy group, said in an interview the new rules are an improvement. But they don’t go far enough, she said.

She said travelers should be told if information is copied from their devices. The new directive states that federal agents must tell travelers if they are looking at their property. But if officials copy the hard drive during this search, the traveler will not know.

“I don’t think that’s the way to go,” Hofmann said.

I would agree. I don’t have a problem with DHS trying to catch terrorists and other “evil doers” to borrow a George W. Bush phrase, but it has to be done in a manner that preserves the rights of the traveling public. What DHS is doing now is a step forward, but more needs to be done. Also, how do I truly know the data that they copy has been destroyed? Do I have to just “trust them” that this isn’t being collected somehow?

Perhaps, if we could have some more clarity on this we’d all feel better. In the meantime, you still might want to do what I suggested in the original post that I wrote.

Psystar Must Pony Up $5K To Apple For “Obfuscating” The Facts

Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I said the following in this post when Psystar started bragging about being able to begin deposing Apple execs:

Oh the stupidity for saying something like that publicly. Statements like that may come back to haunt them

Guess what? It has come back to haunt them. World Of Apple is reporting that Psystar got slapped with a $5000 fine by the judge handling this whole mess. Why? From what I can tell, Psystar’s CEO Rudy Pedraza “obfuscated the facts” (which is a fancy way of saying that he lied) about getting rid of relevant evidence. That to the shock of nobody didn’t go over well with with the judge. Thus the monetary bitch slap. What I find really interesting is the fact that Psystar’s own lawyers didn’t even try to defend the conduct of Pedraza:

5 MR. CAMARA: Well, here’s what happened. They –
6 the people at Psystar — well, I won’t defend that, Your Honor,
7 I think those answers were false.

So Psystar. I note that on your blog you have no comment about this. Which is smart as going around talking about how you’re going in guns blazin as well as running your mouth about how you’re going to give them a taste of their own medicine has now really gotten you into trouble. The best you can do at this point is to try some flag waving to attempt to garner some public support. I have one word for that attempt.

FAIL!

As far as I can tell, Psystar has done nothing but make up bogus charges against Apple since this legal battle began. As a result, they have wasted the time of the court to a massive degree. Psystar should just go away, fold up shop, and never be heard from again. If that doesn’t happen, Apple should crush them into dust. For giggles once Apple is done with them, they should collect every one of those clone Macs and let the employees at 1 Infinite Loop pay to smash them with a sledgehammer with the proceeds going to charity. Perhaps they should invite a few fanbois to join the fun too?

Does that sound harsh? It is harsh, I admit that. But given that they have done other stupid things like claim how they bought OS X from Apple and Apple forgot to copyright OS X, the only logical conclusion to this soap opera is for Psystar to lose and lose badly.

Snow Leopard Ships… Here’s What You Need To Know Before You Upgrade

Today is the day that Snow Leopard ships to the masses. But before you upgrade, you should likely take some precautions to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

First of all, MAKE A BACKUP. I cannot stress this enough as a lot of my work comes from people who didn’t do this before doing something major to their computer (and upgrading your operating system is major). I have a great resource for backing up your Mac here. By having a backup you can ensure that you can get your system back up and running with minimal pain should things go south. Oh yeah, the more paranoid among us would say that you should test that backup to make sure it works as a backup is useless if you can’t restore it perfectly.

Next, you should visit this page to make sure that the applications on your Mac are Snow Leopard compatible. Keep in mind that this list is one that is being updated constantly so the application that you’re looking for may not be on there yet. Therefore it pays to check back at a later date to see if it’s been added. If the apps that you rely on daily are not compatible with Snow Leopard, you may want to skip upgrading until updates come out. I should note that Apple themselves have as similar list, but it’s nowhere as detailed. But this list does describe the fact that if you do go ahead and update and the Snow Leopard installer comes across software that won’t work, it will punt that software to a special folder.

The last thing I would do is boot of the Leopard CD and run Disk Utility to verify the volume that Snow Leopard is going on. It likely wouldn’t hurt to do a permission repair as well.

At this point you should be good to go. One thing that I’ll do is I’ll note this Apple Insider document that details the changes in the Snow Leopard installer as it is very different than any previous version of  OS X. This document will be handy for those of you who have done OS X upgrades before as you will know what to expect.

If anyone else has any other tips, please post them in the comments section and share your wisdom.

Facebook Agrees To Changes To Keep Canada Happy… The Rest Of The Planet Benefits Too [UPDATED]

You might remember that Facebook had managed to tick off the Privacy Commissioner Of Canada because the popular social networking site didn’t conform to Canadian Privacy laws. Today the Privacy Commissioner announced that Facebook is going to make a bunch of changes to comply with with the Privacy Commissioner wants:

“We are satisfied that with these changes Facebook is on the way to meeting the requirements of Canada’s privacy law,” federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said this morning after revealing the popular social networking site has agreed to change the way it collects, stores and shares personal data within a year. “The privacy of people using the site, not only in Canada but around the world, will be far better protected.

“This is hugely significant,” Stoddart continued. “Facebook has 12 million users in Canada alone – that is about a third of our population – and well more than 200 million users of Facebook worldwide. All those users will have a far clearer view of how they perceive information is being shared once Facebook implements our recommendations. They will also have far more control over what they are sharing and with whom.”

So this has implications for not only Canada, but the entire world. And that’s a good thing if you’re a Facebook user. It means that wherever you are, you privacy is better protected.

So in this case, don’t blame Canada. Thank Canada instead.

UPDATE: One reader pointed out by e-mail that in certain circumstances, Facebook is still allowed to retain your data AFTER you close your Facebook account. So if you decide to leave Facebook, make sure you choose the option that doesn’t allow them to keep your data.

Global Gaming Factory Faces Delisting From Sweedish Stock Exchange [UPDATED]

In the latest episode of this soap opera, there’s now news that Global Gaming Factory could be delisted from the Swedish stock exchange. AktieTorget, the Swedish exchange who suspended trading in the company and via a press release (Translated to English via Google Translate for those of you who can’t read Sweedish) has called in a disciplinary committee to consider having them punted from the exchange altogether.

I’m guessing that would seriously cramp any attempt to buy The Pirate Bay. But we’ll know for sure later today as investors are apparently meeting to give this deal the green light, or deep six it altogether.

UPDATE: News.com is reporting that the Global Gaming Factory Board has voted to go ahead with the deal. But the same source says that this is not a done deal yet. More info as it comes.