Gordon Woolf's Blog

Adobe v Apple: It's happened before

On the AppleInsider blog, Daniel Eran Dilger gives the background to the current Flash war with the comment "This all happened before".

His story and timeline of PostScript, the Laserwriter, TrueType, Aldus PageMaker, Macromedia's Freehand is almost all as I recall it and heard at the time from mainly Adobe insiders. The only statement I see which is a bit questionable is his assertion that Adobe did not realise when buying Aldus that the rights to Freehand did not come with the sale since they still belonged to the originators. Not until they bought Macromedia 10 years later did Freehand enter Adobe's fold.

However, if you think that lack of foresight (or what is now called "due dilligence" is impossible I can quote a tale from Australian media history. Our main TV weekly program guide which once sold a million copies a week was part of a publishing company sold off by News Ltd (which many years previously had been in the free-to-air TV business here) and ultimately sold to one of our major TV channels. After the final sale, the other leading TV company "revealed" that they owned 50% of the title. Within a week the magazine was being published by that company's publishing arm, from another city, with an entirely new staff.

Quite a blow for the other TV channel -- but I worked for that magazine several years earlier and as a fairly junior player I knew that the magazine was only half owned by the company publishing it. So I question how the money/management people did not know that essential fact when talking of multi-million deals. Could Adobe have not known about Freehand in 1994? Maybe.

It does not seem long ago that there were continuing email list discussions on the relative merits of true PostScript and the clones built in to printers. It dawned on most of us very slowly that the future lay in postscript interpreters resident on the computer, so slowly for me that the PostScript 2 laser printer I paid $5000 for (and $500 for each cartridge) we were unable to give away. It recently ended at the tip despite still being in working order.

The column is at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on_flash_reminiscent_of_postscript_struggle.html&page=1

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.